Leonardo and the Last Supper (28 page)

The outlines of the entire scene would first of all have been sketched roughly on the base coat in charcoal, either transferred from cartoons or else drawn freehand with reference to sketches. The outlines of the apostles’ heads, like the ceiling beams, were emphasized with a stylus. When the time came to paint, he proceeded at a pace that was sometimes leisurely, sometimes frantic, and he no doubt worked on several areas of the mural at once, ranging from one end of his scaffold to another in the course of a single day.

An eyewitness account of Leonardo’s work in Santa Maria delle Grazie confirms this unorthodox approach. The eyewitness was Matteo Bandello, the young nephew (he was born in 1485) of the prior of Santa Maria delle Grazie. Matteo later became a popular writer of humorous novellas in the tradition of Boccaccio; one of his stories,
Giulietta e Romeo
, first published in the 1550s and then translated into English in 1567, was the source for Shakespeare’s play. Another of his novellas would be taken up by Lord Byron.

One of Matteo’s stories features Leonardo as the narrator: he puts into Leonardo’s mouth the various misadventures of the talented but libidinously wayward painter Filippo Lippi. The story is prefaced with Matteo’s remarks about his personal experience of watching Leonardo at work in Santa Maria delle Grazie. His stories are full of comical exaggerations and improbably fanciful conceits, and the circumstances of his account—a novella published many years later—must make us cautious about its veracity. However, the description of Leonardo’s unpredictable and apparently dilatory working habits has an undeniable ring of truth.

“Many a time,” Matteo began, “I have seen Leonardo go to work early in the morning and climb on to the scaffolding.” On these occasions, he claimed, Leonardo was the picture of industry, working “from sunrise until the dusk of evening, never laying down the brush, but continuing to paint without remembering to eat or drink.” On other days, Leonardo arrived early for work, though much less painting got done. Instead, he studied the mural for hours on end without touching his brushes, “considering and examining it, criticizing the figures to himself.” On still other days he would break off work at the Corte dell’Arengo, where he was still (Matteo
claims) working on “the stupendous horse of clay,” and arrive in the refectory at noon. He would clamber onto the scaffold, swiftly apply only a touch or two of paint, “and then go elsewhere.”
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Matteo himself made no judgment on Leonardo, but this capricious regime evidently left his uncle, the prior, Vincenzo Bandello, frustrated and aggrieved. Vasari tells the story that Bandello, who wished to see Leonardo toiling “like one of the labourers hoeing in the garden,” complained to Lodovico about the painter’s slow and unpredictable progress. For Bandello as for many other people at the time, an artist was a mere craftsman, someone paid to cover a certain number of square feet of wall per day. (Borso d’Este, the grandfather of Lodovico’s wife Beatrice, literally paid his frescoists by the square foot.) Leonardo took another view of his task: he believed that originality and creativity were more important than economics or square feet. He explained to Lodovico that “men of genius sometimes accomplish most when they work the least,” adding that they are “thinking out inventions and forming in their minds the perfect ideas which they subsequently express and reproduce with their hands.”
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Vasari’s story is probably apocryphal, but Leonardo certainly did not regard himself as someone who worked to order like a laborer hoeing the garden. Perhaps, too, Bandello and his friars were baffled and angered by Leonardo’s unusual approach, which meant the unsightly scaffold—along with the smell of oil and paint—would be a fixture in their refectory for an indefinite period. The difference between Leonardo’s eccentric style and the more usual method was underscored by the performance of Giovanni da Montorfano at the other end of the refectory. Montorfano had succeeded in quickly covering his wall with a Crucifixion scene. Teeming with color, his fresco featured more than fifty figures, not only Christ and the two crucified thieves but also Roman soldiers on horseback, grieving women, and various Dominican worthies such as St. Dominic and St. Catherine of Siena. In the background was a multitowered castle, fluttering banners, and a rocky landscape. On a tablet at the foot of the cross he proudly painted his name: GIO. DONATVS MONTORFANVS. Above, he added the year: 1495. After as little as a year on the job, Montorfano had completed his work. By the beginning of 1496 there were no obvious signs that Leonardo would soon make an end of his own wall.

Although Leonardo had painted the infant Christ numerous times,
The Last Supper
marked the first time he painted the adult Christ. The notes about Alessandro Carissimi da Parma and the man in Cardinal Sforza’s entourage allow us to disregard Vasari’s story that Leonardo was “unwilling to look to any human model” for Christ because he believed no one had the requisite grace and beauty.
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Painting the head of Christ would nonetheless have been a daunting task, not least because of its prominent location at the very center of the mural. Years later, Lomazzo would claim that Leonardo’s hand trembled whenever he tried to paint Christ’s face. The story is not entirely incredible. Painters of religious scenes were often deeply moved by their task. Fra Angelico, a Dominican friar, was said to have wept as he painted his frescoes. “Whenever he painted a Crucifixion,” claimed Vasari, “the tears would stream down his face.”
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But the tremor in Leonardo’s hand—if the story has any truth—probably had more to do with the momentous nature of his assignment and the conspicuous location of the Savior’s head than with any iconoclastic reservations about depicting the face of Christ.

Lomazzo is also the source for the story that Leonardo despaired of creating perfect features for Christ. He therefore turned for advice, Lomazzo says, to a friend, the painter Bernardo Zenale, who told him it would be impossible to create features more perfect than those he had already given to both James the Greater and James the Lesser. Zenale advised Leonardo to “leave the Christ imperfect” since he would “never be able to accomplish the Christ after such apostles.”
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These anecdotes about Leonardo’s trepidations, along with paint loss in the mural, ultimately gave rise to the mistaken belief, first expressed by Vasari, that Leonardo deliberately left the head of Christ unfinished, “convinced he would fail to give it the divine spirituality it demands.” Recent cleaning has shown that the face of Christ in Leonardo’s
Last Supper
was, in fact, highly detailed.
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Leonardo did not need to leave the head unfinished because he was a master at capturing divine spirituality. In
The Virgin of the Rocks
, the faces of the Virgin and the angel are animated by an inscrutable otherworldly allure, and Leonardo applied to the face of Christ—with its downcast eyes and mournful features—this same numinous resplendence.

Leonardo in concentrating the focus of viewers on the face of Christ was following a fifteenth-century artistic tradition that has been called the “Catholic vanishing point”: the practice of situating the vanishing point at
a particularly sacred site such as the eucharistic wafer or even the womb of the Virgin Mary (a technique one art historian has dubbed “uterine perspective”).
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He also made Christ conspicuous in a number of other ways. For one thing, Christ is significantly larger than many of the other apostles: he is as tall as Bartholomew (the last figure on the left) even though Bartholomew is standing. So subtle in Leonardo’s hands that we barely notice it, this technique is a throwback to earlier centuries, when painters arranged their figures in what art historians call “hieratic perspective”—the practice by which figures are enlarged according to their theological importance (which explains why so many medieval paintings show enormous Madonnas surrounded by pint-sized saints and angels).

Besides occupying the center of Leonardo’s painting, Christ is spatially isolated from the apostles, all of whom are bunched together as they physically touch their neighbors or lean across one another in partial eclipses. Leonardo further highlighted Christ by placing him against a window that opens onto a landscape of clear sky and bluish contours—by giving him, in effect, a halo of sky. The effect is dazzling, even despite the paint loss, as the warm tones of Christ’s face, hair, and reddish undergarment advance while the cool blues of the landscape recede: a prime example of Leonardo’s knowledge of the push and pull of colors. For the blue mantle over Christ’s left shoulder Leonardo used ultramarine, which was, along with gold, the brightest and most expensive of all pigments. One fifteenth-century treatise on painting called it “a colour noble, beautiful, and perfect beyond all other colours.” A single ounce could cost as much as eight ducats, more than the annual rent paid on a house by a poor worker in Florence. So expensive was ultramarine (the only known supply came from Afghanistan) that unscrupulous thieves sometimes scraped it from paintings. Because of its beauty and expense, it was used to color the most prestigious and venerated parts of a painting, most notably the mantle of the Virgin Mary.
¹⁴

The colors of Christ’s reddish undergarment were equally bright and deliberately intensified. Leonardo generally laid his colors on a base coat of lead white spread across the entire wall. For this red garment, however, he covered his white primer with a carbon-based black pigment to create a dark foundation. He then added vermilion, followed by a semitransparent red lake, a pigment created by extracting the red dye from old textiles. This was a trick he knew from panel painting: adding pigments over black enhanced and deepened their color. Finally, a second layer of vermilion was added over the red lake.

Leonardo’s portrait of Christ in
The Last Supper

Vermilion was the most brilliant of all the reds, and its appearance on the wall of Santa Maria delle Grazie would be all the more striking because it was a pigment that like ultramarine could not be used in fresco. Vermilion was made from cinnabar, a brick-red mineral the ancient Romans believed came from the blood of dragons crushed to death under the weight of elephants. Like most mineral-based pigments, it was, as Andrea Pozzo wrote, “quite incompatible with lime.”
¹⁵
Indeed, the layering of five separate
coats of paint, carefully manipulated to intensify their values, was something else completely unknown to fresco.

Leonardo’s model for Christ, possibly the soldier Giovanni Conte, appears to have been a young man. Leonardo did something distinctive to his features: he gave him a beard. Jesus had a beard, of course—or so everyone believed. For many centuries, painters and sculptors had been unanimous in showing Christ with a beard. Versions of the Last Supper from Giotto to Ghirlandaio imagined Jesus, without exception, in a beard.