Leonardo and the Last Supper (51 page)

Leonardo’s
Mona Lisa
was for all intents and purposes invisible to the public before the nineteenth century. Remaining in Leonardo’s possession throughout his lifetime, it was unseen by anyone except visitors to his studio. The Anonimo Gaddiano knew of it only through hearsay—and he thought it portrayed a man. Sold by Salai after Leonardo’s death, the portrait ended up in the bathroom of the king of France and then, centuries later, in Napoleon’s bedroom. It would become famous only after it was removed from the domestic environs of various French potentates and, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, placed on public display in the Louvre. Santa Maria delle Grazie was therefore one of the few places where one could indisputably see a Leonardo and appreciate the true scale of his genius.

“I wish to work miracles,” Leonardo once wrote. Fittingly, the word most often used to describe the work during the sixteenth century was “miraculous.”
¹⁴

“This is the river that passes through Amboise,” Leonardo wrote in one of his final notes, beside a sketch of the course of the Loire.
¹⁵
He and his patron, Lodovico Sforza, were both to die in the valley of the Loire, in France, twenty miles and eleven years apart: Lodovico in a dungeon, Leonardo in a royal château.

Lodovico’s capture at Novara in April 1500 was, in the words of a chronicler, “a spectacle so abject that it moved even many of his enemies to tears.”
¹⁶
The duke was ultimately imprisoned in the castle of Loches, 150 miles southwest of Paris. The chronicler eulogized his reign: “Thus within a narrow prison were enclosed the thoughts and ambitions of one whose ideas earlier could scarcely be contained within the limits of Italy.”
¹⁷

Lodovico was allowed the company of a jester and the occasional book or visitor, but otherwise the man who had commissioned one of history’s greatest murals spent his time with pots of paint, decorating the vault of his prison with snakes, stars, and mottoes. After almost eight years of captivity he briefly escaped by bribing his guards, who smuggled him out of the castle in a cartload of hay. But, lost in the woods around Loches, he was quickly recaptured and then kept in stricter confinement. His health finally broken, he died in May 1508, two months shy of his fifty-sixth birthday. The location of his remains is unknown, but in Milan he was fondly remembered by the friars of Santa Maria delle Grazie who tried to have his body returned to Milan for burial next to Beatrice.
¹⁸

By the time of Lodovico’s death, Leonardo was back in Milan and in the pay of Lodovico’s captor and enemy, King Louis XII. The wheel came full circle for him when in December 1511, a dozen years after his first escape from Milan, he was forced to flee a second time after an invasion force of Swiss mercenaries ousted the French. More restless wanderings ensued. After several years in Rome he left Italy forever, departing in 1516 for France, where he became the court painter to a new French monarch, François I. With him went his notebooks—some twenty thousand pages of scribblings and drawings—and a clutch of paintings, including the
Mona Lisa
.

Leonardo was given the manor house of Cloux at Amboise, only twenty miles north of the grim dungeon at Loches. The handsome red-brick château had a central tower, a spiral staircase, and views of the adjoining royal palace to which it was connected by means of an underground passageway: the better for an admiring François to pay “affectionate visits,” as Vasari wrote, to his celebrated painter.
¹⁹
However, Leonardo no longer painted. Instead, he continued his geometrical studies, worked on designs for the king’s new palace, studied the flow of the Loire, and was involved in various court theatricals. By 1517 he had suffered a stroke, and his health declined. In April 1519, “duly considering the certainty of death and the uncertainty of its time,” he composed his last will and testament, making provisions for Salai, his assistants, and servants.
²⁰
Nine days later, on 2 May, at the age of sixty-seven, he died at his manor house and was buried, according to his instructions, in the cloister of the church of Saint-Florentin at Amboise. Sixty poor men of the parish carried candles.

Word did not reach Leonardo’s family in Florence until the following month. Then, sometime in June, a letter arrived from France, from Francesco
Melzi, one of Leonardo’s assistants, informing them: “Each of us must mourn the loss of a man such that nature is powerless to create another.”
²¹

“What is fair in men passes away,” Leonardo once wrote, “but not so in art.”
²²
Alas, what is fair in art also passes away, as
The Last Supper
proves only too well. If Leonardo’s style was superlative, his technique, sadly, was not.
The Last Supper
suffers from what the most recent conservator calls—with sublime understatement—the paint’s “defective adhesion” to the wall.
²³
Because Leonardo did not paint in fresco, the pigments were not permanently bonded to the plaster, which meant they began flaking within a matter of a few years. Montorfano’s
Crucifixion
, in its good state of preservation apart from Leonardo’s portraits of the Sforza family, which are now wholly obliterated, points accusingly from across the refectory at the tragic flaw in Leonardo’s approach.

Added to Leonardo’s ill-starred technique was a perfect storm of adverse conditions. The refectory sits on low ground, and Leonardo painted on the damp north wall, which was exposed not only to the steam and smoke of the convent’s kitchen but also the soot from candles and braziers burned in the refectory. Finally, the refectory itself was shoddily constructed (as Goethe gloomily observed) from decaying bricks and “the rubbish of old buildings.”
²⁴

The painting began disintegrating within twenty years of its completion. A visitor to the refectory in 1517, Antonio de Beatis, recorded in his diary that the painting, though “most excellent,” was beginning to deteriorate, possibly, he speculated, due to the effects of humidity.
²⁵
So began a familiar chorus: exclamations about the painting’s stupendous power shot through with regrets about its poor legibility and seemingly eminent destruction. A generation after Beatis, Armenini reported that the mural was “half ruined,” and in 1582 Lomazzo found it “in a state of total ruin.”
²⁶

Things soon got worse. If at first the painting suffered only from technical deficiencies and antagonistic climatic conditions, eventually other even more destructive forces intervened. In 1652, the true indignities began when the friars of Santa Maria delle Grazie in their wisdom decided to cut a door into the north wall, amputating Christ’s feet and loosening the paint and plaster with blows from their pickaxes. Several generations later, in 1726, the
work had become so dim and illegible that the friars were gulled into hiring a painter named Michelangelo Bellotti. He shared little in common with his famous namesake: Goethe called him “a man very deficient in skill and knowledge.” Bellotti erected a hoarding in front of the work and then, concealed behind it, busied himself with his “nefarious proceedings.”
²⁷

In 1770 it was the turn of another bungler, Giuseppe Mazza. He scraped the wall with iron tools and repainted the work according to his own tastes, taking his brushes to everything but the heads of Matthew, Thaddeus, and Simon. Under the impression that the painting was a fresco, he washed the wall in caustic soda. Scandal ensued. Mazza was sacked, while the prior responsible for the heavy-handed restoration found himself banished to another convent. Over the next two centuries the painting would be slathered with various agents—waxes, varnishes, glues, shellacs, resins, alcohol, solvents—in desperate attempts to halt the deterioration. The work was also repainted numerous times. One restoration turned Bartholomew’s foot into a chair leg and Thomas’s hand into a loaf of bread.

In 1796, the French once more arrived as conquerors, this time under Napoleon, one of whose generals chose to use the refectory as a stable. The horses steamed and stamped, and the soldiers pelted the apostles with pieces of brick. Four years later came a flood. For fifteen days the water stood two feet deep in the refectory, with moisture penetrating the walls and covering the painting in green mold. A few years afterward, a visitor described touching the work (a practice not, apparently, discouraged) and feeling “little flakes” of paint come away in his hand: the ultimate in souvenirs.
²⁸
In 1821, a restorer named Stefano Barezzi, under the misconception that
The Last Supper
was a fresco, tried to remove all of the paint from the wall and transfer the entire work to a giant canvas. Failing in the attempt, he was reduced to trying desperately to glue the paint back on the wall.

The mural’s obvious and dramatic decline made it a poignant emblem for the transience of earthly beauty. Keats turned out to be wrong: a thing of beauty was not a joy forever; rather, it decayed, perished, and threatened to pass into nothingness. In 1847 an English writer sighed that Leonardo’s painting “will never more be seen by the eye of man... The greater part is perished for ever.”
²⁹
This resignation perhaps explains why ten years later the refectory was used to store hay.
³⁰

The Last Supper
ultimately became as famous for its grievously impaired and imperiled existence—its status as art’s most famous and tragic endangered
species—as it did for its artistic glories. The novelist Henry James called it “the saddest work of art in the world,” comparing it to “an industrious invalid whom people visit to see how he lasts, with leave-taking sighs and almost death-bed or tiptoe precautions.”
³¹
In 1901 the poet Gabriele d’Annunzio composed “For the Death of a Masterpiece,” recording his distress at “the marvel that is no more.”
³²
Efforts to revive the work in the first half of the twentieth century involved a spa-style treatment of wax injections and invigorating rubdowns with rubber rollers.

The painting’s most perilous moment came on 16 August 1943, when an RAF bomb struck Santa Maria delle Grazie, blowing the roof off the refectory and destroying a nearby cloister.
The Last Supper
, protected by sandbags and mattresses, miraculously survived, but for several months it was exposed to the elements with only a tarpaulin for protection. The refectory was hastily rebuilt, after which, as the painting began vanishing beneath mildew and dirt, came another restoration, this time using a coat of shellac to bind the flaking paint to the wall and (as one report enthused) such state-of-the-art 1950s technology as “heat rays, violet rays, laboratory tests, etc.”
³³
But with air unable to circulate under the layer of glaze, mold soon grew between the pigments and the wall.

In 1977 the latest campaign began, taking a total of twenty-two years to complete before the unveiling in May 1999. This high-tech conservation involved a life-support system of heat and moisture monitors, along with batteries of diagnostic tests done with sonar, radar, infrared, and miniature cameras inserted into bore-holes in the wall, from which microscopic core samples were taken. The wall was stripped back to Leonardo’s pigments, with layers of shellac, grime, and the pigments of previous restorers removed using solvents applied with tiny blotters of Japanese paper. Passages where Leonardo’s pigments were lost the conservators filled with neutral tones in watercolor.