A Visit to The Last Supper in Milan, and Italy’s Still Italy

One’s a magnificent wreck, the other’s more convoluted than ever.

G reetings from Milan. I’m not beyond doing things on impulse, but it’s very, very rare. I haven’t been to the Biennale in Venice yet. It closes in late November, but in the spirit of carpe diem I used miles to get a free flight — only $54 in taxes — and got to Milan on Thursday morning.

I can go on adrenaline for a long time so visited The Last Supper. Leonardo da Vinci’s (1452–1519) slow-motion movie of a wall mural, painted between 1495 and 1498, is in the old refectory — the dining hall — of Santa Maria delle Grazie, still a church and home to a dozen monks but then a Dominican convent. Topping the church is an impressive dome designed by Bramante, from Urbino and the visionary who designed the Tempietto in Rome and introduced Raphael to Pope Julius II.

I’d seen it in the mid-’60s but was a child unfixed on Jesus, the betrayal, whispers, and outbursts. I’d love Jesus more, I thought at the time, if he’d leaven his many woes with the joy of getting me a gelato then and there, before he heads to Golgotha. I flunked forgiveness in Sunday school and, clearly, was a struggling student when it came to piety.

Now, I’m back. What to say? It’s a corpse, last restored between 1977 and 1999, closed for 22 years and its third restoration since 1943, when the refectory was hit by a British bomb, obliterating the church cloisters and collapsing the dining hall roof. The Last Supper’s wall stood and the painting survived, protected as it was by sandbags and mattresses. The roof wasn’t replaced until after the war. The Last Supper has been flaking since it was painted, losing dust-size bits here, and a chunk there; and Jesus’s feet were amputated by the addition of a door. It had endured half a dozen restorations over the centuries before the 1943 calamity. Suffice to say it’s been embalmed more times than Lenin. It’s a ghost.

There are a lot of famous monuments that every sensate, worldly adult ought to see — “ought” meaning a rite, a box to be checked, “let’s see what the fuss is all about,” revelation possible but not guaranteed, exhilaration unlikely but not unknown. For me, the Black Hills were beyond imagination, the Pisa campanile a wonderment given its lean, explained only by the will of God, and the Crown Jewels dazzling. Seeing the Statue of Liberty from afar, on a boat, seemed good enough. The Mona Lisa? Meh. The Sistine Chapel ceiling? Fantastic, at 8 a.m., before the hoards. The Last Supper? Good to see it, but it’s more an academic rather than aesthetic experience. Call me a yahoo. It’s hard to contemplate given the 15-minute time limit for visitors — okay, they gave me extra time. And it’s worth it if you focus on its perfect alignment of logic and emotion.

What’s Leonardo’s concept, since the thing’s such a wreck that it veers toward the realm of Conceptual Art? The scene is the seconds after Jesus’s revelation that one among His core cohort, the Apostles, has betrayed Him. From John 13:21, He’s just said, “Very truly I tell you, one of you is going to betray Me.” A firecracker’s just been tossed into the garden party, or Seder. The cast? There’s Jesus in the center, cool, calm, and collected though the words fresh from His mouth set the party aflutter. The Apostles are in tight groups of three, referencing the Trinity and creating pyramids that anchor the scene. Jesus is an equilateral triangle and a powerful centerpiece. In The Last Supper, geometry’s your friend, not your foe. And what a crafty, supple friend it is.

On the left are Bartholomew, James the Minor, and Andrew. Then Judas, holding a purse as gang treasurer, the bearded, balding Peter, and the young John, who seems to swoon. “Very feminine, yes, too much so, right?” our Italian interpreter drily and darkly asked. Peter nudges him, John’s Gospel reports. “Ask Him which one.” To the right of Jesus are Thomas, his finger pointing, the finger that would later probe Jesus’s wounds, James the Major, and Philip, aghast, hand to his chest in that timeless gesture of emotion that overwhelms. Next are Matthew, the reformed tax collector still with his hand out, though elegantly so, Judas Thaddeus, thought to be Leonardo’s self-portrait, and Simon the Zealot.

Judas is the only figure with his elbow on the table. His head is the lowest, and his skull’s misshapen as if Leonardo has studied phrenology. He abruptly leans backward as if to distance himself from Jesus and to suggest, in response to Jesus, “Oh, You don’t say.” He’s also in the same trio with Peter, Jesus’s deputy and the rock upon which His church would be built. John is Jesus’s favorite of the group. Plugging Judas in the mix shows us that betrayal — and wickedness — can come from any quarter. In earlier Last Suppers, Judas is usually seated on the other side of the table, separate from the others.

It all makes for a choreographed, even musical look, a painting that’s got rhythm. It suggests a chain reaction from ripples in the two groups of three closest to Jesus to more expansive gestures and more space among the groups at the ends of the table. For all its geometry, The Last Supper doesn’t looked locked. On the one hand, it’s the ghost at work. The figures are that cloudy and vague. On the other, it’s scientific, or, as Leonardo understood science, everything connects to something else.

We can spot more details — not with 15 minutes, though — like lots of sliced bread, glass cups filled with red wine, pewter plates, knives, finger bowls, the saltcellar that a startled Judas tipped, plates of whole fish, and, according to my late friend John Varriano, writing years ago in Gastronomica, grilled eel garnished with orange slices.

It’s a Seder but one infused with Milanese treats circa 1500. John, a Renaissance art scholar, told me years ago that Leonardo was a vegetarian.

In 1482, Leonardo, a mixed bag of a success in Florence, took the job as court painter for Milan’s despot Duke Ludovico Sforza. If the genius preferred to be anything, it was a scientist, but he was a visionary artist, too. Sforza saw the new church as the spot for his tomb so assigned Leonardo the job of decorating the hall with the theme Ghirlandaio had just painted in Florence. Others had tackled it, too, focusing not on Jesus’s revelation that someone there had finked but that moment when Jesus offers Judas a piece of bread that he then dips in oil. The notorious kiss came later. Leonardo’s conception is a snapshot, too, of shock, disbelief, denial, and guilt in multiple registers.

Its one-point perspective, the eye on Jesus’s right temple, immerses the painting within the refectory. The proportions are nearly the same. The eye instinctively goes to this point where the scene falls into place. Leonardo purposely places it in the mind of Jesus. Very nifty. This puts us, intuitively, in the scene. It helps that Leonardo painted windows looking out to Lombardy’s landscape.

Unloved and usually ignored is the titanic painting at the other end of the refectory. It’s The Crucifixion by Giovanni Donato da Montorfano from around 1495. Sforza hired him to paint the denouement — Jesus’s end, the starting of which was the betrayal. It’s a magnificent clunker infused with as much stiffly Medieval rigidity as with a limber Renaissance spirit. There are 70 figures, not counting the gaggle of squirts in front of the portals opening to Jerusalem. Donato presents multiple storylines from different time frames. It’s in better shape and quite a thing.

I’m enough of a Romantic to know that everything made from human hands is bound to end in decay, though Leonardo might have hastened inevitability. He painted The Last Supper using a dried fresco technique rather than wet fresco — painting onto wet plaster so the plaster and pigment fused. Going a secco made for more details and more layers of pigment, but it also left wall and pigment two separate things. Smoke and steam poured in from the kitchen next door. Leonardo didn’t know that a stream ran under the refectory’s foundation, feeding humidity to the wall. By the early 1500s, the surface had begun to flake, noticeably eroding details early and then bit by bit.

Milan has weather extremes. It gets cold during the winter, and on Thursday I pined for gelato in 90-degree heat and humidity. I was told to “prepare the umbrella” for Friday. The refectory was a stable and armory during the Napoleonic occupation of Milan in the late 1790s during which the French swiped the church’s Titian, now at the Louvre. Goethe said he heard the refectory was once flooded with two feet of water. “Restoration” meant painting over Leonardo’s paint. A restoration from 1903 to 1908 was the first to apply a scientific understanding of paint. The 1943 bombing and years of exposure before the roof was replaced didn’t help. Over the centuries, dust, dirt, and dead bugs filled millions of microscopic holes in the wall.

As a very nice consolation prize, there are three copies of The Last Supper made in its better days, one at the Royal Academy in London and painted on canvas by Giampietrino (active 1500–1550) and Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio (1467–1516). Both were Leonardo students, and it’s likely that both worked with him on The Last Supper. It’s the same size but lacks the top third of Leonardo’s windows and landscape. A Carthusian monastery in Pavia owned it from 1591 until the Austrians invaded Italy and suppressed and sacked it. The Brera in Milan displayed it until 1817, when it was sent to London to be sold. Thomas Lawrence, then the president of the Royal Academy, made sure the artist organization bought it.

It’s splendid, close to Technicolor, a concerto of sandaled feet, the meal clarified, and expressions juiced. Bartholomew has that “you and whose army” stance, James the Minor’s “not me,” Jesus sad but serene. I think the color contrast’s perfect. Sleeve colors as well as hand gestures thread up through that single moment.

Pinin Brambilla Barcilon’s 20-year restoration stripped fugitive paint, centimeter by centimeter, painting voids with watercolor to make a whole. HVAC makes a huge difference. Forty people max visit every 15 minutes, between 450,000 and 500,000 a year, all breathing, some in my group more than others. Getting in was a comedy. I bought a spot on a tour for €65, since I couldn’t raise the Last Supper museum’s press handler for a press pass, and tickets were sold out for the month.

Much of life in Italy becomes an operetta, if not full-on Tosca. I’ve been to Italy 50 or 60 times, in part because my mother was Italian, and it’s becoming more and more third-worldly. I got there before the appointed time, but the tour company padded it by an hour for latecomers. In the hot sun we waited. I checked in, each of the three emails sent to me having different bits of information to be scanned. Distribution of sound machines to 20 of us, handled by a man on a bike. Sound check. Latecomers, to whom I gave the evil eye. Our guide started with the restoration. Twenty-two years. We were waiting for the ticket office to signal that our slot was impending, “in a few minutes.” My mother was Italian. That could mean months.

A woman fainted. “Just a moment, it’s an emergency,” our guide said. “I’m a doctor, she’ll be fine,” I said. Not a lie. I have a Ph.D. in art history and offered her my bottle of Perrier. She was hauled off anyway. “Museum is one way,” then “food and drink not allowed,” then “guess how many monks there are,” our guide asked. “Twelve,” a man said. “Exactly,” disappointed that a guessing game wouldn’t take up time and distract us from the sweat dripping down our extremities. He looked like he’d been a monk there, which is cheating.

We learned about the Bramante dome. The guide’s scanner broke, so she couldn’t check in more latecomers. We went in, had our tickets scanned again, “no food, no drink,” then we went through the body scanner. My cellphone and keys to a car and house 3,000 miles away. Bag check. I forgot I’d taken two bottles of Perrier, hydration being so important in these parlous times. I’m skunked now. A plug for the Ambrosiana. There are two chambers as crowds move, with sliding glass doors to keep temps and humidity in the refectory constant.

We walked through the cloisters and finally got to Leonardo, for 15 minutes. They’d figured I was an art critic. Do I look like one? They offered to let me stay. I stayed for an hour, looking at the painting up close and in back. Leonardo’s construction does pull the viewer. That’s very Dominican. Dominican art, at least the Italian variety, stresses the overlap of Jesus’s interiors and ours as mere mortals still made in God’s image.

Tickets bought through the church museum are €15, with a discount for EU citizens between 18 and 25 and for children. At, say, 400,000 full-price tickets sold, that’s €6 million, or a bit over $7 million. The private-sector walking tour business of which a visit to the Leonardo is the highlight makes millions more. Running The Last Supper part of the church is the Brera Gallery, Milan’s civic Italian paintings museum from the early Renaissance to today. Once we get past the cost of managing the public spaces, there’s got to be a huge surplus. Unless those twelve monks are going for beluga caviar, white truffles, Maserati, and Brunello Cucinelli for habits, someone’s getting rich. The experience has the whiff of a racket, but that’s Italy, it’s The Last Supper, and get your ticket well in advance.