Leonardo and the Last Supper

by Ross King

  These likenesses were to be one of a number of ways in which Lodovico commemorated his late wife, whom he clearly adored despite his various mistresses. He planned to open a new gate in the city walls and christen it the Porta Beatrice, while her portrait on a medallion would adorn the doors of Santa Maria delle Grazie. Inside the church, the commemoration continued, with Cristofo Solari carving a marble effigy for her tomb that would show her reposing peacefully on her back, arms folded and eyes closed, dressed in the clothing she wore to mark the birth of her eldest son. Draped over her hands would be—poignantly—the pelt of a marten, a creature believed to offer protection to women in childbirth.

  Just as Beatrice had spent many hours each day at the sepulcher of Bianca, so, too, Lodovico, wrapped in a black cloak, now spent many hours mourning his wife in Santa Maria delle Grazie. “He goes every day to visit the church where his wife is buried,” wrote a young Venetian politician, “and never leaves this undone, and much of his time is spent with the friars of the convent.” In fact, he attended two or three masses each day. “He is very religious,” the young Venetian continued, “recites offices daily, observes fasts, and lives chastely and devoutly. His rooms are still hung with black, and he takes all his meals standing.”4 Two weeks after her death, as a kind of penance, he shaved his head.

  How much progress Leonardo had made on The Last Supper by the summer of 1497 is impossible to know. Presumably it was nearing completion, though Lodovico’s urgent note to his secretary ordering Leonardo to “finish the work already begun” may imply that work was proceeding only fitfully, with no clear end in sight. Leonardo had, however, recommenced painting in 1497 following his “scandal” the previous year. That January, Matteo Bandello, the prior’s nephew, witnessed Leonardo working erratically on the scaffold, sometimes painting furiously from dawn to dusk without stopping for food or drink, at other times studying the mural for hours on end without touching his brushes.

  Bandello gave further insights into Leonardo’s work at this time. He claimed that people used to gather in the refectory to watch Leonardo and offer opinions regarding his work—overtures that the painter welcomed. Bandello failed to identify these visitors beyond noting that one of them, early in 1497, was a Frenchman, Raymond Peraudi, the bishop of Gurk, who was staying at Santa Maria delle Grazie during a visit to Milan. Apparently the bishop was not impressed by what he saw. He believed that, on a salary of two thousand ducats, Leonardo was overpaid. Peraudi may have been aggrieved because his own annual income was a mere three thousand ducats. No doubt he regarded himself, as a bishop and a cardinal, infinitely more worthy than someone whose job it was to decorate a refectory.5

  Bandello also claimed that one reason why Leonardo sometimes failed to arrive at the refectory was because he was still working on his “stupendous horse of clay” in the Corte dell’Arengo. Bandello may have recalled the facts incorrectly, because his account was composed many decades later. Yet it may well be the case that, more than two years on, Leonardo was unwilling to abandon this magnificent project and therefore, still dreaming of seeing the work take shape in bronze, gamely continued modeling his horse even as he worked on The Last Supper. Certainly the project was never far from his thoughts, and his papers reveal that in the years between 1495 and 1497 he was still making notes on how to cast the giant horse. He could have had no encouragement, and no money, from Lodovico.6

  Leonardo was distracted by other projects, too, in 1497. He finally had an architectural commission: the remodeling of a villa owned by Mariolo de’ Guiscardi near the Porta Vercellina, a stone’s throw from Santa Maria delle Grazie. Little is known about Mariolo beyond the fact that he was Lodovico’s chamberlain and that he owned a stable of horses, one of which Leonardo had considered as one of the models for his equestrian monument. Mariolo’s villa stood outside the city gate in a district recently transformed into a suburb for wealthy Milanese courtiers. Galeazzo Sanseverino, with his own stable of horses, was one of Mariolo’s neighbors.

  Leonardo was given precise specifications for the villa, which was to be comfortable but not palatial. It was to feature a drawing-room forty-six feet in length and four bedrooms, including ones, Mariolo stipulated, “for my wife and her ladies.” There would also be a courtyard, a guard room, and a thirty-eight-foot-long dining hall for the servants. Leonardo applied himself to the task with enthusiasm, making many notes, drawings, and calculations. He seems to have thought of everything: kitchen, larder, scullery, a hen coop, stables for sixteen horses, and even places to store wood and keep manure. Comfort and convenience were paramount. “The servants’ hall beyond the kitchen,” Leonardo noted on his plan, “so that the master does not hear their noise.”7

  As work began on the villa, Leonardo also had other, less welcome distractions. Salai, though now an adolescent, was still proving a trial despite—or because of—Leonardo’s continued indulgence of him. In April 1497 Leonardo treated the young man to an expensive cloak made from silver-colored cloth trimmed with green velvet and decorated with loops. The garment cost twenty-six lire, the equivalent of a week’s wages for a construction worker. Unwisely, he gave Salai the money to pay for the cloak. “Salai stole the money,” Leonardo recorded in weary resignation.8

  Raymond Peraudi, whose bishopric was in present-day Austria, was visiting Milan to further the good relations between Lodovico and Maximilian. Following his failed expedition to Pisa, the emperor had bidden farewell to Lodovico in the last weeks of 1496, leaving Italy (as a Venetian noted) “in still greater confusion than he found her.”9 The year 1497 witnessed continued upheaval and unrest. In Naples, Ferdinand II had died at twenty-seven, leaving conditions in his kingdom “more disturbed than they had ever been.”10 In Florence, Girolamo Savonarola held the first of his “bonfires of the vanities.” A ninety-foot-high pyramid was built from perfume bottles, wigs, hats, masks, dolls, chessmen, playing cards, musical instruments, books, manuscripts, paintings, and statues. After an effigy of Satan was placed on top, the glittering heap was sprinkled with gunpowder and set alight. “With the greatest happiness they burned everything,” recorded one witness. Afterward, a song was sung declaring Christ the king of Florence.11

  Three months later, in May, Savonarola was excommunicated by Pope Alexander VI for having “disseminated pernicious doctrines to the scandal and great grief of simple souls.”12 Then, in June, the pope’s son, Juan Borgia, the duke of Gandía, was murdered in Rome, his throat cut by an unknown assailant and his body tossed into the Tiber. The pope regarded his son’s mysterious death as a punishment from God, but he believed a hand besides the Lord’s had also been involved: that of Lodovico Sforza’s brother, Cardinal Ascanio. Juan’s restless ghost would soon be seen stalking Rome, and in October lightning struck the Castel Sant’Angelo, causing an explosion that showered the city with chunks of marble. “The reign of Pope Alexander,” wrote a Venetian chronicler, “is full of startling and portentous events.” The pope had his own theory about what was causing all of these problems. “May God forgive him who invited the French into Italy,” he told a Florentine envoy, “for all our troubles have arisen from that.”13

  A Venetian jealously scrutinizing Lodovico Sforza’s fortunes at the end of 1496 had reached a hopeful conclusion: “I believe that he will not continue long in prosperity, for God is just, and will punish him because he is a traitor and never keeps faith with any one.”14 Lodovico’s chickens did indeed seem to be coming home to roost. The deaths of his wife and daughter had been terrible blows. Also, his enormous outlays of revenue—the dowry paid to Maximilian, the funds sent to Pisa, the money for the building of churches and the beautification of Milan and Vigevano, not to mention the endless rounds of banquets and other extravagances—forced him to impose higher and higher taxes on his people. A tax called the inquinto was levied, adding a further 20 percent on the existing taxes on such necessities as meat, wine, and bread. Before the end of the year, riots broke out in Cremona, Lodi, and Pavia. “In the whole Milanese
there is trouble and discontent,” wrote a Venetian. “No one loves the duke.”15

  Danger also lay beyond Lodovico’s borders. The French were poised to descend into Italy, with Charles VIII, as one of his ambassadors observed, harboring “great hopes of revenging himself on the duke of Milan.”16 The instrument of the duke’s destruction would be, it seemed, Louis of Orléans, who in 1496 had massed thousands of troops at Asti in preparation for an invasion of Lombardy to press his claim to the dukedom of Milan. Other powers besides the French had turned on Lodovico. Louis gathered support for his invasion from Florence, from Bologna, from the duke of Mantua, and even—such was the brutal nature of Italian politics—from Lodovico’s own father-in-law, Ercole d’Este, the duke of Ferrara. The Venetians, too, were ready to join the French cause against Lodovico as punishment for his treachery.

  Yet the invasion failed to happen in 1496 or 1497. Despite the urgings of his Italian allies, Louis hesitated on the brink. Perhaps wisely, he was biding his time. Since the death of the dauphin at the end of 1495, he was now heir to the French throne, and Charles, dissolute and frivolous as ever, was not in the best of health. Despite his losses in Naples—all of the lands he had conquered in 1495 had been reconquered—the French king made no urgent moves to reclaim his erstwhile possessions. He reflected on the “many great errors” he had committed during his Italian campaign and casually mooted a second one, resolving to do better next time around.17 However, most of his time was spent entertaining himself with jousts and tournaments. He also paid long visits to Tours, supposedly to worship at the tomb of St. Martin but in reality, cynical observers remarked, to worship a lady in the queen’s entourage.

  Early in the afternoon of 7 April 1498, Palm Sunday, King Charles took his queen by the hand and led her to a part of his castle at Amboise she had never seen before, the Galerie d’Haquelebac. Here the pair planned to watch a game of tennis, or jeu de paume, contested in a ditch below the gallery. Tennis had already caused the death of one of the king’s distant ancestors, Louis X, who in 1316 expired at the age of twenty-six after his vigorous game of tennis in sweltering heat was followed by too copious a draft of chilled wine in a cool grotto. In Charles’s case, the contributing factor was not wine but architecture. Since his return from Italy, and inspired by its architectural wonders, he had begun refurbishing his castle at Amboise, turning it into, an admiring courtier noted, “the most august and magnificent building that any prince had undertaken for one hundred years before.”18

  Alas, the king’s architects had not yet started work on the Galerie d’Haquelebac, which was the “nastiest place about the castle.”19 Ironically for such a small man, Charles banged his head on one of the ceiling beams as he made his way into the grubby gallery. He nonetheless watched some of the match and talked freely with the assembled company before suddenly collapsing and losing consciousness. Placed on a crude bed in the gallery, he died nine hours later, at the age of twenty-seven. One of his courtiers deplored such an unbefitting end: “And thus died that great and powerful monarch in a sordid and filthy place.”20

  Louis of Orléans was crowned king of France at Rheims on 28 May 1498. Now known as Louis XII, he immediately assumed the other title he believed to be his right: duke of Milan.

  Lodovico Sforza’s promptings had served to concentrate Leonardo’s mind. Two weeks before the death of Charles VIII, the duke was informed in a letter from his chancellor that work in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie was progressing “with no time lost.”21 He was probably referring to the portraits of himself, his wife, and children inserted into Montorfano’s Crucifixion, because by the spring of 1498 Leonardo had finished The Last Supper. There is no definitive evidence to prove when precisely he finally put down his brushes and removed his scaffolding. However, it must have been between June 1497, when Lodovico wrote his impatient letter, and the following February. On 9 February 1498, Luca Pacioli composed and dated his dedication of On Divine Proportion, three illuminated manuscripts of which would be completed later in the year. Pacioli’s dedication implies that Leonardo’s painting in Santa Maria delle Grazie was finished. It also praises the mural as “a matter more divine than human:” a satisfying first review if ever there was one.22

  Leonardo may actually have completed the mural as early as the summer of 1497. That August, at any rate, he received a generous gift from Lodovico: a plot of land with a vineyard outside the Porta Vercellina. The land was probably given to him in partial payment, or even as a bonus, for his work in the refectory. It was only a short distance—a matter of a few yards, in fact—southeast of Santa Maria delle Grazie, running south of the present-day Corso Magenta. The gift, which made him the neighbor of the friars in Santa Maria delle Grazie, points more definitively than anything else to the end of his labors on The Last Supper. The fact that Lodovico gave his painter land rather than money says something about the state of the ducal coffers by 1497. Yet it also reflects Lodovico’s gratitude to Leonardo: a bonus paid for a job well done.23

  The land, which once belonged to a monastery, was approximately 220 yards long by 55 yards wide. Nearby were the circular ruins of an ancient Temple of Mars, a Roman theater that had long ago been turned into a church, and the porphyry tomb of the Roman emperor Valentinian II. Leonardo prized his new possession, minutely measuring its dimensions and calculating its value. He came up with the figure of 1,931 and one quarter ducats, which means that if he also received the two thousand ducats mentioned by Bandello, his total remuneration was the equivalent today of about $700,000.

  Although a small house stood on the property, Leonardo probably dreamed of raising a more impressive dwelling for himself on the site. The land was in a desirable location, close to the properties of prominent members of the Sforza court such as Galeazzo Sanseverino and Mariolo de’ Guiscardi. Leonardo was at last a man of property, and he would keep this status symbol, this little patch of land at the heart of Milan’s political elite, for the rest of his life. His will described it as “his garden which is outside the walls of Milan,” and it would be divided between Salai (who eventually built himself a house on the property) and another faithful servant. Leonardo clearly regarded it as one of the most precious possessions he had to bestow.24

  What Lodovico Sforza made of The Last Supper is not recorded. But with the scaffold removed he—as well as the long-suffering Vincenzo Bandello and his band of friars—could at last see Leonardo’s creation without obstruction.

  One of the first things they must have noticed, as they entered the refectory through the small door to the right of the mural, was how Leonardo’s use of color, light, and perspective brought the scene magically to life. One visitor, coming through this door a few years later, noted how his attention was “focused on the particular loaf of bread in line with the left hand of Christ, open in a gesture of offering directed to the entrance door.”25 Christ extending his hand in welcome (and indicating the holy bread) would have been everyone’s first glimpse of the mural as they stepped into the room. Not only did this gesture emphasize the sacramental aspect of the painting; it also cleverly drew the spectators into the painted illusion.

  The illusion of the presence of Christ and the apostles in the refectory would have continued as the friars sat at their tables to eat. Goethe imagined the scene: “It must, at the hour of the meal, have been an interesting sight to view the tables of the Prior and Christ thus facing each other, as two counterparts, and the monks at their board enclosed between them.”26 The illusion would have been strengthened if, as Goethe suspected, Leonardo’s tablecloth, with its sharp pleats and its intricate blue pattern, were copied from one in the convent’s linen cupboard. Moreover, the friars would all have been seated, like the apostles, on one side of their long refectory tables.

  The refectory at Santa Maria delle Grazie

  Something else that would have struck visitors to the refectory was the brightness of the mural, a dazzling display of color made possible because Leonardo abandoned fre
sco in favor of his “oil tempera” technique. The apostles’ robes were combinations of red, green, yellow, and ultramarine made all the brighter by the carefully controlled interplay of contrasts. As we have seen, Leonardo knew that a color’s intensity increased if it was placed next to its complementary. Hence the green of Bartholomew’s mantle was opposed to the deep red of James the Lesser, the blue robe of Matthew to the yellow splash of Thaddeus, and the orange of Philip’s overmantle against the blue of his sleeves. Moreover, the colors of the men’s robes were carefully syncopated along the line of the table to create a pattern of alternating hues that lead the eye through a hubbub of pushing and pulling darks and lights, adding to the gesticulations of the apostles.

  One of the more sensational coloristic effects involved the clothing of Judas. Leonardo was fascinated by what light and shade could do to color. He wrote that shade affected tone and that a color’s “true character” was revealed by its exposure to light.27 In the damaged mural, Judas’s garment appears to be two-tone: his right arm in blue and his left in green. However, the true effect is best appreciated today in the faithful copy done in about 1520 by Leonardo’s student Giampietrino (who probably worked beside Leonardo on the scaffold). Giampietrino reveals that Judas’s mantle is blue in shadow and green where—as he reaches for the bread with his left hand—the light from the window catches and illuminates the material. The same thing happens with Christ’s left hand as it gestures toward the bread. Once again, paint loss now obscures the effect in the original, but Giampietrino shows how Christ’s upper arm and left shoulder are darkened while his palm and forearm, as he extends them, are illuminated—thus emphasizing his words (“This is my body”) and explaining why the visitor felt the hand was reaching out from the mural and welcoming him into the refectory.