Leonardo and the Last Supper

by Ross King

  Leonardo’s Last Supper, following the arrival in Milan of Louis XII, barely survived this depredation. The king’s triumphal entrance to the city, wearing ducal robes, took place on 6 October. Accompanying Louis was Cesare Borgia, who wore a purple suit and paraded beneath an ermine-lined canopy held aloft by eight Milanese noblemen. Much pageantry ensued as a triumphal chariot showing Victory supported by Fortitude, Penance, and Renown passed beneath a triumphal arch surmounted by an equestrian statue of the French king. Coins were distributed bearing the legend “Louis, King of France and Duke of Milan.”

  On the following day, the new duke of Milan was taken to Santa Maria delle Grazie to gaze upon the mural ordered by his predecessor. Evidently the painting’s fame had preceded it. Louis generally had scant interest in paintings unless they depicted him, preferably on horseback. He was, however, suitably impressed by Leonardo’s handiwork. He even hoped to pay it the ultimate French compliment: he wanted to loot it. According to Paolo Giovio, the king “coveted it so much that he inquired anxiously from those standing around him whether it could be detached from the wall and transported forthwith to France.” He desisted in this endeavor only when informed that the removal of the painting “would have destroyed the famous refectory.”47

  King Louis XII of France

  Vasari expanded the story, claiming the king went so far as to engage architects to make cross-stays of wood and iron so the painting could be taken to France. Louis proceeded, he claimed, “without any regard for expense, so great was his desire to have it.”48 The king’s failure to expropriate Leonardo’s work marked a rare victory for the Milanese.

  Lodovico Sforza’s flight from Milan deprived Leonardo of his patron of the previous sixteen years. His harsh assessment of the duke, that “none of his enterprises was carried out,” reveals his frustration at what he regarded as wasted opportunities, not least those that concerned himself. Yet if Il Moro arguably undervalued and underused his painter and engineer, primarily employing him as a theatrical impresario, interior decorator, and general handyman, he had at least offered Leonardo creative latitude and financial security. For the better part of two decades, Leonardo had been allowed to pursue his intellectually itinerant trail through aeronautics, anatomy, architecture, mathematics, and mechanics.

  With Lodovico ousted, Leonardo suddenly needed to find a new patron. He was quite prepared to offer his services to the enemy, remaining in Milan despite the disorder. No document records that he was present when Louis XII visited Santa Maria delle Grazie, but presumably the king would have wished to meet the artist whose work he so admired. Leonardo, for his part, may have wished to follow in the footsteps of the sculptor Guido Mazzoni, whose work in Naples so impressed Charles VIII in 1495 that he was invited to take up a well-paid job at the French court.

  Leonardo did find at least one patron. At some point his services were secured by the powerful secretary to Louis XII, Florimond Robertet, whose Italian-style château in the Loire Valley would soon host one of the great private art collections of the sixteenth century, including a (now-lost) bronze David by Michelangelo. Robertet commissioned Leonardo to paint what became the Madonna of the Yarnwinder, a small Madonna and Child painting that showed (as a witness who saw the work later recorded) “a Madonna sitting as if she wished to wind yarns onto a distaff” while the Christ Child, feet in a basket of yarn, holds the cross-shaped object, “not willing to yield it to his mother, who appears to want to take it from him.”49

  Apart from Robertet, Leonardo made another contact in Louis XII’s entourage: “Get from Gian de Paris the method of painting in tempera,” reads one of his notes.50 Gian de Paris was the court painter and royal valet de chambre Jean Perréal—Leonardo’s opposite number, so to speak, at the French court. Leonardo probably first met him in 1494 when Perréal accompanied Charles VIII to Milan. The pair shared an interest in, among other things, astronomy. “The measurement of the sun, promised me by Maestro Giovanni, the Frenchman,” reads another of Leonardo’s notes.51 In 1499, Perréal returned to Milan in the entourage of Louis XII. As peintre du roi, he was probably the man responsible for overseeing the decorations and festivities surrounding Louis’s triumphant entrance into the city. He may also have been the one who guided the king’s footsteps to Santa Maria delle Grazie.

  Leonardo hoped for yet another contact among the invaders. Toward the end of 1499 he began planning his departure from Milan: a permanent move, it appears. “Sell what you cannot take with you,” he wrote in a memorandum composed on a page that included an architectural drawing done a decade earlier.52 The memo listed the possessions he planned to take: bed linen, shoes, handkerchiefs and towels, a book on perspective, another on geometry, four pairs of hose and a jerkin, even some seeds, all packed into “two covered boxes to be carried on mules.” A third box would be taken by the muleteer for safekeeping to Vinci, where an uncle still lived.

  In this memo, for one of the few times in his life, Leonardo wrote in code. His memo begins cryptically: “Find Ingil and tell him that you wait for him at Amor and will go with him to Ilopan.” The code is disappointingly easy to crack, since Leonardo simply reversed the order of the letters: Amor is Roma and Ilopan is Napoli. Evidently Leonardo planned to go to Rome and from there—once he met “Ingil”—proceed to Naples. A curious aspect of Leonardo’s attempted encryption is that because the memo is written in mirror script, the reversed words are actually more legible than the rest of the page, making for woefully ineffective information security.

  The Ligny memorandum

  “Ingil” was Louis de Luxembourg, among whose numerous titles was Count of Ligny. He was Louis XII’s lord high chamberlain and, as the governor of Picardy and castellan of Lille, one of his top military advisers. Leonardo probably met him during the first invasion in 1494, when Ligny was made the governor of Siena. Five years on, Leonardo hoped to find employment in Ligny’s service. The French still had designs on Naples, and the key to capturing the south of Italy was holding the fortresses in Tuscany and the Papal States. Leonardo’s memo ends with a reminder to “learn levelling and how much soil a man can dig out in a day,” which suggests that he intended to immerse himself in the construction of earthworks and other fortifications, thereby fulfilling his dream of working as a military engineer.

  In the end, Leonardo did not find a patron in Ligny, who soon quit Milan and returned to France. Apart from Robertet, the French seem to have kept their distance from Leonardo, probably viewing him as an untrustworthy Sforza loyalist. One of his best friends was a Sforza die-hard, the architect Giacomo Andrea da Ferrara, the man at whose dinner table the ten-year-old Salai had once behaved so rambunctiously. Giacomo Andrea was such a close friend of Leonardo that Pacioli, in his introduction to On Divine Proportion, called him Leonardo’s brother. In December 1499, Giacomo Andrea went to Innsbruck to help Lodovico plot his return to power. The French response, when he returned to Milan, was to hang, draw, and quarter him.

  Leonardo’s enthusiasm for serving these new political masters no doubt waned as rapidly as everyone else’s. At first Louis had won over Milanese hearts by cutting taxes, but French behavior soon became cruel and obnoxious. Many courtiers had already fled the city. Donato Bramante made his way to Rome, where he quickly occupied himself by measuring ancient ruins and painting the pope’s coat of arms on the basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano. Luca Pacioli, too, was making preparations for his departure.

  Milan had few attractions or possibilities left for Leonardo. Before the end of December he finished clearing out of the Castello dell’Arengo, packing or selling his possessions. He must have made one last trip to Santa Maria delle Grazie: his list of things to do before he left Milan included an instruction to “take the braziers from the Grazie.”

  Then, as the century slipped away, he took to the frozen roads with his mules and his boxes.

  Epilogue: Tell Me If I Ever Did a Thing

  Over the following years, a familiar litany followed Leonardo: des
ultory progress, unhappy patrons, elaborate schemes that—however ingenious—finally came to nothing.

  Mantua, one hundred miles to the southeast, was Leonardo’s first stop after Milan. Isabella d’Este, the marchioness, sister of Beatrice, desired her portrait. Isabella was an indomitable personality: a “woman with her own opinion,” according to her husband, who “always wanted to do things her own way.”1 A combination of Leonardo and Isabella did not bode well. Within weeks he departed for Venice, leaving behind a chalk sketch and vague promises to complete the portrait.

  In Venice, military matters. In the early spring of 1500, Leonardo offered to the Senate his skills in engineering, proposing among other things a sluice gate on the River Isonzo that would flood the valley and drown the invading Ottomans.2 Even grievous territorial losses to the Turks did not tempt the Venetians to accept.

  Leonardo’s stay in Venice must have had its poignant moments: the sight of Verrocchio’s equestrian monument would have been a forceful reminder of his own lost opportunity with the bronze horse. In the early months of 1500, however, his hopes for his horse may briefly have revived. Lodovico Sforza made a victorious return to Milan in the first week of February, having reconquered large parts of the duchy with the help of Swiss and German troops. He was greeted by the Milanese people—for whom the French rule had become tyrannical and loathsome—by enthusiastic cries of “Moro! Moro!” But any plans Leonardo might have made for a return to Milan and a resumption of his old life were dashed two months later as the French army reasserted itself. Abandoned by his own army and trying to escape in the disguise of a Swiss soldier, Lodovico was captured at Novara on the tenth of April. In a scene of treachery replete with biblical resonance, he was pointed out to the enemy by one of his own Swiss mercenaries, who had taken money from the French in return for betraying him. The Judas, identified as one Hans Turmann, was promptly executed by the Swiss for his treason.3

  Within a week of Lodovico’s capture, Leonardo, for want of other opportunities, returned to Florence. He was now forty-eight years old. His father was still alive, living in the Via Ghibellina with wife number four and his eleven children, the youngest of whom, Giovanni, was a two-year-old. Leonardo took a set of rooms in the monastery of Santissima Annunziata, where his father—ever the puller of strings—seems to have arranged for him to paint an altarpiece for his clients, the Servite friars. Old habits died hard. “He kept them waiting a long time without starting anything,” Vasari later recounted.4 An explanation for this leisurely progress is accounted for by an agent sent by Isabella d’Este to check Leonardo’s progress on her portrait. The agent ominously reported that Leonardo was distracted by his mathematical studies. The artist’s habits, he informed Isabella, were “variable and indeterminate,” and he seemed to live from one day to the next. Moreover, Leonardo “could not bear his paintbrush.”5 The friars of the Annunziata, like Isabella, would never receive a painting from Leonardo.

  In 1502 came the opportunity to work as a military engineer. Leonardo entered the pay of Cesare Borgia, but the warlord’s savagery left him shocked and disillusioned. War, he decided, was “the most brutal kind of madness.”6 He then applied to the Ottoman sultan, offering to construct a bridge across the Golden Horn. But the Gran Turco showed no interest. Another engineering scheme—an ambitious plan to divert the course of the Arno by means of a canal—was given the go-ahead by the city fathers in Florence, with Niccolò Machiavelli an enthusiastic proponent. But the plan quickly and disastrously miscarried.7

  Weary of painting Leonardo may have been, but other commissions came his way—and met with predictable fates. In 1503 he began a portrait of Lisa, the young wife of a well-to-do cloth merchant named Francesco del Giocondo. True to form, he proceeded in no great haste. “He worked on this painting for four years,” Vasari reported, “and then left it still unfinished.”8 The portrait, though eventually completed, would never be delivered to Francesco del Giocondo.

  No angry complaints survive from either Francesco or his wife, but another patron—the government of Florence—voiced anger and irritation at his failure to follow through on his obligations. In October 1503, around the time he began the Mona Lisa, Leonardo was contracted to paint a mural, The Battle of Anghiari, on the wall of the council hall in the Palazzo Vecchio. He began painting in June 1505, using an experimental technique, but soon abandoned the work. Early sources blame everything from defective plaster and the inferior quality of the linseed oil, to the failure of the braziers to dry the paints (which apparently trickled down the wall) and even “some kind of indignation” on Leonardo’s part—a repeat, perhaps, of the “scandal” that saw him leave his scaffold in Milan a few years earlier. Whatever the cause, the project came to what Paolo Giovio called an “untimely end.”9 In 1506 he left Florence and returned to Milan, leaving the city fathers disgruntled and accusing him of impropriety: “He received a large sum of money and has only made a small beginning on the great work he was commissioned to carry out.”10 But Leonardo was deaf to their entreaties, and The Battle of Anghiari would never be completed.

  Bridges, canals, flying machines, numerous paintings: all left to languish on the drawing board or easel. Even Leonardo’s beloved mathematical and geometrical studies eventually failed him. A forlorn entry in his notebooks records the sad end of his investigations: “St. Andrew’s night. I am through with squaring the circle, and this is the end of the light, and of the night, and of the paper I was working on.”11

  The candle gutters, dawn light peeps through the shutters, and Leonardo, in nightcap and spectacles, blearily casts aside his pen.

  “Tell me if anything was ever done,” Leonardo used to doodle in the pages of his notebooks. Coming in the midst of so much dereliction and neglect, The Last Supper was the triumphant discharge of the debt that his genius owed to history. Over the course of three years he managed—almost for the only time in his life—to harness and concentrate his relentless energies and restless obsessions. The result was 450 square feet of pigment and plaster, and a work of art utterly unlike anything ever seen before—and something unquestionably superior to the efforts of even the greatest masters of the previous century.

  The Last Supper combined intensity of color with subtlety of tone, storms of movement with a delicate grace of line, symbolic beauty with vivid narrative and distinctive characterization. Above all, it possessed more lifelike details—from the expressive faces of the apostles to the plates of food and pleats of tablecloth—than anything ever created in two dimensions. An entirely new moment in the history of art had been inaugurated. “The modern era began with Leonardo,” declared the painter Giovanni Battista Armenini in 1586, “the first star in that constellation of greats to have reached the full maturity of style.”12

  The Last Supper is indeed a landmark in painting. Art historians identify it as the beginning of the period they used to call the High Renaissance: the era in which artists such as Michelangelo and Raphael worked in a magnificent and intellectually sophisticated style emphasizing harmony, proportion, and movement. Leonardo had effected a quantum shift in art, a deluge that swept all before it. This radical shift can be seen in the career of one of his contemporaries. In 1489 the men in charge of the decorations of the cathedral in Orvieto confidently declared the “most famous painter in all of Italy” to be Pietro Perugino. A decade later the wealthy Sienese banker Agostino Chigi could still claim that Perugino was “the best master in Italy,” that Pinturicchio was second, and that there was no third. And yet when Perugino unveiled his latest altarpiece in 1505 he was ridiculed for his lack of ability and want of originality. The world, by 1505, had witnessed the staggering creative powers of Leonardo.13

  It is difficult to overestimate the importance of The Last Supper for Leonardo’s own life and legacy. It was responsible, far more than any of his other works, for his reputation as a painter. During his lifetime and for many decades, even centuries, after his death, the majority of his other paintings (and only fifteen
survive, four of them unfinished) were seen by neither the public nor other artists. In the three centuries between his death and the early nineteenth century, many of the works we know today were widely dispersed, unrecognized, inaccessible to the public, or completely unknown.

  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