By the age of 42 (in an era in which life expectancy was 40), Leonardo da Vinci had yet to create anything commensurate with his lofty ambitions. At that point, Ross King writes in his new book, Leonardo and ‘The Last Supper’, he “had produced only a few scattered paintings, a bizarre-looking music instrument, some ephemeral decorations for masques and festivals and many hundreds of pages of notes and drawings for studies he had not yet published, or for inventions he had not yet built”. Too many of his projects – like creating a gigantic bronze horse on commission for Lodovico Sforza, the ruler of Milan – had gone unfinished; other projects having to do with architecture, military engineering and urban planning had not found patrons.
Sometime around 1492, Lodovico began planning a family mausoleum at the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. As the project expanded, he asked Leonardo to begin work on a painting of the Last Supper for the wall of the church’s refectory, where the Dominican friars took their meals.
“Leonardo may have dreamed of constructing tanks and guns, of placing a dome on Milan’s half-built cathedral, or of completing the world’s largest bronze statue,” Mr King writes. “But he was going to do none of these things. Instead, he was going to paint a wall.”
The 450 square feet of paint and plaster known as “The Last Supper” would become one of the most famous paintings in the world — a painting, in the words of the art historian Kenneth Clark, that is “commonly held to be the climax of Leonardo’s career as a painter” and that some scholars regard as a portal into a new era in art.
In this volume Mr King gives us a gripping account of how that painting was created and how it represents, in his view, one of the few times in Leonardo’s life that he managed to “harness and concentrate his relentless energies and restless obsessions”.
There isn’t much that’s substantially new in the book – Mr King appears to draw heavily on the work of Mr Clark and other Leonardo experts, like Martin Kemp, as well as on Leonardo’s writings – but he does a fluent and insightful job of weaving together all his research.
On several much-debated issues, Mr King does not hesitate to serve up his opinions. He asserts that the girlish-looking figure sitting on Jesus’ right is John — not Mary Magdalene, as a character in Dan Brown’s bestseller The Da Vinci Code famously argued. John, Mr King contends, was traditionally portrayed as “a youthful and slightly feminine figure among his mostly bewhiskered and older companions”.
As for the question of whether “The Last Supper” depicted the moment when Jesus instituted the Eucharist or the moment when he announced that one of his disciples would betray him, Mr King quotes a Leonardo expert who wrote in 1983 that most authorities had by then agreed that the painting represented “an amalgam” of both.
Jesus and his betrayer, Judas, could have been the focus of considerable commentary, and Mr King shows us how Leonardo used light and shade and spacing to make them stand out. Not only did he make Jesus significantly larger than the other figures, but he also highlighted him by “placing him against a window that opens onto a landscape of clear sky and bluish contours”, in effect giving him a kind of halo.
The story of the deterioration of “The Last Supper” and its many restorations is itself a kind of epic. Because the paint Leonardo used did not properly adhere to the wall (he did not use the fresco technique, which bonds the pigments to plaster) and because the wall was damp and exposed to kitchen steam, “The Last Supper” reportedly began disintegrating within 20 years of its completion.
To make matters worse, a door was cut into the wall in 1652, amputating Christ’s feet and loosening the paint and plaster further. Later there was a flood, a close call with a bomb during World War II and a series of botched restorations in which the painting was slathered with various substances, including waxes, varnishes, glues, shellacs, resins, alcohol and solvents in an attempt to save it.
The latest restoration using high-tech conservation methods began in the 1970s and was completed in 1999, returning the painting, Mr King says, “as far as is humanly and technologically possible” to its original condition. The faces of the apostles were restored by consulting, where possible, Leonardo’s original drawings, and many early copies of the painting that “revealed details lost or damaged in the original”.
Some critics, Mr King writes near the end of this fascinating volume, have argued that “The Last Supper” is “now 80 per cent by the restorers and 20 percent by Leonardo”. But he argues that its “ghostly evanescence has only enhanced its fame, making it available for endless interpretations and reinventions”.
“Not only does it tell a story from the Gospels,” he writes, “it has become its own story, one of Leonardo’s miraculous triumph followed by centuries of decline, loss and – finally, 500 years later –a kind of resurrection.”
©2012 The New York Times News Service
LEONARDO AND ‘THE LAST SUPPER’
Ross King
Walker & Company; 336 pages; $28
