038
Leonardo: The Last Supper
Pinin Brambilla Barcilon and Pietro C. Marani
Trans. by Harlow Tighe
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2001) 458 pp., 382 color illus., 64 b&w, $95.00 (clothbound)
It took Leonardo about four years to paint his famous Last Supper. It took Pinin Brambilla Barcilon 20 to restore it. Leonardo’s work (1493/4–1497) was immediately hailed a triumph—certain to bring honor to Milan’s Monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie, where it still can be seen today, and to Ludovico Sforza, the Milanese duke who commissioned the painting.
Barcilon’s attempt to recover Leonardo’s work, which occupied her from 1977 to 1997, has received mixed reviews. Critics have deemed her restoration “clumsy,” “an affront.” The painting, they claim, is “ruined.” Others, comparing the pre-restoration painting to a woman wearing too much makeup, commend Barcilon for revealing Leonardo’s true colors.
Barcilon recounts the restoration step by step, brushstroke by brushstroke, in this lavish report, illustrated with more than 400 photographs (most of them in color), including numerous life-size, full-page details of the painting. The hefty volume also includes a history of the painting by Renaissance scholar Pietro Marani, who describes the events that led to its creation and documents the many previous restorations and the earliest copies and drawings of the painting.
The controversy that surrounds the current restoration is not aired in full in this volume, although it is alluded to several times. Throughout the notes and prefatory material, we read of the “tension” and “disagreements” that “nearly derailed the project.” Even the University 039of Chicago Press, which produced this English translation, has included an editorial disclaimer similar to those commonly found in news journals (or even BR) but not coffee-table books: “Art restoration is, by its very nature, a sensitive and controversial subject,” it states. “The University of Chicago Press endorses no position but believes that all informed voices should be heard.”
Leonardo himself deserves much of the blame for making the restoration job so long, tedious and troublesome. For, when painting the Last Supper on the wall of the monastery’s refectory, Leonardo abandoned traditional fresco-painting techniques (called buon fresco), in which paint is applied to wet plaster, and experimented instead with tempera and oil on dry plaster (coated in places with a thin layer of white lead). In buon fresco, the paint bonds with the plaster, creating the remarkably durable images we know from the villas of Pompeii or the Sistine Chapel ceiling. In the Last Supper, however, the paint began to flake off during the artist’s own lifetime. By the mid-16th century, one visitor deemed Leonardo’s masterpiece “completely ruined.” After visiting Milan in 1566, the Renaissance painter, architect and biographer Giorgio Vasari described the painting as “nothing…but a mass of confusion” (una macchia abbagliata). The central portion of the painting had so deteriorated that Vasari assumed Leonardo had deliberately refrained from painting the face of Jesus. Vasari wrote:
[Leonardo] painted…a most beautiful and marvelous thing; and to the heads of the apostles he gave such majesty and beauty, that he left the head of Christ unfinished, not believing that he was able to give it that divine air which is essential to the image of Christ.
Contra Vasari, Leonardo was never so humble.
The painting continued to deteriorate. In 1652 the bottom center (with Jesus’ feet) was lost when a door between the refectory and the kitchen was enlarged. By the late 18th century, when the refectory served as a barracks and warehouse for Napoleon’s army, chips of paint were raining down. In 0401943, an Allied bomb hit the refectory, introducing severe cracks to the painting and causing water damage. The fragile paint began to turn to powder.
Throughout this entire period, restorers have tried to save Leonardo’s work. In truth, the painting might have survived better if they had left it alone. Earlier restorers greatly dimmed the original by adding paint, plaster, varnish, shellac, wax and adhesives to the surface, and by applying harsh solvents that removed not only dirt, but paint. They also altered the lines, color and lighting of Leonardo’s original. Over the centuries, Bartholomew’s hair was thickened; Matthew grew a beard; Peter’s blue robe became gray. The shadows that once dimmed Judas’s face were lightened; the moneybag in his fist was lost in darkness. Thomas’s left hand, which rests on the table, just beneath James’s, was so damaged that one early restorer mistook it for a loaf of bread and repainted it as such. (He failed to cover up one finger, however, leading some art historians to speculate why Leonardo had depicted James with six digits.)
The goal of Barcilon’s restoration project was to remove these later accretions and to recapture the postures, facial expressions, pigments and areas of light and dark found in the original. After a surgical binocular microscope was used to identify the work of later restorers, Barcilon slowly and carefully applied layers of solvents to clean the surface. Loose fragments of paint were reattached with a wax-free shellac. Where no original paint survived, the restorer filled in the gaps with light watercolor washes.
Probably the most intriguing information uncovered by the most recent restorers concerns Leonardo’s working methods. The handling of the paint on the left side of the painting is far more hesitant than on the right, Barcilon noted, leading her to conclude that Leonardo began work on the left end. Trace amounts of red chalk beneath the painting suggest that the artist sketched the scene on the wall before painting. A series of incised lines in the plaster indicate how he reworked the perspective, trying to make the apostles’ upper room appear to be an extension of the monastery’s refectory. A hole in Jesus’ temple marks the vanishing point, where the lines of perspective converge.
The report also includes early sketches that show how the scene was reconfigured 041by Leonardo. Judas, for example, was originally seated by himself on the other side of the table. He now sits fourth from the left, between Andrew and Peter.
In the Last Supper, Leonardo paints the moment when Jesus tells his disciples, “‘Truly I tell you, one of you will betray me.’ And they became greatly distressed and began to say to him one after another, ‘Surely not I, Lord?’” (Matthew 26:21–22). Leonardo’s interest in the event, according to this volume, was primarily scientific. He was eager to portray the Last Supper precisely and naturalistically. He was especially interested in depicting how the sound of Jesus’ voice, traveling like ripples of water, would reach each of the apostles in turn. “He who is nearest hears best and he who is far hears nothing,” Leonardo wrote. This explains why those apostles closest to Jesus react most violently, gesticulating as they push away from the table, while those at the end of the table seem not to have heard a thing. Bartholomew, at far left, rises to his feet and cranes his head to hear; Simon, the balding elderly man at far right, waits to hear the news secondhand from Matthew and Thaddeus.
Leonardo: The Last Supper is a beautiful book. Antonio Quattrone’s exquisite photographs, printed on thick white paper, capture the textures and colors of the work (whether Leonardo’s or Barcilon’s). The before, during and after photographs that accompany Barcilon’s report are clearly labeled and extremely helpful in understanding her methods. Unfortunately, the figures that accompany Marani’s historical essay are not numbered, so the reader is forced to flip back and forth to find out whether and where the images under discussion appear. The gorgeous full-page color plates, which make up about one-third of the book, also lack both labels and plate numbers, making it extremely difficult to identify whose hands, or whose glass of wine, or which section of the tablecloth, is depicted. A handy diagram pointing out which apostle is which appears only on page 328. Unfortunately, the reader is never directed to it. Some have criticized Barcilon’s work for treating Leonardo’s painting as a collection of fragments, a mosaic of restored bits, rather than a whole. This presentation of unidentified detail after unidentified detail only increases the problem.
Reservations are needed to view the restored Last Supper in Santa Maria delle Grazie, on Corso Magenta, in Milan. Visits are limited to 15 minutes and should be reserved 60 days in advance. From the U.S., call 011–39-02–498-7588.
Leonardo: The Last Supper Pinin Brambilla Barcilon and Pietro C. Marani Trans. by Harlow Tighe (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2001) 458 pp., 382 color illus., 64 b&w, $95.00 (clothbound) It took Leonardo about four years to paint his famous Last Supper. It took Pinin Brambilla Barcilon 20 to restore it. Leonardo’s work (1493/4–1497) was immediately hailed a triumph—certain to bring honor to Milan’s Monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie, where it still can be seen today, and to Ludovico Sforza, the Milanese duke who commissioned the painting. Barcilon’s attempt to recover Leonardo’s work, which occupied her from 1977 […]
You have already read your free article for this month. Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.
Already a library member? Log in here.
Institution user? Log in with your IP address or Username