Jots & Tittles

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First Look at Last Supper

After 20 years of painstaking work, the restoration of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” is finally complete—even though it took four times as long as da Vinci spent painting his masterpiece. The restored painting was unveiled to the world on May 28.

Da Vinci painted “The Last Supper” in the Basilica of St. Mary of the Graces, in Milan, at the behest of Ludovico Sforza, a Milanese count. Da Vinci’s experimental techniques and materials contributed to the painting’s deterioration after it was completed, in 1498. Over the centuries, humidity and pollutants also took their toll on the work, dulling its colors and collecting beneath its surface.

Pinin Brambilla led the team of restorers, who struggled to repair patches of flecked paint and to uncover portions of the original that had been besmirched and blackened by earlier, crude restoration attempts. Brambilla told the BBC that theirs was a “slow, severe conquest, which, flake after flake, day after day, millimeter after millimeter, fragment after fragment, gave back a reading of the dimensions, of the expressive and chromatic intensity, that we thought was lost forever.”

The Italian government has hailed the restoration. Yet criticism abounds. The restorers took the audacious step of removing paint from previous restoration efforts and dabbing color onto the areas of the painting that had been rendered blank by their own efforts. Brambilla says that the removal has uncovered formerly hidden details: “Many faces were enlarged [by earlier restorers], so they had a different physical structure. Some eyes had been rubbed out and painted over with small brush strokes. Underneath we found the original eyes—the eyes as they were originally painted.”

And yet, as Oxford University’s Professor Martin Kemp noted in an interview with the BBC, “What has been fabricated is a late-20th-century picture on the best information we have.” Professor James Beck, of Columbia University’s Department of Art History, told the British newspaper the Guardian: “It’s taking art lovers for a ride. What you have is a modern repainting of a work that was poorly conserved. It doesn’t have an echo of the past.”

Viewers can decide for themselves, though they are allowed to view the painting, in groups of 25, for only 15 minutes.

Good Book, Good Read

Do you think the Bible is a musty tome that cannot speak to today’s problems? If so, St. Martin’s Press has a new series of volumes just for you: The Classic Bible Series.

Sample titles include The Great Sayings of Jesus: Proverbs, Parables and Prayers, The Book of Job: Why Do the Innocent Suffer? and The Hebrew Prophets: Visionaries of the Ancient World. It’s still the Bible, of course; only it has been renamed, reorganized and expounded upon.

The Classic Bible Series repackages the Bible in the hope of “pinpoint[ing] its modern relevance” to “today’s narratives.” Each volume contains chunks of the Bible in discrete form, with summaries, user-friendly chapter headings, celebrity-authored forewords (Desmond Tutu and John Updike are contributors) and pithy analyses of the Bible in literature. Updike, in particular, provides an elegant analysis of the Song of Solomon, concluding that “in this era of irrepressible sexual awareness, we trust the Bible a bit more because it contains, in all its shameless, helpless force, The Song of Solomon.”

Believers will likely not need convincing that the Bible is “relevant” to their lives, and may think the Good Book stands well enough on its own. St. Martin’s target audience is the general reader who, vaguely familiar with the Bible, seeks answers to life’s problems.

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There is, however, something a bit flavorless in the promotion of this series: Mark Dow, a publicist for St. Martin’s, calls The Book of Job “a valuable read.” The blurb for The Gospel of St. John: The Story of the Son of God says, “More than any other gospel writer, John illuminated the life of Jesus in an interesting way.” File that under faint praise.

Publishing the Bible in discrete chunks may impede readers’ sense of the Bible as an organic whole—The Great Sayings of Jesus, in particular, reads a bit like Bartlett’s Quotations. Nonetheless, the commentaries are written by serious thinkers, and they redeem what would otherwise seem a publisher’s rather tired marketing strategy.

Family Surfing

Tracing family roots has become one of the more popular activities on the World Wide Web. Now, thanks to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (often called the Mormon Church), Net surfers can tap into the world’s largest genealogical database. In so doing, they may learn not only about their ancestors, but about the spiritual philosophy of one of the world’s fastest-growing religions.

FamilySearch: Internet Genealogy Service includes more than 400 million names of deceased individuals. The database draws from the world’s largest genealogical repository—what has been called the closest thing to a history of histories of the human race, with two billion names—which is housed in a massive underground storage facility 25 miles from downtown Salt Lake City.

The repository represents a vast labor of love fueled by religious convictions. “We believe that family relationships can be eternal, and by searching out our ancestors we can begin to better understand who we are and what we may become,” said Elder D. Todd Christofferson, executive director of the church’s Department of Family History, at a press conference in Salt Lake City. Mormons believe that various church “ordinances”—such as baptism and eternal marriage—are required if one is to live forever with one’s family in God’s presence. As the family is the central unit in Mormon life, the church sees its mission as helping families gain eternal salvation and blessings—foremost among which is the privilege of preserving one’s family for eternity.

According to church teaching, the gospel of Jesus Christ was restored by the church. People who lived before this occurred were unable to receive the sacred ordinances, and latter-day Mormons are duty-bound to perform vicarious ordinances for these ancestors.

Consequently, Mormons are urged to identify those that need temple ordinances performed on their behalf. This accounts for the very strong Mormon interest in genealogy.

Demand for the site is intense, and not only among believers: An eight-week test of the site garnered 200 million hits, and by late May the site received 40 million hits per day. Its address is .

Elie Wiesel’s Mission to the Balkans

Readers disappointed that Elie Wiesel’s column, Supporting Roles, is absent from this issue will be pleased to note that his energies were focused upon a most noble endeavor. At the behest of President Clinton, Wiesel toured the Kosovar refugee camps in Macedonia in early June. The New York Times account of his mission, published June 2, 1999, appears below.

First Look at Last Supper