Leonardo and the Last Supper (47 page)

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 fresco 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.

This subtle but ingenious play of light is one of the most tragic casualties of the mural’s deterioration. Giampietrino’s copy shows that Leonardo made his painted scene look like part of the refectory by having the fall of light in the painting—coming from an unseen source at the left—correspond to the actual windows opposite the entrance. This interplay of light and shade even extended to the floor, where the legs of the table (as Giampietrino shows) cast their oblique shadows from left to right. The illusion is further enhanced by the fact that the three deeply embrasured windows in the background of the painting make the north wall of the refectory look like it has been pierced. The view through these windows, a luminous expanse of distant hills, mirrors the Italian countryside, while the church glimpsed beyond the head of Christ faithfully reflects, with its square bell tower with the steeply pitched roof, the Lombard architecture in the countryside around Milan.

But this illusionism had its limits. There were a number of disjunctions between the painting and the actual scene in the refectory. For one thing,
the figures in Leonardo’s mural are larger than life-size, exceeding by a half the size of the friars, with Christ the largest of all. For another, they were not on the same level: Leonardo’s mural begins some eight feet above the ground, which means Christ and the apostles were elevated well above the heads of the seated friars.