Leonardo and the Last Supper (9 page)

Bird’s-eye view of Santa Maria delle Grazie

The church of Santa Maria delle Grazie was part of a complex of buildings making up a Dominican convent: besides the church, there was a sacristy, a cloistered garden, cells in which the friars prayed and slept, and a refectory where they took their meals. These buildings, like the church, were recent constructions and required decoration if they were to be worthy of the Sforza name. 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. But he was going to do none of these things. Instead, he was going to paint a wall.

For the previous two centuries, the Dominicans, or the Order of the Friars Preachers as they were officially known, had been, along with the Franciscans, the most active religious order in Italy. They were certainly the most visible. Dominican friars in their distinctive black-and-white habits could
be seen in cities and towns all over Italy, preaching from the pulpits in their churches or to throngs in the piazzas in front of them.

The Dominicans originated early in the thirteenth century, after Dominic, their founder, traveled through the Languedoc region of southern France at the time of the Cathar heresy. Dominic was determined to counter these heretics, against whose austere lives and simple devotion the pomp and bluster of successive popes had fallen flat. He advocated fighting fire with fire: zealous preaching and an ascetic lifestyle. “Zeal must be met by zeal, humility by humility,” he famously reproached a trio of richly dressed, self-important papal legates whose latest mission to the Languedoc had failed.
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In 1217 the pope granted Dominic authority to found his order, calling him and his followers the “invincible athletes of Christ.”
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The Dominicans became the church’s spiritual enforcers and, after 1232, the papal inquisitors. When Maifreda Visconti announced that she would be crowned pope in Milan on Easter Sunday in 1300, the Dominicans rooted out her followers, interrogated them, and burned them at the stake. More recently, when four women in Turin were burned as witches in 1494, the inquisitor was a Dominican.
¹³

Their eager devotion earned the Dominicans their punning nickname, the Domini canes: the Hounds of the Lord. It was a nickname they embraced. Fresco decorations in their churches, such as in Santa Maria Novella in Florence, sometimes featured packs of black-and-white-spotted dogs. The dogs were an allusion not only to their punning nickname and two-tone habit, but also to the legend of Dominic’s mother, who supposedly dreamed, while pregnant, of giving birth to a black-and-white hound bearing a torch in its mouth. “When the dog came forth from the womb,”
The Golden Legend
reported, “he set fire to the whole fabric of the world.”
¹⁴

The Dominicans did indeed set the world alight, serving as the church’s intellectual luminaries. “The bow is first bent in study,” stated a Dominican maxim, “and then it sends the arrow in preaching.” This emphasis on teaching and learning meant the Dominicans came to occupy the great theological chairs at the universities in Paris, Oxford, and Bologna. By the fifteenth century, two Dominicans had been elected pope, while many others became famous throughout Europe as preachers and writers. The Dominicans also produced the greatest scientist of the Middle Ages, the German bishop Albertus Magnus, known as Doctor Universalis in honor of his extraordinary breadth of knowledge. The greatest Dominican of them all, after Dominic himself, was the Angelic Doctor, Thomas Aquinas,
author of the
Summa theologiae
, a treatise that ambitiously encompasses, in 1.5 million words, “the things which belong to the Christian religion.”
¹⁵

Aquinas did not, apparently, look particularly ascetic, since he was tall and fat and enjoyed a good dinner. Dominic, on the other hand, had been exceptionally abstemious.
The Golden Legend
reports that he always gave his body “less than it desired,” and that while pursuing his studies in Spain he went for ten years without a glass of wine.
¹⁶
Following his example, the Dominicans devoted themselves to lives of prayer, study, and preaching. The life of a Dominican was a severe and exacting one even by the standards of the Middle Ages. They took vows of obedience, chastity, and poverty, and raised their money by begging. From the middle of September until Easter, and on all Fridays throughout the year, they ate only one meal a day. Their clothing was made from scratchy wool, their beds were hard, and they slept in communal rooms. When they traveled, they walked rather than rode, often barefoot, and without carrying money. In order to become one with the sufferings of Christ, they flagellated themselves: one of Fra Angelico’s frescoes in the Dominican convent of San Marco in Florence shows a kneeling Dominic dutifully scourging himself before an image of the crucified Christ.

The Dominicans were the most vocal of the religious orders, often preaching to large audiences in the open air of the city. For most hours of the day, however, the friars observed a strict silence, the better to concentrate on their thoughts and studies. Even meals were eaten in silence. The prior of Santa Maria delle Grazie after 1495, Vincenzo Bandello, wrote a work,
Declarationes super diversos passus constitutionum
, which described the ritual according to which the friars took their communal meals. At the prescribed hour, they made their way to the refectory, which was known as the
cenacolo
(from the Latin
cenaculum
, the room in which the Romans dined). First they stopped in a small adjacent room where they washed their hands—the only part of their bodies they ever cleaned (it was believed that bathing relaxed the body and therefore stimulated lust). Then they waited in silence on benches before filing into the
cenacolo
itself, which at Santa Maria delle Grazie was a lengthy, narrow dining hall perpendicular to the church, 116 feet long by 29 feet wide, its perimeter lined with tables. It was an austere and gloomy place, its only windows high overhead on the west wall. The friars would kneel to pray before a crucifix on the far wall before taking their places on the outside of the tables, facing inward. At the back, beneath the crucifix, sat the prior.

After prayers for the blessing of the table, the servers would arrive with food from the monastery kitchen. The fare was of such a humble quality that priors were urged to avoid the temptation to dine outside the monastery, where no doubt they would have enjoyed a better table. Painters working for friars often complained of the appalling diet. Paolo Uccello supposedly fled from a church where he was working after he was given nothing to eat but cheese. Davide Ghirlandaio once dumped soup over a friar and bludgeoned him with a stick of bread to protest the poor quality of the meals provided for him and his brother. Certainly meat was off the menu. Dominic, following the Rule of Saint Benedict, had abstained from flesh, which, like baths, awakened concupiscence: Aquinas explained that pleasurable foods such as meat “stimulate our sexual appetites” and produce a “greater surplus for seminal matter.”
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The punishment for breaking silence without permission was missing the next meal, though if the prior desired some conversation over dinner he might give one or two friars license to speak. More usually, as the friars ate their meal they listened to one of their number—the person known as the
lector in mensa
, or reader of the table—read aloud from the Bible or another religious text such as
The Golden Legend
, which had been composed by a Dominican. And since the middle of the fourteenth century, friars in some monasteries (and nuns in some convents) could enjoy another stimulus to contemplation as they ate their silent meal. Frescoes were often painted on the refectory walls, and the subject matter—unsurprisingly, given the location—was usually food. Painters sometimes showed Abraham preparing food for the angels (a scene from Genesis 18) or the miracle of the loaves and fishes. The most common scene, though, was the Last Supper, so much so that Last Supper paintings came to be known as
cenacoli
, a reference to the location where they were painted. Monks and nuns therefore had the opportunity, as they broke bread together, to identify with the apostles supping at the table in their own dining room in Jerusalem.

Lodovico Sforza had in mind just such a painting for the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie. And so into the midst of the Dominican friars—this band of devout, studious, and abstemious men—came Leonardo da Vinci.

The exact date that Leonardo received his commission to paint a Last Supper in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie is not known. Since the archives of the convent were destroyed, crucial details about the commission have been lost. The most logical scenario is that it was given to him either at the end of 1494 or the very beginning of 1495, in the wake of the lost opportunity to cast the bronze horse. It is not known for certain that Lodovico Sforza rather than the Dominican friars originally engaged Leonardo. However, with his personal interest in the monastery—where, in a show of piety and humility, he dined every Tuesday and Saturday—Lodovico seems the more likely candidate. A few years later, referring to the commission, he made explicit reference to agreements signed by Leonardo.

These agreements were undoubtedly the lost contract. A patron never entrusted an artist to execute a work without first coming to a legal agreement covering such things as the subject matter, the price, the materials, and the deadline. Lodovico would hardly have engaged Leonardo, a dilatory and even unreliable worker whose career was strewn with abandoned projects, without a contract to offer guarantees and concentrate his mind on the task at hand. However, as the men in the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception had discovered to their cost, not even the most ironclad legal document could keep a painter like Leonardo from improvising or procrastinating.

A commission to paint a wall was not the most obvious assignment for Leonardo. In fact, he was an odd choice for the job. His letter of introduction to Lodovico had stressed in great detail his supposed expertise in military engineering. It concluded with the vague and almost casual remark that he could “carry out...in painting whatever may be done, and as well as any other.”
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Bluff and bluster aside, Leonardo truly was, even by 1482, a painter who, properly motivated or inspired, could do as well as any other when it came to portraits or altarpieces. His
Virgin of the Rocks
, painted in the years after he wrote the letter, loudly proclaimed his astonishing talents.

Yet Leonardo did have a particular limitation when it came to painting. His teacher, Verrocchio, had been a master of many accomplishments, able to work in marble, brass, bronze, and copper. However, Verrocchio’s experience of painting was confined to working with tempera on wooden panels—and even his work in this area was sparing. Most altarpieces and portraits were still done in tempera. The panel was constructed from a series of glued-together planks, often poplar wood, that were then coated with layers of glue size and a gypsum-based primer. The tempera (from the Latin
temperare
,
to mix) was made by blending powdered pigments with a liquid binder, usually egg yolk. In order to keep the paint wet longer, artists sometimes added honey or the juice from the fig tree, and the viscosity of the paint could be lessened with the addition of vinegar, beer, or wine.