Original subtitles

500 years ago, in the city of Milan,

a painting was commissioned for the dining room of a monastery.

The subject matter was traditional,

the Last Supper of Jesus and his disciples.

But the work that emerged over the following five years

was to revolutionise Western art.

There are a few neat breaks in the history of art,

but Leonardo's Last Supper is one of them.

This geometric logic, this rigour, this mathematical purity.

It would have been astonishing.

It would be like seeing the first computer virtual reality

or the first cinemascope.

Just think of the effect of walking in

and feeling that you're in the presence of Christ and his disciples

who are doing essentially what you're doing, feeding themselves.

From the moment it was completed,

The Last Supper was hailed as a masterpiece.

Soon, the painting came to be regarded

as almost as sacred as its subject matter.

What is amazing about The Last Supper

is that it seems to speak outside of Christianity

as well as within it.

There are emotional values and theatrical values

in this painting that go far beyond Christian belief.

By the turn of the 20th century,

The Last Supper was easily the most famous Christian artwork in the world.

But its glory was almost turned to dust

in the inhumanity of war.

And the attacks on the great painting's integrity were not finished.

Perhaps the greatest travesty suffered by The Last Supper

is the Da Vinci Code.

It is a misreading on every level of The Last Supper.

It's a kind of exploitation of the myth,

the myths of Leonardo and of his paintings.

It is, it's too bad.

But for all it has endured,

The Last Supper's story is not one of decay and destruction.

It is one of survival and adaptation.

More than half a millennium after its creation,

the shockwaves from the painting's artistic explosion

are still resonating, as loud as bombs.

The Last Supper constitutes who we are.

The Last Supper creates who we are.

I think in some ways,

modern Western consciousness begins with The Last Supper.

You don't have to travel far today to see The Last Supper.

Or in some cases, leave home at all.

It is one of an elite group of artworks

that will soon enough come to you.

From the very first years of its existence,

the great mural has been ripe for exploitation.

First it was copied out of reverence,

then for laughs,

and finally to sell jeans.

Yet still, each year,

a quarter of a million people

make the pilgrimage to Milan to see the original.

The monastery of Santa Maria della Grazie

is today a shrine to a painting.

Inside its former refectory,

visitors are allowed just 15 minutes

in the presence of the holy relic.

What they see would probably be

the most famous painting in the world,

were it not for the same artists, Mona Lisa.

Nearly 30 feet long by 15 feet high,

The Last Supper covers the entire width of the north wall.

Its painted figures are larger than life size.

The restored mural is now light and open,

but it tells a dark story.

It is at the Last Supper that Jesus tells his disciples

that one of them will soon betray him.

What we are looking at,

it centers upon this moment of betrayal,

when Christ says,

one of you will betray me,

and he identifies subsequently Judas.

But it's not like a snapshot.

It's not a frozen frame,

where they're just frozen like that.

There are all sorts of ripples in time,

echoes of the past story,

and what is to come.

All 12 disciples are present in the painting,

but the main players in the Easter story

cluster around Christ.

John, who will mourn at the base of the cross.

Peter, who later that evening

will slice off the ear of one of Jesus' assailants.

I think that Leonardo has worked it out,

has found the visual correlative

for an enormous mass of the Christian saga.

Whereas the Stations of the Cross,

you must physically go from point to point to point,

or with the Rosary,

you must repeatedly go from bead to bead to bead.

In this particular case,

the eye roves free,

has many points of separate interest,

little scenes within the larger play,

and then it keeps returning

in a very satisfying way

to the central figure.

The Last Supper is justly celebrated

as a high point of Western culture,

of humanity and enlightenment.

But it owes its very existence

to the ambition and pride

of a 15th century dictator.

Milan, at the end of the 15th century,

was a city of some 100,000 people.

Ludovico Sforza was very much what we would think of

as the old-style despot

of the Italian city-estates,

a strong, autocratic,

top-of-the-pyramid type of ruler.

Ludovico, known as Il Moro,

or the Moor because of his dark colouring,

was no stranger to the shady arts of politics.

He had come to power in Milan

when his young nephew,

the rightful duke,

died in mysterious circumstances.

The city Ludovico ruled

was the largest and most prosperous in Italy,

but more distinguished in commerce

than in art and architecture.

Milan's new cathedral

was a vast and expensive building,

but of an old-fashioned Gothic design.

It was time Ludovico decided

that Milan's art showed itself worthy

of such a mighty city

and of its ruler.

One of the ways in which talent

in a ruler was recognised

was by their capacity

to recognise talent in artists.

Ludovico Il Moro is very important

in transforming the art scene in Milan,

and it's very important

that he's coming in, in a way,

and sweeping aside

what's happening in Milan

up till that point.

Ludovico had his eye

on one handy place

as a focus for this artistic revolution,

his local Dominican monastery.

On the duke's orders,

its Gothic church was extended

and crowned

with a breathtaking new dome,

and the friar's dining room

was completely rebuilt.

The moor's motives

were typically mixed.

Basically, people learned

that if they pay for

the restoration of a building

or of a work of art,

they could shave a few years

off their time in purgatory.

So, yes, he's supporting the arts,

yes, he's helping the Dominican friars,

but he's also helping himself.

Ludovico hired a local artist

to paint a crucifixion scene

at one end of his new-look refectory.

But it was the opposite wall

that was to immortalise

the moor's name.

Tellingly, the artist he employed

this time was not local.

He had been born in the spring of 1452

near the small Tuscan village of Vinci.

Fittingly, for a man whose last supper

was to reinvent so much,

he was an outsider from the very start.

Leonardo was an illegitimate child,

and rather, as with the lack of formal education,

we might now feel that this is

a beneficial impediment,

and that Leonardo's illegitimacy

prevented him from entering

the mainstream of Florentine middle-class life.

But around the age of 14,

the boy who would one day paint

The Last Supper

found himself learning a trade in Florence,

an apprentice to the artist

Andrea del Verrocchio.

He would have learned plenty

about religious art from his master,

but tragically for The Last Supper,

he learnt nothing about

the standard method of wall painting

known as fresco.

Verrocchio, a sculpture specialist,

did not practise this craft.

Nonetheless, the boy couldn't have failed

to notice the growing fashion

for Last Supper scenes,

painted in monasteries by fresco artists.

If you look at The Last Supper

from the 14th to the 16th century,

you can follow the history of art in a way.

It's a sort of microcosm

because they move from

the early representation

that are rather flat and immobile

to more dynamic views of the same scene.

The first monumental scale Last Supper

had been painted in Florence

well over a century earlier.

It clearly shows the major problem

the scene posed for artists,

with the apostles sat isolated

like wooden chess pieces.

The Last Supper is a challenge

and an opportunity to the painter

to display a variety of figures,

all plausible and all real

and all alive in a space.

That was a difficult thing to do.

It's easier to paint a portrait

than it is to paint 12 people

who are all bound together,

but at the same time,

they're all different,

they're all individuals.

By the time Leonardo was 30,

he was ready to try his fortunes

away from Florence.

One of the last paintings he saw

before he left

was probably a Last Supper,

created for the monastery of San Marco.

It was state-of-the-art,

with three-dimensional space

and lavish decoration.

But the design was still stuck

in the previous century.

Now the artist who was to change all this

was on his way north

to meet his ideal patron,

Ludovico the Moor.

Leonardo da Vinci in 1494

had indeed progressed

into the favour of Ludovico Sforza,

into a position of some courtly status,

but he might well have felt

that his energies

and his abilities

had not fully been used.

So when the initial project

of the Last Supper was begun,

it was, I would say,

a project which he regarded

as something that might make or break him.

The Last Supper was a vital part

of Ludovico's personal project

at the monastery.

The date of the commission is unknown,

but early sketches

now held at Windsor Castle

show the artist still wrestling

with the layout

of this fiendishly difficult scene.

This is the only compositional study

for the Last Supper

that survives by Leonardo.

This is the only one

that shows him really thinking

about the layout

of the composition.

And he's still thinking

in fairly conventional terms.

You can see that the figures

are laid out

mostly on the far side of the table

with the exception of Judas

on the near side.

It's still very early stages.

It's not a coherent composition at all.

And there's a great leap

of imagination and planning

between this very early drawing

and the final composition

as Leonardo actually painted it.

The design couldn't, of course,

entirely break with tradition.

It would have to stick close

to the biblical accounts

of Jesus' Last Supper

with his disciples.

The setting for that meal,

according to St. Mark's Gospel,

was a large upper room

furnished and prepared.

And as they did sit and eat,

Jesus said,

Verily I say unto you,

One of you which eateth with me

shall betray me.

And they began to be sorrowful

and said unto him one by one,

Is it I?

And another said,

Is it I?

And he answered and said unto them,

It is one of the twelve

that dippeth with me in the dish.

And as they did eat,

Jesus took bread

and blessed and break it

and gave to them

and said,

Take, eat,

this is my body.

And there was a further

more down-to-earth restriction.

The design would have to complement

the seating arrangements

in the friar's dining room.

In monastic refectories,

traditionally,

people eat in silence.

And thus,

they don't have to sit

across from each other

because there's not going

to be any conversation.

Earlier painters

had showed you that

as if the Table of Christ

were the head table

in the refectory.

But then they disturbed

that traditional arrangement

by putting one figure

on the near side of the table,

where normally

in a monastic dining room,

no one would be sitting,

and that one figure

was Judas.

Leonardo himself

starts thinking

about that arrangement.

The artist's mind

was a blank sheet of paper

as he broke free

from the past

and began to re-imagine

and began to re-imagine

the Last Supper.

Some drama schools

still use the painting's figures

to help teach movement

because its great daring

was to mix the sacred

with the recognizably human.

one breakthrough was to show

some of the disciples

rising to their feet

while others stay seated.

Instead of being isolated,

the apostles would cluster

in groups,

reacting to each other

as well as to Christ.

He hasn't got the power

behind it,

but you have,

you've got the firm...

There is a point.

It's the steadiest,

the strongest,

the most definitive

gesture of the lot.

Well, I just felt

like I was being pulled

because, of course,

all my sort of weight

is this way

and I'm very much involved

in this,

but my entire body

is wanting to be there

and now I'm actually

coming over

to this conversation.

It's always very

in-between moments.

That split second

and then it's just...

And tiny details

realistically observed

from life

was introduced

into the holy drama.

When the teacher

found us in there,

his whole body

is contorted.

There's something

really...

In one way,

we see a very

naturalistic image

and that is certainly

what contemporaries

recorded.

But it's a very

artificial construct.

It's a stage performance.

It is, in a sense,

actors on the stage

all playing their roles.

Leonardo would have

regarded a purely

naturalistic painting

as not very interesting.

The Last Supper's design

took perhaps

two years to develop.

The result was

an astonishing break

from everything

that had gone before.

It is almost easier

to list what it did not

change than what it did.

The apostles are

on their feet.

They are gesturing,

their hands almost

as animated

as their faces.

At the centre,

Christ, rather than

being hemmed in

as before,

sits alone and vulnerable.

Bartholomew, at the left,

rises up to his full height,

the only figure

entirely visible.

Thomas, on the other hand,

is represented

in four tiny parts,

two hands,

a head,

and originally,

a foot.

At the right,

Matthew faces away

from the scene's core,

but sweeps the gaze

back with his arms,

arranged as if

playing a musical instrument.

And most radically

of all,

Judas,

who before sat

opposite his fellows

on the near side

of the table,

is placed back

behind it.

Leonardo,

he pulls Judas

back into the group.

Judas is no longer

a completely

extraneous element.

Betrayal is not

any longer

so glaringly different

from discipleship.

Indeed,

by placing Judas

in the same

group of three,

with Peter,

the disciple

who loves Christ,

John,

the disciple

who is loved

by Christ,

betrayal becomes

one of the dimensions

of love,

one of the dimensions

of intimacy.

And the revolution

did not end there.

If traditional designs

were out,

so too was

the traditional

painting technique.

The making

of The Last Supper

began conventionally

by hacking the plaster

off the refectory wall.

When the artist's

assistants reached

the stone,

they began to build

the surface back up

until it was fit

for painting.

first a thick layer

of plaster went on.

It was on such

a wet surface

that all previous

Last Supper artists

working in fresco

had set to work.

The technique

called good fresco

effectively painted

into the wall

because you painted

into wet plaster.

And it had been

tried and trusted

for centuries

and everybody knew

that was the way

to do it.

Leonardo was being

a freak and eccentric

by trying a different

method.

There was no reason

to try a different

method by most

people's standards.

In The Last Supper,

he effectively tried

to do an oil painting

on the wall.

New ground

was now being broken

as two completely

untried layers

were applied to the wall,

one of calcium

and magnesium

to help the colours

bind,

and one of lead white

for added brilliance.

And in another

revolutionary departure,

the wall was left

to dry.

This is the wall surface

on which Leonardo

would paint.

It's smooth,

it's dry,

totally unlike

the surface

that a fresco painter

would have worked on.

And maybe he chose

to do this

because he wanted

longer to actually

work in his technique.

He was a slower worker.

He wanted to think

about it longer.

The year was 1495

and The Last Supper's

breakthrough design

could at last

be transferred

onto the wall

of the refectory.

First,

full-scale drawings

were used

to transfer sections

of the image.

Then the outline

was sketched in

in red ink or chalk.

And finally,

the painting could start.

A visitor,

Juan Matteo Bandello,

wrote an extraordinary

eyewitness account

of The Last Supper's

creation.

Leonardo sometimes

stayed there

from dawn to sundown,

never putting down

his brush,

forgetting to eat

and drink,

painting without pause.

He would also

sometimes remain

up to four days

without touching

his brush,

standing in front

of the work,

arms folded,

examining and

criticising the figures

to himself.

I also saw him

driven by some

sudden urge,

clamber up onto

the scaffolding,

pick up a brush,

put in one or two

strokes and then

go away again.

Progressing in this

sporadic fashion,

the painting of The Last

Supper took as long

as three years.

A letter from

Ludovico shows the Duke

losing patience

with his court artist.

Urge Leonardo the Florentine

to finish the work

already begun,

it says.

Make him sign the contract

with his own hand.

Braziers were brought

in to help

the paint to dry.

Finally,

the last touches

of oil were applied

to give the mural

a sheen unknown

in fresco.

The scaffolding

was dismantled

and there,

in all of its glory,

was perhaps

the finest narrative

painting the world

had ever

and would ever

see.

Leonardo da Vinci's

Last Supper.

A copy painted

just a decade

after the original

survives to give us

an idea of how

vibrant and colourful

it must have looked.

I think what we've

got now is a ghost

of a picture.

What we had then

probably was something

which would have been

simply amazing.

Leonardo's capacity

to paint colour

and shadow together,

to combine them

to give a sense

of volume for the figures,

had an extraordinary

impact.

What the wall painting,

when it was new,

would have done

is triumphant

and bluntly

convince the viewer

that what they

were looking at

was real.

The Last Supper

complemented,

almost extended,

the room

for which it was made.

It was as if

the friars

were themselves

sitting down

to dinner

with Christ

and his apostles.

The painting's

secret was

a perspective

tailor-made

for the layout

of the room.

I'm standing

on the side

of the refectory

and something

very surprising

happens.

You wouldn't expect

the illusion

to work well,

but what happens

is that the cornice

and the actual

refectory

and the painted

tapestries line up

very, very strongly.

And if you imagine

that originally

there would have been

tables down

these sidewalls

with monks

having their supper

in this room,

I think Leonardo

must have realised

that, that the way

the perspective works,

and it is very strange,

is that that side

of the wall

aligns almost perfectly

for someone

looking across

like that.

The friars,

dining in silence,

would have been

drawn into the

sacred space

of the mural.

Its creator

was not himself

a man of

conventional

Christian beliefs,

but he was steeped

in the religious culture

that was all around him.

And this depth

of knowledge

is evident

in every inch

of the Last Supper.

Leonardo,

like all Florentines,

would have,

in his youth,

seen,

and as a young artist,

certainly been

deeply impressed

by,

the enormous,

eight-meter-tall

figure of Christ

in the 13th-century

mosaics

in the Baptister.

Before the invention

of the modern billboard,

it was the biggest image

anyone could see

in the entire city,

which shows

the body of Christ

in the shape

of a cross.

It shows the wounds

of Christ's crucifixion.

And it is

that very image

that it seems to me

he has in mind

for the Christ

of the Last Supper.

The image

of the crucified Christ

is, of course,

present in the same room

as the Last Supper,

depicted in the earlier

fresco

on the opposite wall.

It continues the biblical story

of the Last Supper,

because the betrayal

announced by Jesus

at that meal

leads directly

and inevitably

to his crucifixion.

If Leonardo's Christ

lifted his gaze,

which is inward turned

in this mood

of deep sadness,

if he lifted his gaze,

he would be looking

at himself

the next day

on the cross.

The Last Supper

overflows

with symbolic richness.

John,

whom the Gospels

say Jesus loved best,

mirrors his Saviour

here in the red

and blue

of his cloak.

Thomas,

the doubter,

raises the finger

that will soon probe

the wound

of the risen Christ.

Judas,

the traitor,

turns away

from the light,

the only character

with his face

in shadow.

The great painting

succeeds in encompassing

not just the betrayal

announcement

and the blessing

of the bread and wine.

It stretches

and remakes time

as it does space.

Leonardo summarizes

the entire New Testament

in this one image.

He summarizes

the entire story

of the passion.

He doesn't tell you

all the different

things that happened.

He doesn't show

Christ arriving

on a donkey

and he doesn't show

waiting in the garden.

He doesn't show

the crucifixion.

He just shows

this moment,

this one moment

in which everything

is there.

All the passion

is there.

All the intensity

is there.

Nobody ever again

I mean, quite had the confidence to do that.

The Last Supper was a triumph, but its creator did not sign it.

Instead, it was the patron's name and coat of arms

that graced the wall, high above the refectory.

Yet Ludovico would not have long

to bask in his painting's glorious presence.

Just one year after The Last Supper was completed,

the Moors' dubious past caught up with him.

The French, with a legitimate claim to the dukedom of Milan,

invaded the city.

Leonardo and his patron fled in opposite directions.

Ludovico would probably never see his Last Supper again.

He died in prison in France in 1508.

The King of France was now ruler of Milan.

He soon visited the monastery

and was rather taken with the Last Supper.

So much so that he asked his engineers whether it would be possible

to transport the entire wall, wrapped in iron bands, to France.

But it was not to be.

The mural was intricately linked to the space over which it presided.

This was to be its triumph and its tragedy,

as its story now becomes a curious mix of unstoppable growth

and equally unstoppable decay.

Leonardo's painting was copied to an extraordinary degree

from very, very early on.

In a way, I think it was seen as a sort of miraculous image.

Leonardo is similarly being seen as inspired by God,

and so his own picture becomes that kind of miracle,

that kind that needs to be promulgated,

that can be copied and revered in a whole range of different places.

Copies abounded, and they in their turn were copied.

And so the Last Supper began to spread its web around the world.

But the painting held a dark secret.

Deep within, it contained the seeds of its own destruction.

As a painting surface unattached from a wall, it is fine.

But if it is going to be attached to a surface that will become damp,

it is the beginning of the end for that wall painting.

It's hopeless.

In ideal conditions, the Last Supper might have survived intact.

But behind its wall was the monastery's kitchen,

pumping out moist heat.

And under it was the city of Milan's high water table.

Damp entered the wall, and pushed upwards and outwards.

A fresco would have allowed the moisture out.

But the Last Supper's surface could not breathe.

And the paint started to flake and detach.

Leonardo's mural, in effect, was born with a genetic defect.

I mean, his technical experiment was a failure.

And so what happened was that it was crippled from early on.

It's an invalid for most of its history.

And right now it is effectively in intensive care.

Experiments are either successes or failures,

and his technical experiment, for all his good aesthetic intentions, was a failure.

Less than two decades after its completion, the painting was starting to spoil.

And soon it was described as no more than a mass of blots.

Leonardo returned to retouch his masterpiece.

But even the great inventor could not find a way to stop the rot.

A century on, the celebrated English diarist John Evelyn visited the painting.

This incomparable piece, he wrote, is now exceedingly impaired.

The friars of the monastery obviously agreed.

Believing the mural ruined, they boldly removed a chunk from it by enlarging a door let into the wall beneath.

Christ's feet, and quite a bit besides, were lost forever.

Given Leonardo's painting technique, it's a miracle that we have the Last Supper.

The work was a ruin in his own lifetime.

His contemporaries complained about that.

And this is rare for Renaissance works.

Normally they knew how to make their paintings so they would survive.

The Last Supper was rotting.

Mould started to grow on it.

And soon it covered the entire surface.

Curtains were hung over it when the humid Scirocco wind blew.

But still, damp ran down it like rain.

And friars had to climb ladders to sponge it dry.

And soon, to the damage caused by nature, was added damage caused by man.

At the end of the 18th century, Milan fell to Napoleon's armies.

The French troops, not noted respecters of religion and its trappings,

used the refectory as a stable and a meal store.

They scratched the apostles' eyes out with daggers,

and hurled stones at the figures, destroying the lovingly painted gowns.

It took a direct edict from Napoleon to save the painting.

The refectory was bricked up, and the Last Supper entombed.

The painting by now really was a ruin.

But when early artistic tourists found a way back into the abandoned monastery,

they discovered an image that held a surprising appeal.

I think, looking at the Last Supper, there is this romance of the patiner and the damage.

It's a bit like listening to a kind of ancient blues record

or a historic conductor and hearing all the crackle.

And if we'd seen it in the original, I suspect that the sheer coloristic vitality,

the crispness, the sharpness of it, would have been very surprising,

that we somehow quite like this aged, battered appearance.

It has a certain kind of romance to it.

It came close to being the romance of death.

The Last Supper was now so fragile that even touching the wall beneath it

caused its paint to fall away.

Early restorers, as brutal as the sore-bones surgeons of their day, moved in.

We know from the recent campaign of restoration that at least 11 campaigns of restoration were done on the Last Supper.

And so, at the end, in the 20th century, we had the overimposition of 11 layers,

like in a cake, like in a dessert with cream, marmalade and so on.

These early bungled restorations caused as much damage as the damp and the vandalism.

Thick animal glue was used to stick flaking paint back.

Heated rollers were run over the surface to iron the picture smooth.

And ham-fisted retouchings distorted the apostles' faces.

And into the new composite work, fashionable prejudices were introduced.

The proprietary drawing of Judas shows simply a surprised old man, I suppose.

He doesn't look particularly criminal.

But because this was a painting which was lauded as being an exemplar of expressiveness,

people were continually talking about how criminal Judas looked,

how he showed his evil intent in his eyes.

And this spurred later restorers each time they worked on the head of Judas

to make him look more and more criminal and a Semitic stereotype.

The nose becomes increasingly hooked down.

The chin rises almost to meet it.

His hair becomes blacker.

His brow becomes more clouded.

And gradually, the restorations took the figure of Judas

further and further away from Leonardo's intention

as we see it in the proprietary drawing.

That original sketch shows Judas as bewildered,

a man doomed to play a part.

His veined, bulging neck has been described by one critic

as the neck of a man who will hang before the night is out.

By the time the Grand Tour was in full swing,

The Last Supper had become the most famous painting in the world

and was the star of the European art circuit.

Charles Dickens, on a tour of Italy, paid the painting an obligatory visit.

And he was shocked, both at its condition

and at the antics of the crowds of tourists.

He recalled seeing...

An English gentleman before the picture

who was at great pains to fall into mild convulsions

at certain minute details which were not left in it.

For the Last Supper has been so retouched upon and repainted,

and that so clumsily,

that many of the heads are now positive deformities.

But fame, like decay, has its own momentum.

And the cult of The Last Supper was by now unstoppable.

And so the painting careered towards the 20th century

and a critical backlash.

Bernard Berenson was a famed and highly influential American art critic.

And when he published yet another of his books on Italian art,

nobody expected a controversy.

But in it, he confessed to a lifelong hatred of The Last Supper.

Of the painting's disciples, he wrote...

What a pack of vehement, gesticulating, noisy foreigners they are!

Berenson's comments caused a storm,

and angry letters were printed in the Times.

But the critic had his supporters.

The American novelist, Edith Wharton,

wrote to congratulate him on his forthrightness.

Ever since I first saw it at 17,

I've wanted to bash that picture's face.

And now, at last,

the most authorised fist in the world has done the job for me.

Hooray!

Verbal sticks and stones,

after the more literal-minded efforts of Napoleon's soldiers,

were hardly going to hurt The Last Supper.

But far more dangerous weapons were to make their mark.

After four and a half centuries of precarious survival,

The Last Supper came within inches of total destruction

during the Second World War bombardment of Milan.

As it was, the painting was boarded up like the window of a derelict house,

and left without a roof over its head for three long years.

It has survived, it has endured the centuries,

and it wasn't its moment to die.

When you think of it under that tarpaulin during the war,

exposed to the air and the wind for such a long time,

you have to say, it just wasn't its moment to die.

The refectory was rebuilt, and the painting yet again restored.

But its dignity wasn't so easily reasserted.

By the 1960s,

much of the traditional respect for religious authority had evaporated,

and The Last Supper was fair game.

From his small museum in Leonardo's home town,

Alessandro Vetsosi keeps an eye on how popular culture

has been treating the work of Vinci's most celebrated son.

The painting has a double kind of sacredness,

the sacredness of religion and the sacredness of Leonardo.

Sadly, it has spread in many forms,

very often in ridiculous forms of advertising.

The Last Supper is running the risk

of undergoing the same process as the Mona Lisa.

It is so common, so widespread and so familiar,

that it ends up not really being seen in an objective way,

but just as an interpretation.

Some artists, though,

manage to pick up on The Last Supper without putting it down.

One of the most celebrated and controversial of all the takes

came in Luis Buñuel's film, Viridiana.

Here, a gang of drunken and violent beggars re-enact the tableau

as they gorge on stolen food.

An attack on the impotence of the Catholic Church,

the film was naturally condemned by the Vatican.

High culture and low culture were having their fun with The Last Supper,

and soon one artist brought the two together.

The most fragile particular artwork in the world became the raw material

for the master of commercialism and reproduction, Andy Warhol.

The Last Supper series of paintings that Andy Warhol did,

literally in the last six months of his life,

was in one sense a culmination of his career.

And he took it on as a monument that's known to all,

so it was, in the art world, a commodity as well-known

as Coca-Cola was in the consumer world.

But further, it was a monument that was disintegrating.

And in a sense, through his multiple canvases,

which were enormous, almost the size, some of them,

of the actual Last Supper or Fresco itself,

he gave life to it again, gave it life through reproduction,

which is what he had done all of his life.

Warhol produced nearly 100 artworks based on The Last Supper,

each uniquely modified,

with company logos or newspaper headlines or camouflage patterns.

In a sense, I think it was that notion of the belief in religion,

which has no logic to it,

and the belief in art and the notion of masterpieces,

which has no logic to it,

and the two conjoined, really, in this work,

which was ultimately to be his last major output

before his untimely death.

And so The Last Supper might have seen out the millennium,

respected and spoofed in almost equal measure.

But an American fiction writer had other ideas.

Dan Brown's thriller, The Da Vinci Code,

has sold tens of millions of copies.

More people have read the book than have ever seen

the original Last Supper in all its history.

And at the novel's heart is a fantastic assertion

that the figure to the right of Jesus is actually not St. John,

but a very different biblical character, Mary Magdalene.

It was, without a doubt, female.

Any of you convinced by this argument?

Well, her features, in general, are very much softer

than all the other figures, and also her position.

I asked my students, American 20-year-olds,

how many of you read the book?

The answer is, all of them.

They know it's a novel, of course.

But most of them think that the information about Leonardo is true,

that the information about The Last Supper is true.

And that distorts their idea about art,

about the Renaissance, about history itself.

I find that disturbing.

While many readers did buy into Dan Brown's extraordinary notions,

art historians were unanimous in rejecting them.

But a closer look at Leonardo's working techniques

reveals a twist to the tale.

Dan Brown might, it seems, albeit accidentally,

have stumbled on a truth.

Experts have long known that Leonardo liked to use

the same life drawing as the basis for more than one figure.

And when we superimpose the head of his Virgin of the Rocks

with that of St John,

we see that they match perfectly.

This suggests that the Virgin and St John

are based on the same life drawing of the same person.

This might have been a young male model,

but Leonardo was not suggesting that the Virgin Mary was really a man.

Or it might indeed have been a female model.

But this equally does not mean that The Last Supper's St John is to be viewed as a woman.

Under the gathering layers of meaning and interpretation, copy and parody,

an original remains,

but only as a spectre, a ghost.

Perhaps, for now, the last word on The Last Supper belongs to the Restorer,

who helped to nurse the painting back to health at the end of the 20th century.

She has spent nearly a quarter of her long life in hands-on contact with The Last Supper

and knows it better than anyone.

The painting had been totally altered by previous restorations.

There was the Hand of Thomas, for example,

which had been completely repainted and had turned into a bread roll.

Over a period of 20 years,

Pinin Brambila stripped away these overpaintings, flake by flake.

The ideal was to leave on the wall only the paint applied by the original artist's own hand.

The major discovery was in the expressions of the Apostles.

Matthew, before, was a man of a certain age, let's say,

with brown hair, an irregular nose, and a mouth closed in a kind of bitter grimace.

He's changed completely.

He's changed completely.

Many of the Apostles' faces have survived,

but as much as three-quarters of the original paint has been lost over the centuries.

And so the Last Supper that we see today

is mainly painted in muted watercolours,

applied by Pinin Brambila and her assistants

to the vast areas that would otherwise be blank.

When I first came to the painting, I found it, I wouldn't say ugly, but opaque.

It didn't move me at all.

Then, of course, slowly, I discovered so many little details,

which made me realise what an indescribable genius Leonardo was.

Shepherded through a system of airlocks, visitors now come into the presence.

They carry with them a lifetime's exposure to an image

whose original they will see probably for the first time.

Fifteen minutes is all they will get to take in this most complex of artworks,

and then they will re-emerge into the world of copies and spoofs and spins,

taking away some memory of this incomparable original,

which is itself no more than a memory of its own greatness.

I courage to speak for the first time,

while I was with it, in the past.

its own strength has been made by the next.

while I see it in the future of this,

and I hope that this is the only nature of this,

as we were talking about my last name,

so I would help in the future,

and this wasn't the future of the future,

I believe that will be very long,