Original subtitles

Good afternoon.

In this lecture, we will discuss Leonardo's Last Supper, which was painted between about

1495 and 1498, and we'll discuss it in some detail, though it's not the sole subject of

the lecture. Regarding the Last Supper, three unarguable facts should be reiterated. One,

because of the experimental methods used by Leonardo in painting, his masterpiece was

deteriorating rapidly during his own lifetime. Two, despite the recent long and arduous restoration

of the mural, it remains irreversibly a ruin. Three, the painting has nonetheless, for

centuries, overwhelmed most viewers with its physical and emotional power while inspiring

countless artists. We're going to look at its history, including its near destruction. We're

going to describe the scene as Leonardo imagined it, pointing out how it differs from other

representations of the subject, which we've seen already. And we'll try to understand the

psychological brilliance of Leonardo's conception, what the Italians called a concetto, his conception.

And we'll attempt to explain its virtually physical impact, at least an impact that I feel when

I encounter this mural. Leonardo abandoned commissions, left work unfinished, and through experimental

methods sometimes caused the serious deterioration of his work. The Last Supper is a notorious example

of this last habit. The Last Supper was not painted for just any refectory, but for the refectory of the

the Monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, where he was living and working for the Duke, whose church was the designated

burial place for the Sforza dynasty of Milan. The commission came from Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, from 1494, just before

the time of this work. And since the church and the monastery were under the Duke's control, the Dominicans of the

Monastery, we presume, had little to do with the matter in terms of the commission. He paid for it, and they enjoyed it, but it was always, and this is

interesting, it was always available to be seen by other artists. And so from the time it was completed and even before

Leonardo's Last Supper was attracting artists and art lovers to Milan to see it.

After Ludovico Sforza had gained control of Milan, he consolidated his power, and then he arranged the

marriage of his niece to the Emperor Maximilian to give him the imperial title Duke of Milan, and he decided

to emphasize his dynastic ambitions by establishing a mausoleum within the existing ducal church of Santa Maria

delle Grazie. It was at about this time that Leonardo da Vinci wrote to Ludovico, pardon me, offering his services as a military engineer and city planner.

He also mentioned sculpture and painting in his letter almost as an aside. This shouldn't surprise us, and yet it always does. We talk about

Renaissance man, a Renaissance man, by that we mean somebody who excels in many things, or at least tries to excel in many things. Well, Leonardo is the epitome of that, but he's not alone.

Many people who were not architects in the sense that we might say define an architecture today, architect today, were practicing architects, as well as painters and sculptors. And if you were an architect, it's quite likely, at some point, you were going to be called upon to build a defensive wall for a

military engagement, or something else, or military equipment, or something else, or military equipment, and things of battle. And Leonardo could do this, did do it, so did Michelangelo, and so we shouldn't be surprised that he writes

to the duke. After all, he's more likely to get a job, a military job, he's thinking, than an artistic job, because the duke was quite warlike.

You're looking at a ground plan of the monastery and church of Santa Maria delle Grazie. The church is on the right-hand side. The entrance, of course, at the bottom here, this is the long nave. It is an older church, it was already extant.

And at the very end of the nave, suddenly you have a quite different area, a very large domed area, which was constructed, at this time, in the last decade of the 15th century.

With apsidal projections on each side, rather than the normal kind of transept, which would be square-ended, but rather curving, apsidal projections on each side.

And then the long chancel, the altar in front, and a deep chancel and choir behind this.

The ducal tombs were also to be added to this site. So this was a mausoleum, as well as the central part of the church.

And those tombs were mounted in the wall, at the back part of that rotunda. The documentation is scarce on the church, actually.

But it seems certain that Donato Bramante, an architect with ambition and imagination, who worked for the duke, designed this.

Bramante was a friend of Leonardo, and it's possible that Leonardo was involved in the design.

It is certain that he was paying close attention to the new construction, which was going on shortly after he had arrived in Milan.

Let me describe the ground plan further of the whole complex. To the left, as you look at it, which is to say, to the north of the main church, you have the courtyard, the atrium of the monastery, with gardens in it.

And a second and smaller courtyard was here to the back, up toward the apse of the church.

But there were two separate open areas here. And on the west side of that area, and of the monastic rooms here, you had the refectory.

The refectory, the dining room, which we've talked about in the two last suppers that we have seen previously.

The dining hall of the monks, which was the usual place where you painted a last supper, most appropriately for the monks dining there.

The front of it, as it were, is aligned at right angles with the front of the church.

But there's no entrance here, nor was there, because in fact, a little after Leonardo painted his masterpiece, another painter had to suffer the comparison and paint a crucifixion on this end wall.

And so there's no door there. One entered through a door on the side, one does today, although the doors have changed, the windows have changed and so forth over the years.

But we know a good deal about what it did look like.

But I should point out that there was a door at about where you see the pointer here.

And a little further up at the midpoint on that east side of the refectory was a pulpit,

because preaching would often go on a reading more correctly from the gospel during the meal, which was otherwise silent.

And they could be listening to the reading and contemplating this wall, which is where the Last Supper was painted.

This wall right here.

I never want to leave anything out because I might not come back to this.

The door that was about here.

Let me ask you to draw an imaginary line from the center of this wall through a door at about that point,

a diagonal line which continues on across to the mausoleum, to this new crossing just built of the church, to the area where the Sforza dynasty is being buried.

Follow that line back all the way across, and you come to the center of the mural.

The center of this mural is the figure of Christ.

I will refer to it again, try to remember that connection, which may have some significance.

Let me show you the Last Supper after its restoration with some tourists, or perhaps a class, who are here.

This was fairly soon after it was finished.

And I must say that one aspect of the photograph distorts.

It seems like a short and crowded room, whereas, in fact, you saw on the ground plan that it's a very long, narrow room, but we're up close on it.

Nonetheless, you can see over their heads what exists of the mural today, including the upper parts of it,

these lunettes which he frescoed, which have the coats of arms of the Sforza family in the lunettes.

There were windows on this wall on the left-hand side, and still are.

They're not the same ones, but there were windows.

And if you will observe, there is light in the painting cast on that right-hand wall.

As you look at it, it corresponded with actual light falling from the windows.

This is not the first time that happened, but his use of real light and his way of combining fictive space and real space

is remarkable in this work, in this—I always want to say fresco, it's not—in this mural.

That its ruinous condition, even after the restoration, does not utterly obscure the effect of the painting results, I insist, from the power of the concetto, the concept,

the psychologically profound idea or concept embodied in an unprecedented composition, unprecedented for this subject matter.

Had this painting relied solely on color, which of course was much brighter than it is today, or on surface finish and detail for its effectiveness,

all would have been lost long ago.

Where there would be—you would not—you simply wouldn't have the effect that we still have.

So it didn't rely on those, shall we say, beautiful aspects to make its effect.

As we've seen elsewhere, the refectory where the monks or nuns, in this case monks, took their meals, was the traditional location of life-size murals of the Last Supper,

an utterly appropriate subject for silent contemplation.

A long table, as I understand it, usually went down the middle of the room, a communal table, but there might have been a table parallel to the wall under the Last Supper,

where the abbot and other distinguished members of the community might have—might have sat, more or less paralleling the holy figures above them.

I'm going to show you now, and of course we will be coming back to this, perhaps since we're looking right at the lower center so close,

I should point out the obvious, there's been a loss at the lower middle.

A hole got punched in the wall.

If I remember correctly, it was when it was used to billet some soldiers and they wanted an extra door,

so they cut a hole through the wall, knocking out principally the feet of Christ.

Not to mention the lower part of the table at that area.

So we are missing something that is quite important that we will only be able to see in an engraving done before this occurred.

Let me go to a 19th century view, which I love.

It shows the hall during the 19th century.

You now get an idea of the full length of this, this wonderful sweep of space that we have here.

And you can see the light falling from the left, although there are windows at the upper right here,

which I think were not there in the original hall.

It had been altered. There's no door on that side now.

It had already been—changes had already been made.

But you can see the height of the mural.

You can see that it doesn't start, as none of these do, at floor level, but above, at a higher level.

And, by the way, you can see that loads of people are there copying The Last Supper.

Every one of those easels has a copy that some painter was working on.

This is the most copied painting probably in history.

From the time it was finished onward, people came to make copies, and here they all are in the 19th century.

They'll be back from their break soon to continue their work.

I want to call your attention to the cornice, even though it's not the original cornice line here.

Because if your eye follows the cornice down to here, you see that it is more or less continued in the painted cornice inside the painting.

The actual cornice continues.

What you cannot appreciate here thoroughly, but it is demonstrable, it is true if you are at the right angle,

there is, as the—if I can put it this way—as the real cornice enters the painting and meets the fictive cornice,

it breaks just slightly, slightly inward.

In other words, it doesn't literally follow the same perspective, but slightly breaks, surely to separate the secular space from the sacred space,

to make that distinction. And this is the first small, but the first thing that Leonardo does in terms of manipulating perspective in The Last Supper.

Apparently, he decided not to use fresco, because fresco painting, as we've talked about with Masaccio,

you have to move quite rapidly before the—before the plaster sets up.

You've got to get a lot of work done in a short time, a whole figure, for instance.

Well, that isn't the way that Leonardo liked to work.

He liked—he would work very, very slowly for a long time, and then do no work at all,

and then come back and maybe just do a little bit of work, and this is an eyewitness account.

Just do a touch-up and go away again. Well, you can't do that in fresco.

And so, the spontaneity of his method was at odds with the medium, and the pace of the medium,

and instead he painted directly on the wall with a mixture of tempera and oil.

Now, we've seen that fresco artists do that if the pigment is too expensive to run into the wall with water,

as the blues are, as the azurites are, or if there's some detail they want to add.

So secco, dry on the wall, is done for details or for certain pigments, but not for the whole surface.

Moreover, this mural is on an end wall of the building. There is no room on the other side of it.

It's an outside wall, as it were. It's unprotected.

And that means it's exposed to the inevitable incursion of water.

We all have had this experience in our living quarters.

Incursion of water through the wall, and the stress of the changing temperature against the other side of that wall.

And he put some sort of his own gesso and mixture of things down as a painting surface,

but it didn't hold well, and his pigments didn't hold well to it.

So it was flaking practically as he finished it. It did not hold up at all.

And then the further damage, which you can see again in this photograph of the hole through the wall destroying the feet of Christ.

Leonardo conceived the room in which the Sacred Supper took place as a modified continuation of the refectory itself,

as a comparison of the real and painted cornices demonstrate, I hope.

The perspective recession constructs the space, but it also organizes the surface composition and focuses on the spiritual center of the story.

Let me show you now an engraving, a very important engraving, made between 1788 and 1794.

It's quite large, by a Frenchman named André Duterte.

He did this copy on behalf of Louis XVI.

The revolution intervened, and Louis XVI never saw it, but it was in France.

It's now in England at Oxford, and it's the best record we have of this composition.

Let me quickly go through the room with it before going back to the fresco.

If you look at it, you realize that you had, on the floor, you had receding tile lines.

Very important perspective, just as you did in the coffered ceiling.

And, of course, along the tops of what were tapestries.

These are meant to be millefiore, flowered tapestries, along the wall.

And that's another way in which he constructed the perspective.

All of the perspective lines don't merely run to the landscape, but rather they run to the head of Christ.

They point right to the spiritual center of this.

All the perspective lines, while they may also, if you will, take you to the landscape, basically go to the head of Christ,

Judas, instead of a typical halo, he uses an architectural cornice as a kind of stand-in for a halo.

All of the figures are on the far side of the table.

In the two examples of the Last Supper we've seen, Judas is on the near side.

That's how we know who he is. Not now, he's within the figures.

This was an upper room, and there is a view of a landscape beyond.

The trestles, it was a trestle table, as you see, and you can also see the pleats and folds in the white tablecloth,

which covers nearly the whole width of this mural.

Let me return to the Last Supper in the restored state.

The moment, and this is critical, the moment which he has chosen is the moment at which it is announced that Judas shall betray Jesus.

And this moment had not been used before.

This moment is so dramatic and inherently, the shock is so great, that the variety of the reactions of the apostles is the story of this mural.

Some of them rise up. They are so astonished at what has been said.

He groups them in threes, three to the right, who discuss among themselves while one gestures toward Christ and what he has just said.

On the left-hand side, they're rising up dramatically here.

Then the two closer groups. On the right-hand side, we have a group which includes St. Philip and St. James and St. Thomas here.

And they, their heads are close together, and there is a great drama in their reactions.

Arms either pointed toward themselves, who, me, or outward in astonishment, or in the case of the figure of St. Thomas, his finger pointing straight upward.

An amazing gesture. Remember, Thomas? He verified the resurrection, the physical resurrection, by putting his finger in the wound of Christ.

So, this is a dramatic gesture. It's a mystical gesture. It is about the resurrection. It points up, as well.

On the left-hand side, the important group, of course, includes St. John, St. Peter, and Judas.

Judas shrinking back from the others, shrinking back into the space.

St. Peter talking to John. John is the most passive of the three.

Judas is cast into shadow on this side. His right hand clutches the money bag that he has betrayed Christ for.

And he pulls back, and his face is in lost profile.

The figure of Peter, by the way, his right hand, back this way, holds an unsheathed knife.

Which reminds us that he, shortly after this, when Christ was arrested, severed the ear of the servant of the high priest in his anger over the event.

And in the middle of all of this extraordinary emotion is Christ.

Absolutely motionless. He is the center, the motionless pyramid at the center of this scene of consternation.

He is the controlling figure. In large ways and in small ways, he enacts not only the narrative of the moment,

but symbolizes the sacrifice and the salvation that will follow from this supper.

It's a supper that is, of course, theologically the institution of the rite of the mass.

Let me add just a little more about this image.

Christ lowers his arms in what could be seen as a gesture of resignation or submission.

It's been nicely called a hieroglyph of submission.

He looks slightly downward. Both arms are out. The torso is triangulated by the arms.

So, one thinks trinity right away. It was Christ who said, he who sees me has seen the Father.

And the triune Godhead, to use a theological term, is present.

His right hand gesture accuses Judas because it goes right toward Judas.

His left hand, his right hand goes toward Judas.

John's folded hands are next to theirs, a kind of calm, passive connector of those two gestures.

The spread fingers of Christ's right hand relate both to the dish and the wine glass.

The left hand reaches toward the bread.

The right hand, if you will, the wine hand, is on the shadowed side of the painting.

You see how the light falls. It's on the shadowed side where Judas is.

The descending side. The bread is on the illumined side, the rising side.

The wine is the blood, is the sacrifice. The bread is the body and the resurrection.

These are all extraordinary concepts. There is an immense amount of intellect that has gone into this.

Whether he had anyone advising him, I do not know.

But it is something that he understood and understood very, very deeply.

It doesn't stop there. And I will only say one more thing.

And that was, and I didn't point it out adequately, but in the preceding engraving, the feet of Christ come together under the table.

They almost cross. They are in the position of the feet on the cross, not the way you would put your feet on the floor.

And the center line of the tile runs straight up like the line of the cross.

It's an amazing concept, and not at all, for a moment, accidental.

Have I explained the impact, the physical impact on the viewer? I doubt it.

Scale, it has immense scale. For some reason it leaps off the wall.

The figures seem to, literally, in my experience during the restoration of it, it seems to just press forward.

They just push from the wall, and I feel a physical push from them.

It is partly perspective. It's partly the scale of the figures.

It is an amazing, an amazing experience.

We almost didn't have this at all.

We should be happy for small favors and sort of for ruinous, for ruinous paintings,

because this is what happened in 1943.

The refectory was bombed, and behind the sandbags on the right-hand side is the Last Supper.

The refectory was otherwise totally demolished.

Part of the other end wall stood, otherwise very little here.

When they took it down, it was there, but it was crumbling.

Don't think it wasn't damaged by the impact. It was, but it was nonetheless there.

Physically overwhelming, spiritually profound, intellectually astonishing,

it was and is one of the most influential inventions in the history of Western art.

One could spend weeks.

Let me show you a chalk study of the head of Judas.

He did studies for all the heads. We have some of them, but we can imagine all of them were drawn this way,

just from a model with his head turning in an extraordinarily powerful drawing.

I'm going to examine a cartoon or a full-size preparatory drawing for a painting,

and then a highly finished red chalk drawing, and then a fantasy in black chalk.

Drawing was at the heart of the work of Leonardo.

It was, and I've used the word disegno in the last lecture, design and drawing.

In more ways than in the usual artistic sense, drawing for him was a way of thinking.

Many of his drawings, often contained in the notebooks, literally reveal the creative act.

It is happening. It is going on as you see it.

It isn't the end product. It is the process.

Showing the evolution of an idea not merely from one drawing to the next,

but within a single drawing. It's astounding.

We are looking at the life-size cartoon for a painting that was never made,

The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and John the Baptist.

This large drawing done about 15-7, 15-8.

It's charcoal with white chalk to heighten it. It's on paper,

many pieces of paper mounted together.

The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and John the Baptist was a drawing surely used to prepare for a painting,

but it never was done.

If it had been done, first of all, we ought to have the painting,

but secondly, there would be either little holes around all of the outlines through which powder was pounced,

so that you could transfer it onto a surface to be painted and get the outlines that way,

or you could incise it, say, with the handle of your brush or another tool.

But it isn't incised, it isn't pricked for transfer, but it must have been originally intended to.

So we know nothing of the presumed commission.

The subject, or rather the treatment of the subject, is one that preoccupied Leonardo.

There's a related drawing, probably done before, a related painting, I beg your pardon,

probably done before this drawing, which is now in the Louvre.

And if he intended to make the painting, as I say, it would have been a very elaborate preparation,

similar to the Louvre painting.

This, I said many sheets of paper, eight sheets of paper were glued together to make this six-foot image.

Let me describe the surface of the painting to you, that is to say, the composition of the painting to you.

The dense interlocking of the figures, realistically unnatural but compositionally potent,

is extraordinarily intricate.

The virgin half sits on her mother's knee, while holding the Christ child across Anne's lap,

so that the Christ child may bless the infant John the Baptist.

The mysterious pools of shadow and the typically enigmatic smiles, the Mona Lisa smiles, if you will, of the two women,

produce together an aura that is deeply affecting, but inexplicable.

It's as if they were sharing a deep secret.

It enhances the theme, which I take to be the heart of the matter here,

the theme of generation, of the lineage of Jesus.

Anne and Mary interlinked in this way with the Christ child being supported by them.

This complexity of composition, as well as of conceit, of concept,

is something that other artists were soon to learn was inimitable.

Lots tried, especially in Milan, and they failed most of the time pretty badly.

The rare survival of this large drawing is due both to the fact that it was never damaged by transfer to the surface for a presumed painting,

and to the contemporary fame of Leonardo's art.

The cartoon in the Louvre painting, for example, we know from contemporary descriptions,

was exhibited to the Florentine public who, quote,

visited it as if they were going to a solemn festival.

That's the worship of art that resulted in the Renaissance toward Leonardo.

Let me show you a remarkable red chalk drawing like that of Judas,

but this time a drawing which is almost universally accepted as a self-portrait from about 1512.

Ironically, the best support for this identification is probably the very strong similarity of this head

to a figure of Plato in Raphael's School of Athens, which we will see before long,

which has been said, it seems forever, to be a portrait of Leonardo.

So there is a connection that's always been presumed between them.

Although there's no proof, it seems likely to go on being regarded as a self-portrait.

It's an extraordinarily beautiful drawing.

The full echoing curves of the beard obviate any need for a neck or a bust behind it.

Head and beard, it's all complete, even though it's not all there.

Do you recall the early landscape drawing we saw in the last lecture?

An extraordinary spring-like drawing of trees and moving water and the sense of moving wind.

What a distance to have traversed in perhaps forty years to have come to this drawing.

This drawing is an evocative, terrifying black chalk drawing known simply as Deluge,

in which the self-confident world of the Renaissance seems to self-destruct.

There are about ten late drawings, each of them known as Deluge or the Deluge in his art.

And they were all made at a time when he was studying the movement of water, we know from other drawings in his notebooks.

And like the ancient philosopher Heraclitus, Leonardo seems to have been fascinated with the ever-changing nature of water in all its forms.

But what overwhelms us today in this drawing is the ineluctable, the sense of the ineluctable and irresistible force of water in these drawings.

They seem to us to be akin to the biblical Deluge that almost destroyed all mankind.

They have their roots equally in scientific observation and in theological and psychological awe.

Leonardo's art was only a portion of his incessant creativity.

But even in its fragmentary and incomplete state, the body of work that he left offers us a look into one of the most penetrating intellects in history,

whose theorems, whose thoughts and ideas, no less than his demonstrations of them, continue to challenge us today.