About Leonardo's Last Supper

The following are excerpts from the interview with Robert Randolf Coleman, associate professor of art history at Notre Dame, from the documentary, Jesus Decoded.

I.  LAST SUPPER – BACKGROUND

The Last Supper is located in the refectory attached to the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan which is a monastic dining hall.  Most monastic complexes will have dining halls for the monks to eat. “Last Suppers” are traditionally placed on the walls of such places.  Now this refectory is part of a larger complex, run by the Dominicans, that was sponsored by the Duke of Milan.  He intended this church complex to be a memorial to his dynasty and in fact intended to have himself and his duchess buried there. So it’s a very, very important commission.

The painting is a mural.  Leonardo was the kind of artist who is never satisfied.  He did not paint it in the traditional “buon fresco” or true fresco, that is the painting of water color paint in wet plaster, so when the plaster dries, the painting becomes the wall.  As a consequence, the painting, probably 20, 30 years after it was painted began to fall apart. There have been something on the order of maybe ten interventions.  The most recent being this rather radical restoration that began I believe in 1979 and was finished in 1999.

 I think they tried to take away as much of the subsequent interventions as possible, to leave the original paint, what they believe is original. It’s a very complicated business.

Because of these various interventions, many of the figures were altered because they didn’t quite know exactly where the contours were. And for a long time, the best way to understand what we think the “Last Supper” would have looked like would have been to go to the drawings.  There are a number of finished drawings, for example, the heads of the apostles, showing them in the positions that Leonardo intended.  Some of the faces are gone – I mean completely gone. There’s just nothing there. I think St. Bartholomew is one of those examples where there’s just a blank space.

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