Art: THE TRUE LAST SUPPER

ONE August night in 1943, a British bomb fell on the little refectory of Milan’s Santa Maria delle Grazie. Next day Milanese climbed out of their shelters to behold what seemed almost a miracle: the two side walls of the refectory had collapsed, but the north and south walls still stood—like playing cards on edge. The Last Supper, Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece, remained intact under the sandbags protecting the north wall.

Two years later the rest of the refectory was rebuilt, and the sandbags removed. But the mural was obscured by a newly formed crust of white mold, brought on by long contact with the rain-dampened sandbags. A fingertip touch would dent the pasty surface, and there seemed no way of removing the mold without flaking off the picture as well. The world had seen the last, apparently, of the Last Supper.

Meanwhile, a new shellac which was colorless, waxless and impervious to moisture had been developed in Britain. Deciding that they had little to lose, Italian restorers injected quantities of the British shellac into the rotting wall. Within a year the mold had entirely dried up, and the painting remained.

Blots & Bandages. Still, it was quite unlike the picture Leonardo was believed to have painted. Milan’s cold and damp winter wind (which her opera stars survive by will alone) had been whining at the wall that held the mural for 450 seasons. In Leonardo’s own lifetime the wall began to show splotches of dampness. Over the centuries, well-meaning restorers flattened out blisters and bandaged the picture’s cracks with liberal applications of plaster, painted over to resemble the chilblained masterpiece beneath. Five separate times, at least, alien hands overlaid Leonardo’s mural.

But now that the picture was altogether dry, the possibility occurred, for the first time, of scraping it down to what Leonardo himself had painted. X rays are useless with frescoes, so no one knew quite what the result would be. but after bitter controversy, a brilliant restorer named Mauro Pelliccioli was commissioned to attack the picture with a surgeon’s scalpel (TIME, May 4, 1953). The job took him three years and is now at last finished. The completely cleaned painting is reproduced, for the first time anywhere, on the following pages.*

Among the first to approve the restoration was the ancient Expertizer of Renaissance Art, Bernard Berenson, 89, who climbed a scaffold to examine the picture minutely. He reported afterwards: “I felt that I had touched bottom . . . and that I was gazing on the true painting of Leonardo, spoiled, to be sure, by the centuries, but no longer smeared by incompetent hands. [At] a few yards . . . the figures emerged as if from a mist, large and imposing. Space was full of their presence.”

Symbols & Subtleties. Milan’s Museum Director Fernanda Wittgens is more explicit. In an article written for a special section of Art News Annual (out next month), Wittgens recalls the highlights of the cleaning: “It was found when the restorations were removed that Judas’ tunic was bright blue with traces of gold around the collar and that Christ’s garment turned out to be flame red, a symbol of His sacrifice. [Before the cleaning job, it was a dirty lime.] In the landscape some bright blue water came to light [and] now the glossy pewter utensils reflect the most subtle gradations of color in the robes of the apostles, the roseate or deep red brilliance of the wines shines transparently in the glasses. [All this] must have struck Leonardo’s contemporaries as a marvel of naturalism. Even now, after a century of Impressionism, he still seems modern and revolutionary.”

Leonardo was perhaps the most skilled painter who ever lived: he pictured bread on the table to seem near and crisp as bread on one’s own table at home, and he could make even a little segment of sky as wide and mysterious as the sky itself. Beyond that, he could bind many different things, men and emotions into one unchanging harmony. The Last Supper incorporates all these powers, and more. It has been called, both in praise and dispraise, the most “literary” picture in history—and, overlaid with clumsy restorations, the picture did have somewhat the stilted look of ordinary illustration. But now, restored to an approximation of its original purity, it becomes once again Leonardo’s seemingly impossible achievement: a fitting illustration to the Gospel.

* From left at the supper table (see center fold), Leonardo represented Bartholomew, James the Less, Andrew, Judas, Peter, John, Jesus, Thomas, James the Elder, Philip, Matthew, Thaddeus, Simon.