When Leonardo da Vinci was 42 years old, he hadn’t yet completed any major publicly viewable work. Not that he’d been idle: in that same era, while working for the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, he “developed, organized, and directed productions for festival pageants, triumphal processions, masks, jousting tournaments, and plays, for which he choreographed performances, engineered and decorated stage sets and props, and even designed costumes.” So explains gallerist and YouTuber James Payne in the new Great Art Explained video above, by way of establishing the context in which Leonardo would go on to paint The Last Supper.
For the definitive Renaissance man, “theatre was a natural arena to blend art, mechanics and design.” He understood “not only how perspective worked on a three-dimensional stage, but how it worked from different vantage points,” and this knowledge led to “what would be the greatest theatrical staging of his life”: his painting of Jesus Christ telling the Twelve Apostles that one of them will betray him.
This view of The Last Supper makes more sense if you see it not as a decontextualized image — the way most of us do — but as the mural Leonardo actually painted on one wall of Milan’s Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, whose space it extends (and where it makes more sense for everyone to be seated on one side of the table).
Payne goes in-depth on not just the visual techniques Leonardo used to make The Last Supper’s composition so powerful, but also the untested painting techniques that ended up hastening its deterioration. If you do go to Santa Maria delle Grazie, bear in mind that at best a quarter of the mural’s paint was applied by Leonardo himself. The rest is the result of a long restoration process, made possible by the existence of several copies made after the work’s completion. And indeed, it’s only thanks to one of those copies, whose maker included labels, that we know which Apostle is which. Unlike many of the creators of religious art before him, Leonardo didn’t make anything too obvious; rather, he expressed his formidable skill through the kind of subtlety accessible only to those who take their time.
Related Content:
What Makes Leonardo’s Mona Lisa a Great Painting?: An Explanation in 15 Minutes
Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks Get Digitized: Where to Read the Renaissance Man’s Manuscripts Online
How Did the Mona Lisa Become the World’s Most Famous Painting?: It’s Not What You Think
Why Leonardo da Vinci’s Greatest Painting is Not the Mona Lisa
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
