Italy Guide
Lombardy and the lakes
Santa Maria delle Grazie: The Last Supper
Telephone: 02.8942.1146
Website: www.cenacolovinciano.org
Opening time: Tues– Sun 8.15am–6.45pm
Address: Corso Magenta
Price: €6.50, plus €1.50 obligatory booking fee
The beautiful terracotta-and-brick church of Santa Maria delle Grazie is home to the world-famouse mural of The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci. Visits must be booked in advance, at least a month (or more) in summer and at weekends. If it's fully booked when you ring, try asking about cancellations: people don't always turn up for the early-morning viewings so it might be worth chancing your luck and going to the desk. At your allotted hour, once you've passed through a series of air-filtering systems, your fifteen-minute slot face-to-face with the masterpiece begins.
A Last Supper was a conventional theme for refectory walls, but Leonardo's decision to capture the moment when Christ announces that one of his disciples will betray him imbues the work with an unprecedented sense of drama. Leonardo spent two years on the mural, wandering the streets of Milan searching for and sketching models. When the monks complained that the face of Judas was still unfinished, Leonardo replied that he had been searching for over a year among the city's criminals for a sufficiently evil visage, and that if he didn't find one he would use the face of the prior. Whether or not Judas is modelled on the prior is unrecorded, but Leonardo's Judas does seem, as Vasari wrote, "the very embodiment of treachery and inhumanity".
Goethe commented on how very Italian the painting was in that so much is conveyed through the expressions of the characters' hands; the group of Matthew, Thaddaeus and Simon on the far right of the mural could be discussing a football match or the latest government scandal in any bar in Italy today. The only disciple not gesticulating or protesting in some way is the recoiling Judas who has one hand clenched while a bread roll has just dropped dramatically out of the other. Christ is calmly reaching out to share his bread with him while his other hand falls open in a gesture of sacrifice.