What distinguishes Leonardo’s “Last Supper” from the many versions done by previous artists? As Mr. King observes, the Bible’s accounts were extraordinarily dramatic: a charismatic religious leader and his band of disciples gather for dinner “in the middle of an occupied city whose authorities are plotting against them, waiting for their moment to strike. And in their midst, breaking bread with them, sits a traitor.”
Leonardo was an avid observer of the world around him: he sketched in his notebooks people he encountered in the streets and tried to capture in his paintings the sort of specifics he’d recorded. He was also willing to disregard fashion, precedent and tradition in his work, and in Mr. King’s opinion his “Last Supper” would feature more lifelike details — “from the expressive faces of the apostles to the plates of food and pleats of tablecloth” — than anything yet “created in two dimensions.”
The story of the deterioration of “The Last Supper” and its many restorations is itself a kind of epic. Because the paint Leonardo used did not properly adhere to the wall (he did not use the fresco technique, which bonds the pigments to plaster) and because the wall was damp and exposed to kitchen steam, “The Last Supper” reportedly began disintegrating within 20 years of its completion. NYTimes
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