The first and only time I saw The Last Supper was about 40 years ago. I was wandering around Milan like a dumb fuck on a Sunday afternoon in August with nothing to do and nowhere to go. The city was completely empty - every restaurant shuttered, every bar closed. I walked all the way from the cemetery to Porta Magenta without seeing a soul and stood across the street from Santa Maria delle Grazie, which looked a little grim, like a jewel box left in the barn. There were pieces of scaffolding here and there, but it didn’t look like anything was going to get fixed any time soon. It was just another neighborhood church without much in the way of coffers.
I crossed the street to the entrance, where the door was standing open and an old man wearing a wife beater was sitting in a folding chair in the vestibule. I stood there as he gave me a long look. The church was closed, of course, but this guy and me were like the last two people on earth. I was happier to see him than I was to see inside. He looked at me like he was trying to remember something. Then he said: go ahead, take a look.
I went inside and walked right up to it. There were tarps hanging on either side, a small rolling scaffold nearby. The painting wasn’t covered. It was the back wall, that’s all, and it was a wreck. There was some construction detritus, like the place was undergoing a paint job. In fact, it looked like The Last Supper was getting ready to be painted white, right after it was scraped and spackled.
Like most art up close, the artist’s hand was apparent, the magic on display. In the case of The Last Supper, you could see that it was done by many hands, one following another, taking off a flake and painting it over because, from a technical point of view, Leonardo did a truly shitty job in the first place.
It was vanity, which is no surprise. It had to be the perfect painting. Leonardo was more confident as a scientist than as an artist, which was his one big mistake, the first and fatal, set to destroy this most perfect of paintings before it was begun. He re-made the surface into one he could paint over, which is exactly what happened for centuries.
A true fresco permits no mistakes. The plaster becomes part of the stone on which it sits, and can last thousands of years. The artist has to get it right the first time, and he must prove himself master by the minute. It occurred to me that Leonardo never expected it to last very long, and I can’t help but think that he knew it - two immutable facts. Every mason knows them, every housepainter: water seeps, stone weeps.
No, I didn’t touch it. It was The Last Supper and I was respectful. But I did put my nose right up to it. I smelled the bread on the table and the left hand of Christ. I wanted to see if I could still smell egg tempura, but it smelled like dust, which is what you’d expect.
