The Last Supper

Leonardo refused the fresco painter's hurry. True fresco demands speed — pigment into wet plaster, a day's patch at a time, no revisions. He wanted oil-painter's time: glazes, second thoughts, slow shadows. So he sealed the refectory wall and painted on it dry, in tempera and oil — and the mural began leaving almost as soon as it arrived. Within twenty years visitors described it as ruined; what survives is roughly a fifth of his paint, held together by the longest restoration in history (1978–1999).

The composition is an arithmetic of shock. Christ sits alone at the vanishing point, a calm triangle; the twelve break around him into four trembling groups of three, each a different grammar of disbelief. The words have just been said — 'one of you will betray me' — and the painting is the half-second after.

Judas does not sit across the table, exiled, as a thousand earlier Suppers had placed him. Leonardo seats him among the others and lets the light do the judging: he leans back into shadow, grips his purse, and knocks over the salt — the only face the window's glow refuses.

In August 1943 an Allied bomb fell on the convent. The roof and the east wall collapsed; the Supper's wall stood, sandbagged and braced, open to the rain under the summer sky. The painting that should have been the first to die has now outlived the building twice.