I have not seen The Last Supper. I have seen The Last Supper. Both true.

Don't be perplexed. Like a lot of sentences in this world, there are shades of meaning.

If I say, I have not seen The Last Supper aka L'Ultima Cena or Il Cenocolo, everyone immediately knows that I don't mean I was not around in first-century Jerusalem to witness, if it happened, Jesus's last meal where he told his apostles that the bread they were eating was his body and the wine his blood, over which there have been endless arguments for 2000 years as to what he meant.*

*If what the last supper was in the New Testament is not in your knowledge base, just go to Wikipedia, or (God Forbid), read about it in each of the four gospels.

What then would people think I meant if I said, I have not seen The Last Supper? My guess is that most people would think that I meant that I have never seen Leonardo DaVinci's famous The Last Supper, a fresco painted in the Santa Maria del Grazie, formerly a Dominican convent, now practically a museum for the painting, although the church is still there.

And, they would be right, I have not seen that painting. And, if I phrased it that way - it is what I would have meant. When I was in Milan (I won't count the first time when I just drove to the airport) I had very limited time, it being just the last leg of a trip to Sicily and Sardinia, so I could fly home at their international airport. I had about 3 hours to cover 2 museums, Pinocoteca di Brera and Pinocoteca Ambrosiana, plus Il Duomo, a peek at their opera house, La Scala and a few other little things on my way back to the hotel. The museums were fantastic. I love Renaissance art. 

So, why, you ask, would I not see what is considered one of the great artistic achievements of all time? And what would I mean if at the same I time I said I hadn't seen it, I also said that I had seen The Last Supper?

Well, I'll tell you, because now you need to know. I didn't see Leonardo's The Last Supper for several reasons. One, I have seen it many times in books and read quite a bit about it. I was hardly an expert, but, certainly at some point in my life knew more about Renaissance art than most people I've met (although, not an artistic bone in my body). Being interested in something is not a reason to not see something and usually a reason to go see something. But, there's more to the story. DaVinci's The Last Supper painted by DaVinci isn't really around. Or, sort of yes, sort of no. DaVinci, a genius (whatever it means), didn't just paint, he experimented with painting. Many of his projects were unfinished, and some he would paint on forever, such as his perhaps even more famous Mona Lisa. And so, he experimented with his The Last Supper, which was supposed to be what is called a fresco. A fresco was a well-established type of painting (the first one we know is over 5000 years old in Egypt)  on walls of buildings, where first was slathered on a wet coat of plaster and the pigment is added with water that binds it with the plaster when it hardens. This is all a summary and you can read the details elsewhere if you like.

Frescos were quite popular during the Renaissance. The Sistine Chapel ceiling is another famous example. Sometimes when a painting was done and dry, the artist would add secco, or dry paint to it for highlights. It wasn't easy. You had to be trained in it and know what you were doing or it would be a disaster. You had to work fast, doing a giornata, or day's work on the wet plaster, then moving to the next day's work. 

As I said, DaVinci often experimented. And so he did with his fresco on the convent wall, not painting on wet plaster at all, but used a technique developed a while back, and almost never used and was known to be very risky, with his own experimental touches. Not that long after he finished painting it began to deteriorate; roughly 20 years later it was very noticeable. Then, it became subject to perhaps the worst continuous assault on a famous painting imaginable over centuries - flooding, mold, steam, manure, cutting, bombing (yes, bombing, in WWII) and perhaps most damaging, a number of very badly executed restoration attempts beginning in the 1700s. The last restoration, from the 1970s-1990s - 21 years in all, was finished in 1999, a year before I got there. It is now a sealed room, climate-controlled, and you have to pass through chambers just to see it for a few minutes with the other guests. This is not the way I appreciate art. Given unlimited time, would I see it? Maybe, but it does not excite me. Despite now excellent restoration techniques, it is hard to say what is Leonardo's work and what is just a conglomeration and a mess. In fact, what it actually looked like, we can know from what are thought to be excellent copies of the original by his assistants and a later follower just before the original began to decompose. These aren't in Italy but can be seen in London, Switzerland and Belgium. 

The Last Supper was considered to be a landmark in the use of perspective, which Leonardo was an expert in (although using perspective is also as old as Egypt and if anyone in the Renaissance should get real credit, it is the architect Brunelleschi and the painter Masaccio before Leonardo was born, but others as well), but his painting was considered a landmark, even in its own time. I can appreciate perspective and other aspects of his art by reading books and looking on the internet. It is kind of exciting that during the last restoration they found a pin-prick hole that Leonardo used as his vanishing point, but I would not get to see that even if I went to look at the convent.

So, why I am committing heresy and ruining your visit to The Last Supper? I'm not trying to do that. Go see it. See whatever you like, what interests you. But, I do think even had the original survived, it would have been overrated.  

Honestly, I am writing this because I read all this stuff about amazing people and things they do, and there are few people with whom I can talk about it. Even those few don't want to hear a lecture. So, I like to write about stuff that interests me. I love Renaissance art and almost never discuss it. Once, on a plane, I was seated next to a young woman getting her degree in art history. Now that was a good flight, but oh so rare.

Here's what I want to tell you about The Last Supper. First, there was nothing revolutionary in Leonardo's design. Most people have only heard of Leonardo's painting and don't know that artistic depictions of the Last Supper have been around for many centuries before him - and, they were not that dissimilar. 

Maybe - maybe, the first one is in the Catacombs of Rome, as claimed. But, other scholars argue that that image was actually a depiction of a post-resurrection gathering with Jesus and some of his apostles (possibly in the same room as the last supper was held). There seems to be a consensus of a mosaic in Ravenna made in the 6th century B.C. being definitively The Last Supper.

Okay. I don't know if it is, but it seems like it. All I know is that there are a lot of depictions of The Last Supper which bear uncommon similarities. Usually, a table - in the 6th-century mosaic, in Leonardo's depiction and in many others, they are all sitting on one side of the table, as if posing for a photograph. There's also fish on the table (a symbol of Christ), which has always been around. And these factors are all there in the Ravenna mosaic.

Above is a tapestry from about 1175. Some common themes - halos on all the apostles, John sleeping at the table next to Jesus and Judas on the other side of the table and also reaching for food. Usually, Judas doesn't get a halo, but here he does.

This amazing work of art below was carved about two centuries before Leonardo's version out of salt(!) in a mine in Poland:

I don't know about you, but I find that amazing. It's probably the only reason I would want to go to Poland (although, everywhere is interesting if you research).

I'm not going to give you all the images of The Last Supper I have from history as there are too many to count. But, of famous artists before Leonardo, some a couple of centuries before him  - Giotto, Fra Angelica, Duccio, Ugolino of Siena, Ghirlandaio. As well, many painted it after Leonardo, like Bassano, Veronese, Titian, etc., right up to modern times. And many, many others by unknown artists or teams of artists. I've seen some of these in Florence, Siena, New York, London and Germany. That's what I mean when I say I have seen it.

Below was painted by a great artist born a little before Leonardo by the name of Domenic Ghirlandaio:

There are a lot of similarities between the two, but, Ghirlandaio's was painted about 15 years before Leonardo even started. You can argue which is "better" but I find Ghirlandaio's more interesting. But the artist wasn't, which is why I think Leonardo's version is more famous. 

The one below is by Jacopo Bassano (the father), 50 years after Leonardo's when artists were expanding on what they learned from their forebearers like Leonardo, Rafael and Michelangelo:

And this one below is from one of my favorite artists, a unique stylist, Doménikos Theotokópoulos, popularly known as El Greco, painted about 100 years after Leonardo's:

I'm going to wind up with my two favorites, one made just a few years after Leonardo's and one a century after. 

Although I had already seen a copy of Leonardo's work in London and others representations in New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, the one below was what started me thinking about The Last Supper as a genre (even I know how odd the idea must seem to some of you that I'd spend time thinking about something like that) separate and apart from Leonardo's one painting. I was in Germany in a wonderful little preserved town, Rothenburg ob der Tauber, and I wandered into a beautiful little church, Sankt Jakobs Kirche, where there was an incredible woodworking of The Last Supper. I didn't take a lot of pictures back then - film was expensive and I didn't have really good cameras, but I took a picture of that one, because I knew I was looking at something special:

Tilman Riemenschneider, one of the most famous woodworkers in history (though like so many artists, forgotten and rediscovered), started carving this about a year after Leonardo finished his version. When you compare the two - Leonardo's is at the top of this post - you can see, unlike say, Leonardo's similarity to Ghirlando's and others before him, Riemenschneider's really seems to be its own design and unlike everyone else's. I do not believe Riemenschneider had ever left Germany and never would have seen Leonardo's effort or the many other representations there. 

My absolute favorite, though, I have not seen, except on the internet. I actually became interested in Jacopo Tintoretto before I became interested in art in general, having read an essay about him written by, of all people, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. At that time, I had never seen a painting by Tintoretto, and the first few I did find (this was pre-internet) were not that interesting to me. However, when the internet grew up, I started to find more and more great paintings by him. Very recently, he has become a star again in the art world, though hardly a household name like Van Gogh or Picasso. I don't know why it suddenly happened and I expect it will die out. I have been to Italy a few times, but never to Venice, and that's where you can find most of his paintings. Tintoretto, whose real last name turned out to be Comin (like the seasoning, cumin, in the local dialect), also known as Jacopo Robusti and Il Furioso while he was alive (great names, and he seemed a fascinating character), painted very fast, which was not the way Leonardo did it at all. He actually painted a number of different and interesting Last Suppers. But, my favorite is, I believe, the last one he did:

I love the light effects and the colors in the dark room, the host of angels floating on top, a very different use of perspective from Leonardo's (as I understand it, both used single-point linear perspective, but Tintoretto's vanishing point is not in the middle of the painting). It is one of the few paintings I hope to see in person - someday, anyway. We will see.

That's it for now. By the way, I had to enlarge some of the painting slightly by google magic and may have ever so slightly changed the proportions, but, no so much I think you would notice.