Leonardo da Vinci's large mural of The Last Supper is one of the most familiar images in Western art, even though it has deteriorated to the point where its original magnificence can only be guessed at. The mural has largely been known through its repainted versions, or through touched-up copies that attempt to give some idea of what the original might have looked like. But, the various versions of the picture do little to convey how revolutionary Leonardo's whole conception was. At Milan, Leonardo created a work that treated a familiar subject, but was a complete departure from the usual in terms of composition, selection of a Biblical text, iconography, use of perspective, and, unfortunately, fresco technique.
Leonardo arrived in Milan in the early 1480s, and made one of the longest stays of his career there--nearly twenty years. He went to Milan to work for the controversial Sforza family, dukes of Milan, in a number of different capacities: designer, engineer, painter, sculptor, and producer of theatrical entertainments and spectacles. The Last Supper was his most important painting commission in that city. The mural, which measures 13'10" x 29'7.5", was painted in the refectory of the ducal church of Santa Maria della Grazie in the years 1495-1498.
Leonardo was an inventor and an innovator, always looking for a better way to do things. In addition, he was, of course, one of the most influential painters of the High Renaissance. The key to understanding the revolutionary qualities of The Last Supper lies in the fact that, in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, Leonardo was engaged in creating an entirely new style of painting. He was involved in working out a solution to a problem that had confronted Florentine painters during the preceding century: the opposition "between a view which took the first function of art to be that of rationally and objectively describing physical reality and one that held it to...