The Last Supper (Cenacolo): special opening hours thanks to Eni on 24 February and 30 March.

Leonardo da Vinci was commissioned to paint The Last Supper by Ludovico Maria Sforza, better known as Ludovico il Moro, in the period between 1494 and 1497. Given that it was to be painted on the wall, the artists did not use the traditional, however resistant, technique of the fresco, which involves the rapid application of paint to plaster that is still damp, but rather he experimented with an innovative method that allowed him to work on dry plaster and, therefore, to return to the work on different occasions in order to work on the finer details. Unfortunately Leonardo's intuition proved ill founded and soon, for an unhappy combination of reasons, the painting began to deteriorate. Consequently, over the centuries, there have been a succession of restorations in desperate attempts to save the masterpiece. After more than 20 years of work, 1999 saw the completion of the most recent conservation effort which, thanks to the removal of many overlays, has brought the what remains of the original drawings back to life. The precarious condition of the painting means that the Museum is obliged to respect rigorous rules that allow only 30 people every 15 minutes to visit it.

The last Supper - history

The last Supper - image

The church, the Basilica and Sanctuary of Santa Maria delle Grazie is in Milan and is part of the Dominican order. The Duke of Milan, Francesco I Sforza, commissioned the architect Umberto Scopatello  to build the church in 1436.

Santa Maria delle Grazie

Leonardo the man and the main episodes of his life, as told by Carlo Peretti, the well-known scholar and expert in the life and work of the great artist.

Leonardo was born on 15 April 1452 at Vinci, a small hamlet adjoining a medieval castle on the slopes of Montalbano. [..]
Vinci is situated half way between Florence and Pisa and so Leonardo was born in a small village that may have seemed cut off but was in fact the crossroads of a busy communication route.
At the age of sixteen or seventeen Leonardo moved to Florence, where his notary father found him a place in the workshop of Verrocchio. The route he took, on foot or horseback, a distance of about forty kilometres, is the same as that today that runs alongside the River Arno.
The same route that most probably had already taken him to Pisa, attracted by the unusual countryside where the rock formations of the surrounding mountains frequently take on a primordial character that can be seen in the background of the Virgin of the Rocks in the Louvre, the first Milanese painting commissioned in 1483 when the artists was thirty-one years old. [..]

Leonardo spent twelve years in Florence Leonardo systematically training and experimenting and soon came under the protection of his almost-peer Lorenzo de' Medici (1449-1492), a refined humanist, sly merchant, astute statesman and able politician, but above all incomparable diplomat: in other words, a master communicator. For the young Leonardo, Lorenzo provided a fascinating example of communication technique, where persuasive efficacy was based on eloquence and psychology, an approach that Leonard would use to refine his own visual language adopting a form of "talking" painting that with the Adoration of the Magi of 1481 (painted when he was 29) achieves an intensity of animate gesture and an iconic impact that reminds one today of a silent film. [..] (segue)

All of Leonardo's work as a painter and theoretician of painting, and therefore in all the ways in which he would promote the idea that art must be seen as a form of creative knowledge, and so like science and philosophy, in other words everything about Leonardo, remains to the present day a direct and immediate lesson – both for traditional media (those which from a historical perspective remain unsurpassed) and new electronic media – provide an incomparable support also for historical research which is only now beginning to be fully appreciated, having overcome an initial, inevitable  playful stage.

But of course also Leonardo played. Even Sigmund Freud recognised this in 1910: "The great Leonardo, it would seem, remained for all of his life in many respects infantile; it is said that all great men maintain something of the child in themselves. He continued to play also well into adulthood and this was why he sometimes appeared disturbing or incomprehensible to his contemporaries."

And so - disturbing and incomprehensible – he still seems today, after five centuries, and it is even possible to say that it is because he is more studied than understood. We have rediscovered the genius and lost sight of the man. During a visit to Pavia in January 1490 in the company of the architect from Siena Francesco di Giorgio Martini to advise on the work of the cathedral, Leonardo, who was then thirty-eight, was attracted by the ingenious arrangement of the rooms of a celebrated local whore-house and drew a floor plan of a model "brothel". It can be found in pages of one of his notebooks from the time. [...]

On the same page, at the same time, Leonardo noted: "catena aurea" (golden chain), the title of the great Thomist anthology on the Gospels. Small but certain clues to how the real Leonardo can finally re-emerge in the new millennium. He died for the first time in France on 2 May 1519, and many times again in the writings of posterity; those who proclaimed his immortality.

Carlo Pedretti Director of the Hammer Center for Leonardo Studies

Since the time of Enrico Mattei culture has been for Eni an important area for initiatives with which to combine its nature as a great energy company with the social and cultural fabric of the countries in which it operates. To establish itself as a company that acts for the development of a specific territory is the primary aim of every project. In fact, Eni remains convinced that facilitating access to culture is a value and an instrument of growth for the whole of society

This is why all of the events supported by Eni are today recognisable for the quality of content, variety of languages and background tools made available to help and stimulate visitors of all ages. 

In a period in which, a trend for reducing economic investments is met by an increasing demand for culture, Eni is committed to facilitating access to and awareness of art, the theatre, music and cinema.

"The Last Supper" by Leonardo da Vinci includes a number of hidden and esoteric features. According to some experts the Apostle John, seated next to Christ, is in fact a woman. The outline around the two figures appears to form the letter M, indicating the names of Mary and Magdalene; according to this theory Magdalene represents Jesus companion.

There are a number of copies of the original work: among the full-size works the stand-out exemplar, in terms of prestige and age, is the copy by Giampietrino, originally intended for the Certosa in Pavia, and now at Magdalen College, Oxford.

Fragments of gold and silver sheet have been found, suggesting that Leonardo also used precious metals in his painting.

During the most recent restoration traces of a hole were found at the height of Christ's head which is presumed to have been used by Leonardo da Vinci as  a "vanishing point" to configure the perspective of the work.

Peculiarities