April 10, 2017

One of the things that makes Leonardo da Vinci’s fraught and perpetually flaking masterpiece The Last Supper so figuratively enduring lies in the way it manages to represent several thorny convergences. The most obvious: the trompe l’oeil lines of perspective that seem to extend the room where da Vinci painted it, converging on a vanishing point in the distance. Then there is the subject matter: Jesus and the twelve disciples assembling for a Passover meal on the night before his crucifixion. There’s a contentious convergence: religious scholars and others eternally arguing whether the real Last Supper was actually a Passover seder or what exactly the real Last Supper’s best-known spinoff (the Catholic rite of the Eucharist) symbolizes.  And there’s the questionable one: a host of secret symbols possibly hiding in da Vinci’s tableau, colluding to foreshadow some dark conspiracy, as hypothesized in pop fiction like Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.

Last but not least, there’s the literal convergence: the painting being an ill-fated collision of da Vinci’s scientific and artistic impulses. The artist painted it, circa 1496, using a then-new and unproved technique of painting not with fresco, or wet plaster, but secco, or dry plaster. The result was an artistic tour de force that had already begun deteriorating while da Vinci was still alive. The myriad restoration efforts undertaken in the centuries since have often made matters worse—not to mention the bizarre 1652 decision to put a door through it, or the 1943 bomb that destroyed the ceiling above it but left it intact. For a painting infamous for flaking away, The Last Supper has long legs and many layers.

This year, with the holiday weeks of Easter and Passover (which begins today, April 10) overlapping perfectly, the convergence count is not only higher, it is more complex. In Milan, for the first time in thirty years, one of Andy Warhol’s storied Last Supper paintings is on display at Museo del Novecento through May 18. The series was first exhibited in 1987 in a gallery across the street from the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, where da Vinci’s painting is located.