Schematic diagram From Restoration of the Last Supper
The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci finished in 1498 on the refectory wall of of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan
The artist Makoto Fujimara, taking up the invitation to Come and See, travels to Milan to stand under the masterpiece.
"If you want to 'understand' something," said my friend Bruce Herman, "you have to be willing to 'stand under' it." Bruce, an art professor at Gordon College, went on to cite C. S. Lewis' Experiment in Criticism:
We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.
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Leonardo painted in a grand, dominating scale for a small space. Even standing in the far back of the refectory, it is difficult for the eye to decipher the whole painting all at once. He painted The Last Supper in such a way as to force the viewer to enter the painting, physically and emotionally, and to viscerally become part of the narrative.
Only when the viewer stands under the painting can it be seen as it was intended to be (plate A). Leonardo had a specific visual message for those who stand under the painting. He had the visual sophistication to carry off what very few artists could even dream of doing: he painted the complex psychology of betrayal. It starts with Philip, and ends in a moneybag. Invited to walk into Leonardo's funhouse of mirrors, we are all meant to be part of this narrative, which is refracted within our own dark journeys.
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As an artist, I naturally try to identify the source of light in a painting, because I know that artists often use light to reveal what they want the viewer to see. In this painting, it would be easy to assume that the light is coming from behind from the windows, through which we see a Renaissance landscape. But the source of light in this painting actually is the face of Jesus reflecting on all of the disciples – all but Judas, who is under-painted with black, denied a brightened countenance.
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For him to have painted as he did, he had to be convinced of a center that holds.
So who is at the center? Where does the “vanishing point” end?
It ends on the forehead of the Savior.
And that foundation will hold, no matter how full our moneybags get, nor how little it takes for us to engage in betrayal. To Leonardo, the triangular shape of Jesus literally holds the painting in its visual movement.
A very high resolution photograph (16 billion pixels ) of the painting can be explored here
Timothy Verdon, an art historian and priest explains the profound meaning of the masterpiece from an artistic, theological and liturgical perspective in The Last Supper According to Leonardo published last week in L'Osservatore Romano.
By the use of perspective, the artist focuses the attention on Christ, making him the convergence point of the entire pictorial cosmos defined by the room. In fact, the diagonal lines that draw the eye forward inevitably lead to Christ, everything meets in Him, He is the center of the visual logic of the whole, as well as its narrative logic. He is not the last point, the vanishing point in the perspective; the diagonal lines, instead, converge behind Christ, in the evening sky outside of the window; but that vanishing point remains hidden. Seeking the infinite, our gaze comes to a halt with Christ, as if He were still saying, "He who has seen me has seen the Father" (John 14:9).