What did Leonardo da Vinci's "Last Supper" really look like? | DW Documentary

the Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci when it was first shown in 1499 it created shockwaves through Italy and beyond changing the world of art forever but a 20-year restoration effort has revealed the awful truth of the original fresco only some 20% is still visible simply put we can no longer see nor understand why this painting had such a devastating impact or Kenley this is the incredible story of a hunt across Europe following a trail of clues and documents hidden for centuries that suggests that Leonardo and his workshop painted another Last Supper a huge life-size canvas for none other than the king of France does that painting still exist and if so can it reveal the secrets of the original fresco this is where a story starts in Milan the most important fashion and business city in all of modern Italy and in that sense not much has changed even in the 15th century Milan was a bustling city filled with artists and musicians of all the city-states in Italy the Duchy of Milan was the most powerful the most exuberant and the wealthiest by far no wonder that many kings in Europe wanted to conquer it particularly because the man in charge the Duke named Ludovico Sforza was a tyrant who had ceased power in 1481 and like many other such rulers he was desperate to cloak his legitimacy with the splendor of a renaissance court the Juke had many projects a monastery complex culture certo sada Pavia and a new church building right here in Milan called the Santa Maria delle grazie but the biggest project of all was this massive Cathedral deliberately designed to be the biggest church building in all of Italy so naturally this city was a magnet for young artists and sculptors from all over the region but why Leonardo this artist wasn't from Lombardi he was from Florence the most exciting city in all of Italy the wellspring of the Renaissance what was he doing painting a fresco in Milan answer may be found in a small village outside of Florence called Vinci [Music] leonardo was a natural child the son of a farmer's daughter Katharina who one day had a roll in the hay with a promising young notary called ser Piero of course marriage was out of the question a bright future awaited ser Piero provided he married a wife from a prestigious family that's why leonardo was never truly part of the creative circles of Florence around Lorenzo de Medici with artists like gibberty Gil and IO or Michelangelo these were folks who wrote Latin sonnets and could hold their own in fine society Leonardo was never part of that but ser Piero never forgot his son and was always ready to use his connections to help him get work but the lack of a proper education left young Leonardo at a major disadvantage instead he was apprenticed to the workshop of one of the most prolific artists of florence andrea vera key here leonardo learned how to mix pigments prepare panels or transfer large fresco drawings called cartoons to a plastered wall eventually parochial allowed him to paint one of the angels in his panel of the baptism of Christ it's obvious that Leonardo's angel is much more beautiful than the rather dour angel to the right painted by Rocio himself so how did he create such lovely and gellick faces the answer by using a new invention called oils whereas most of Florence still used the flat colors of tempera paint which dries quickly Leonardo had begun to experiment with pigments mixed with oils the technique first developed in northern europe the advantage oil house versus egg tempera is that in order to create a three-dimensional object you pretty much have to mix every single color that you put in there or crosshatch it so you get the feeling of a dimension but with oil you didn't have that problem you can't have an incredible range from black to white almost seamlessly and so this was a huge shift for for the artists in the Renaissance good or a mayor is a classically trained artist who painted a life-size recreation of the Sistine Chapel for the motion picture angels and demons and how are these oils made well they were ground up pigments that could be anything from bones to dry parsley to of course the famous ultramarine blue that came from Afghanistan that was so expensive that it cost more than actual gold in its own weight my god more than gold yeah yes it did [Music] the 15th century the Quattrocento was an exciting time to be in Florence it was a time of rebirth the Renaissance the revival of the ancient world in the arts science in literature and in engineering here for example Filippo Brunelleschi used Roman engineering to create this vast dome over the Duomo the Cathedral of Florence while Brunelleschi was taking measurements of ancient temples in Rome he had discovered that when you draw a street or a building all the horizontal lines seem to converge to a common centre what today we call the vanishing point Brunelleschi had discovered the laws of linear perspective it revolutionized Renaissance art suddenly painters could create an illusion of three-dimensional space as if the image they painted was a window on another world you know for us it's almost impossible to imagine the impact of this innovation why because today we are surrounded by simulated images of the form of billboards television cinema they have conditioned our brain to interpret flat images as three-dimensional reality but in the Middle Ages men and women never had that experience before and so that must have been utterly amazed by a painting like this one the crucifixion by masaccio the first fresco in history to use linear perspective people in those days was thought it was some form of magic to see space where there was only a flat wall Leonardo was also trained in the magic of linear perspective in the workshop of his master the rakia and he too was amazed by the possibilities but as he began his first major painting Leonardo realized that linear perspective had one major drawback it tended to stifle the figures and inhibit their expressive power in many paintings the figures became like puppets fixed on a rigid grid 10 years later Leonardo would write how to give your figures of pleasing air look about you when you see a beautiful face remember its features and fix them in your mind so what Leonardo is saying is don't let geometry deprive your characters of feelings of emotions of psychological drama and the first bold attempt to do just that as the painting that hangs right here in the Uffizi called the adoration of the Magi unfortunately the monks who commissioned a panel weren't interested in moving the boundaries of Italian art they simply wanted a pretty picture of the Nativity that people could recognize and worship and so the work was stopped and the painting remained unfinished it would take nearly two decades before Leonardo could realize his great vision he talked about wanting to create his work of fame he could see Brunelleschi's work of fame you could see Donatello's works a Fame and he wanted to create his own and so his destiny he felt lay with a large a large court with a grand patron a single person who is going to be writing the checks and that happened to be I mean the most powerful man in Italy may the 1480s and 1490s was the Duke of Milan Lodovico Sforza and so that's why he went north in 1482 to begin working for someone who was ineffective Prince not just a group of monks that's why Leonardo decided to turn his back on the Florence and that's why he came here in Milan filled with ambition not as an artist but as an engineer a military engineer he even prepared an impressive pitch for the Juke that catalogued all of his military talents I have methods for destroying every fortress or stronghold unless built on Iraq I can also design different types of cannon which will hurl stones and ball like a hailstorm Leonardo's hopes came to not they took several years for Jupiter veeko to finally notice the Florentine artist but the project he gave him a huge equestrian statue ended in failure the only thing that remains of this massive project are his studies leonardo was ready to tackle the greatest most ambitious composition of his young career a series of 13 live sized portraits of men seated at a table for a wall in Milan how did the last supper' project come about and who asked Leonardo to paint it this becomes a surprise but we really don't know what we do know is that the Juke Sforza tended to favor homegrown artists like Giovanna da montanha Fano they may not have been particularly imaginative but they delivered their work on time and on budget like this fresco of st. peter martyr what we do know is that the duke had chosen this church to become the pantheon of his dynasty actually it was part of a Dominican convent and the abbot right away saw his opportunity so he asked the Duke if he would build him a new refectory a place to have meals for the monks complete with frescoes the refectory was usually decorated with two paintings a Last Supper and a crucifixion of Christ the Last Supper illustrated the institution of the Eucharist or as the crucifixion depicted the redemption of mankind to the suffering of Jesus the two counter points of Christian theology the most important fresco destined for the south wall was the crucifixion of Christ this did you gave to giovanni de menthe or Fano whose family had been working on the Cathedral of Milan for many decades but who was going to paint in north wall Lena da da Vinci up to this point but Leonardo had done other than the failed a question project and the two small portraits was the production of plays and masks for the entertainment of the Duke in his court was he truly going to be given this monumental fresco but Leonardo was in effect a special effects man for the Duke and so I I guess we would think of him as a sort of a combination set designer costume designer and special effects person for these spectacular 's that Laura Vico would have staged maybe a couple of times a year in Milan that is why Leonardo was determined that with this fresco he was going to astonish them all [Music] and they probably would have been expecting that he would have done a Last Supper akin to all of those that had been done primarily in Florence in Tuscany Siena for the previous two hundred years but of course he did something quite different that archetype showed christ breaking bread thus establishing the first Eucharist but like a skilled film director Leonardo picked a far more dramatic scene the moment when Jesus declares that one of the men in the room is a traitor that news literally explodes from the center and hits the Apostles in various poses of shock disbelief sorrow even anger the full panoply of human emotions is laid bare the same idea that had galvanized his adoration of the Magi some 25 years earlier Leonardo wanted action and he also wanted the emotion and the dramatic intensity of what happened in in those seconds in in Jerusalem and that of course is one of the Magnificent things about the painting that he brings that to life and we see that an instantly I think we can understand what's happening there it's that whole vortex of human drama that's right where everyone is reacting differently they're asking each other there's a incredulity there's disbelief there's anger there's in the cases of the like Saint John he just appears to be coming awake and is being interrogated by Saint Peter and so he does he takes each each of these twelve and gives them some characteristic some you know a facial expression hand gestures things like that in order to take us into the character but here is the great tragedy most of these beautiful expressions are no longer visible today Paris a meadow Osmo it's a tableau reserved in a high risk it has a vineyard we own the pure component technique Victoria Hypatia edifice beaucoup de for snakes question the clarkey la posada so to say despair dollar gonna send Ariana unlike monter Fano who used conventional fresco techniques Leonardo could not resist experimenting with his pigments to try to create the same optical effects that he had pioneered with his oil paintings the result was catastrophic I think the thing that's so interesting about him is that he's got different intellectual interests and so he's trying to achieve different goals with paint but he's asking different questions of them Larry Keith is the head of conservation and keeper at London's National Gallery but also I think he really was interested in exploring nuances of tonal gradation all those kinds of distinctions that I think are really not possible to achieve in fresco [Music] in 1517 an influential Cardinal named Luigi Dagon and his secretary Antonio de Beatus went on a tour and among others visited the convent in Milan to see the Last Supper as the bee artists would write it is most excellent although it is beginning to decay either because of the dampness of the wall or some other form of neglect in the century since the fresco continued to deteriorate because it was adjoining a kitchen so all the moisture was trapped in the wall in the end there's really no way to know what Leonardo's great masterpiece look like or is there [Music] long before Antonio's visit another even more distinguished visitor came to Milan with an army in tow this was the newly crowned king of France Louisa 12th just one year after his elevation the king marched on Milan to claim the city as his own and what was the first thing that King Louie did after he set himself up here in the Costello's ferrata the answer is in the book written by Leonardo's first biographer Giorgio Vasari as Fusaro says the king went on a visit he went to see the Last Supper the king was deeply impressed by the excellence of this picture both in composition and execution and convinced that he should take it back to his kingdom so he tried to find architects who could build a framework of wood and iron to safely transport the fresco back to France with no regard for expense so much did he want to have it but since it was painted on a wall his Majesty could not have his desire but Kings aren't used to being told what they cannot have and so Louie decided on an even bigger gambit but for that he needed Leonardo himself at least that's our theory even though Leonardo was in Milan he was wanted back in Florence to finish another fresco the Battle of Anghiari in the Hall of the five hundred of the Palazzo della signoria so he wasn't in a position to stay in Milan and do whatever the King had in mind for him but then something extraordinary happened something that changed Freeman this is the Ark Evo dello stato diffidence a the state archives of Florence but documents that go back over a thousand years and here we found a truly remarkable letter with the letter D Luigi sakoda chasm of a la signora a difference in viata quest or de Janerio million crescentus a day here is a letter from the French King himself King Louie the 12th to the conferral year and the president of the French Republic listen yuria asking as we have need of master Leonardo da Vinci painter to your city of Florence and want to make him do something by his own hand we beg you to kindly let Leonardo work for us for a period of time and carry out the work we intend him to do I think it's becoming clear what the French King once Leonardo to do if he can have their fresco itself he will have the next best thing a copy on canvas that he can take back to France and what's interesting about this is that the King doesn't tell the sin yuria what he would like him to do he is very cagey about it the king doesn't say how long because if our theory is correct and he wants Leonardo to make a copy of the Last Supper that would take a very long time indeed the idea of such a live sized copy was not far-fetched leonardo was arguably one of the first painters in history who used his studio to make copies of his own works for sale such as the virgin of the rocks-- painted with his associate ambrosia the Pleiades the Madonna of the yarn winder possibly painted with his pupil Francesco's paniolo the saint and painted with his assistant Mel C and of course the Mona Lisa painted by his pupil and close companion Sol I there was a good reason for that here in the Santa Maria Novella Leonardo had a large studio with lots of assistants but he worked very slowly and it's difficult to maintain a large studio when you have a very limited output but it's not so hard if you use your best assistants to make copies of your works for sale under the Masters supervision of course so what happened to this copy of the Last Supper who painted it and does it still exist there's only one way to find out and that is to go to France [Music] today we think of Paris as the world's epicenter of art culture and fashion this is where the world comes for beauty and refinement but in the 16th century things were very different people sometimes forget that but in the Middle Ages it was actually burgundy bull gone which dictated French culture not just an art but also in poetry and music then came the scourge of the Black Plague and a hundred years war in which Joan of Arc would play such an important part [Music] so by the time Louie de 12th came to the throne France was a mere shadow of its former self and Louie was very much aware of that he knew that French artists needed to take their cue from the Italian Renaissance and I think that's why he was so incredibly keen to get the Last Supper into France but if that's true and if a life-size copy of the Last Supper was actually made where did it go the answer I think may be hidden behind these walls this is the Chateau de gallo which once served as the residence of your dumb was the from birth was the most important men besides the king with the 12th a sort of Prime Minister we can underline the fact that he was as powerful as the King yeah like his master King Louie Dam was was deeply smitten with the beauty of Italian art he decided he wanted to build a chateau that was entirely in the Renaissance style the first one in France and so he brought back scores of Italian artists and Mason's to do just that the pupil of mirror which came here then what did he do here they do lots of things to decorate the AIA Chappell one of the most beautiful Chapel of the 16th century the fact that andreas Ilario one of Leonardo's leading pupils was working in this chateau around 50 now nine may be the missing piece of the puzzle [Music] unfortunately the chapel and much of the Chateau were destroyed in the French Revolution and the turmoil that followed but one work that Andrea painted for the Chateau still exists a deposition from the cross which today hangs in Duluth san andreas Ilario what we know of him is that he was from a family of artists we think he was probably working in Venice in the period when Leonardo was very first in mind so he wasn't there with him right from the beginning and around 1495 he probably came back from Venice to man with his brother Christopher Oh which is of course exactly the moment when Leonardo's beginning to work on the Last Supper fresco if that's true then salario must have been present as the great fresco of the Last Supper took shape on the refectory wall and since he was one of Leonardo's most talented pupils could he have been the one who painted the copy for the French King in the archives of the Chateau we find a key piece of evidence an inventory of all property including paintings from the 1540s one of these paintings is thus in effect on to a noncom personage keyframe will say your fiesta party to be long a Last Supper on canvas with monumental figures which His grace had brought over from Milan could this be our first hard piece of evidence of a life-size copy of the Last Supper on globe personage with monumental figures put this together with what we know that andreas Ilario was in guile in 1509 and the pieces begin to fall into place there is little doubt that Solaria was a favorite of the da hua's family in 1507 he even painted a portrait of George's nephew Sharla Dom was Cheryl was none other than the governor of Milan at that time but given the short time frame in which the copy was finished between 1507 and 1509 is likely that not only salario but also other leonardo pupils were involved including for example jumpy Torino but here's the next question where is this canvas after all if it's as big as we think it is it's not something you would lose very easily and that's why we find ourselves on the train to enter in Belgium to follow the next trail of clues we usually think of Antwerp as the city of Rubens the painter of the Baroque but even in the early Renaissance Antwerp was a very important city primarily because it served as the major port in the Low Countries the things started to change in the early 16th century primarily as a result of the growing tensions between the Protestant north and the Catholic South which ultimately produced the eighty years war this is when the Catholic Church looked for every which way to defend the faith in the Low Countries and found it in this Abbey the abbey of Toro [Music] now what I think is so interesting is that Dutch Calvinism rejected all forms of religious imagery paintings sculpture even stained glass it was all torn down and destroyed I think that's why the abbot of Tunnel Road decided he should get the biggest painting of Christ and His apostles he could find to deter the north and give a boost to the Catholic faithful in the South reportedly this painting still exists in a small chapel on the grounds of this very convent oh my god there it is yes that's the painting we've been looking for all these weeks yep it is magnificent [Music] you so the painting was brought to Antwerp and just in that specific moment the abbot of tangelo has asked somebody to look after the beautiful huge great painting religious painting for the new abbey church he wrote a letter to the abbot that this the Last Supper of Leonardo da Vinci was sold on the 2nd of February in 1545 it so the painting was actually presented and sold as a product of Leonardo da Vinci yes painted by Leonardo da Vinci in those days it was not that important but probably 90% of the painting as the work of disciples pupils of of da Vinci tell me about this theory of who painted Christ and Saint Jean yes well you know brambilla the lady who has been restoring for 22 years the original fresco in Milano she was she said that this is a work of a group of pupils disciples of da Vinci but she said I'm convinced that a christ is and especially also the apostle of st. john the favorite model of da Vinci has been painted by himself by Leonardo yeah why is that well it's a quality the quality of you when you look at painting you'll see that sanjana's is very nice it's exceptional the quality and very very well and they also made x-rays some twenty years ago there are under the the apostille schedules except for st. John and Christ you're telling me that there are there is an under drawing under all of the Apostles yeah except for John and Christ that is painted directly on the canvas the result of TR of the x-rays that is an astonishing discovery so we might conclude that even though the Apostles may have been painted by his pupils including perhaps andreas Ilario that Leonardo himself painted Christ and say the most important figures on the under last op repeat yeah and also it's they both the painting as a work of the Vinci that's fascinating that's fascinating it is a beautiful work but is this the painting that King Louie de 12th ordered from Leonardo in 1507 and that andreas Ilario brought to France and 1509 fortunately the abbe has an extensive archive going back many hundreds of years and here we find an astonishing eyewitness account that for said go hunt and is do it is said that the painting is made after an original painted on a wall that is now in bad repair and that when a king of France who conquered Milan saw the painting he was very disappointed that he could not take it with him since it was painted on a wall and so he gave the order to have a copy made and that's the copy that hangs in the choir today so what we have here is an eyewitness document from the 16th century that confirms our theory that Louie 212 ordered a copy of the Last Supper from Leonardo da Vinci and that this painting now hangs on the wall of this beautiful Abbey in Belgium but then the plot thickens once more as we saw such a large canvas could not have been painted by just one artist in such a small timeframe so who would have painted it other than andreas ilaria the most likely candidate is an Italian artist called Jim Keithley known for as we will discover in London he went on to make a second copy for 250 years the Royal Academy at Burlington house in London has been training generations of British artists by drawing inspiration from the work of the great masters so we're sitting here in the library which very much relates to the training of the artist these were all what we call materials through artists inspire them for them to look at when did the Royal Academy acquire the copy of the Last Supper and and why did they acquire so it was 1821 the Academy bought it for 600 guineas which then was a lot of money as a sort of comparison in 1820 the National Gallery bought a real Titian for just over 300 pounds so to spend 600 pounds on what was a copy was an immense amount of money so they had to gather all the artists together they all had to vote on it and agree that this was a good purchase it was this extraordinary example of Leonardo's work I mean although it's a copy I think it was seen as a real window into the sort of achievements of Leonardo and to have that in the schools for the artists the students to look at was was an amazing there's a note by Leonardo that refers to a jan pietro who we think is probably the same person and we know that a figure more or less of this name is working in Milan from at least around 1507 so in that second period after Leonardo has been back to Florence and has been returned to Milan and would you agree that he is probably the one of the principal artists on the copy in the Royal Academy yes so that's very much the current line of thinking although pietro Mirani has recently going back to the technical drawings-- underpinning this work and has due to technical analysis of the under drawings of the work has asserted that in fact it's probably well track his hand initially and then Jan patrina coming in as a secondary hand if it's true that jump you tulino worked on both the tunnel Oh Virgin Anne done later around 15-20 on this copy it would seem that between these two paintings we would have a very accurate sense of what the original fresco once looked like I think the scale of it it is it does appear to be very very close to the original and certainly these heads that we can investigate further seem to be very close to the original bull trophy and giardia trina obviously had access to Leonardo's drawings cartoons and they I think was possibly evidence that there may have been some as of freaking out or tracing or you know from these original cartoons so you know this is really interesting that that the basis may be kind of even closer than we originally thought now that we found not one but two life-size versions of the Last Supper by Leonardo and his top pupils do we at long last have a key to see what the fresco and Milan truly looked like the Last Supper painting that would go on to transform the course of Western art could anyone in the 1490s have anticipated the tremendous impact that this fresco would have he would have been told by the Lord of eco and the prior of Santa Maria delle grazie do a Last Supper and they probably would have been expecting that he would have done a Last Supper akin to all of those that had been done primarily in Florence in Tuscany Siena for the previous 200 years but Leonardo of course did not work like that and he did say that the way to make a painting was not to look at other paintings it was to look at real life and so I think what he wanted to do and why he bought the Bible was find the drama in the story was almost like he was the director of a film and he was given the brief this is the film you're going to make you're going to make a film of the Last Supper lion order wanted action and he also wanted the emotion and the dramatic intensity of what happened in those seconds in Jerusalem and that of course is one of the Magnificent things about the painting that he brings that to life and we see that and instantly I think we can understand what's happening there three paintings and yet one vision a vision of depicting the most familiar scene from the Gospels in a way that had never been done before and now we know what that original vision once looked like thanks to a canvas and a remote convent in Belgium of course in the years to come the high Renaissance would produce some of the most memorable frescoes in history including Raphael stanza in the Vatican and Michelangelo's immortal ceiling of the Sistine Chapel but all that incredible realism all that monumental grasp of the human figure first started with a fresco on the wall of a refectory in Milan [Music] you

Channel: DW Documentary

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Keywords: Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo's Last Supper, Leonardo's 500th anniversary, da Vinci anniversary, da Vinci anniversary year, da vinci and the renaissance, leonardo da vinci and the renaissance, da vinci last dinner, da vinci last supper, last supper, leonardo da vinci last supper, leonardo da vinci last supper secrets, last supper painting secrets, last supper painting, leonardo da vinci, leonardo da vinci paintings, DW, DW Documentary, documentary

Id: 2pJD5HtlKwg

Length: 42min 26sec (2546 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 18 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/sandragen]

And who was sitting on the other side of the table?

[u/Kodarkx]

in song form

[u/mamakomamomo]

good watch