You have 15 minutes to immerse yourself in the last supper of Jesus Christ with his disciples. It was painted in fresco by Leonardo Da Vinci on a wall in the refectory of the Dominican monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie, in the center of Milan. You will have seen it in dozens of reproductions, but in nature it is something else, despite its serious deterioration due to the technique used in its creation, the passage of time and the vibrations caused by the bombings of World War II.
The artist who has gone down in history as the incarnation of the Renaissance mixed the pigments with egg yolk to obtain more intense colors. Aided by his apprentices, he applied the paint onto layers of plastered dry plaster. Lacking moisture, the plaster absorbed it superficially. This made corrections easier, and, as we have said, gave more lively tones. But the technique implied a great disadvantage: the oil and tempera were fixed in a single external layer, so that they were more vulnerable.
It doesn’t matter. The Last Supper (460cm x 880cm) impresses, and there are those who cross half the world to spend a quarter of an hour (the maximum time allowed to the visitor) in front of this prodigy that, surely, astonished the monks who saw it recently completed. It would seem to them that they could enter the scene, extremely realistic and that fixed in time the moment in which Jesus announced to his disciples that one of them would betray him.
The twelve apostles are shown in groups of three, with only Judas appearing in isolation. Leonardo represented the emotions and movements of the characters with the greatest naturalness, which he arranged in a composition of mathematical harmony. It seems like an equation made with the heart.
In that refectory we believe without hesitation the story told by a witness of the work of the Florentine: often, Leonardo would climb the scaffolding from which he painted The Last Supper, and spend hours studying it in silence, before adding a single brushstroke.
Leonardo dedicated three years of his life (from 1495 to 1498) to this work commissioned by Ludovico Sforza, great patron and Duke of Milan between 1494 and 1499. He was 46 years old when he finished it, and he was in the maturity of his art. He had left Florence in 1482 to work at the brilliant Milanese court as “painter and engineer to the duke.” In the seventeen years that he spent there, until his patron lost power, he painted, sculpted, advised on the construction of buildings and fortifications and the manufacture of weapons, organized court parties and still had time to work as a hydraulic and mechanical engineer, in addition to to study nature.
In his second stage in Milan (1508-1513) he barely painted, but took part in sculptural and architectural projects and developed a great scientific activity. Da Vinci left his mark in the capital of Lombardy, and here we are going to trace it.
It’s not Venice, but the Mediolanum of the ancient Romans also has canals, the navigli. There were a few, but only two of importance remain: the Naviglio Grande and the Naviglio Pavese, which meet at a dock built in 1603. They can be traveled by boat, they pass through some of the most interesting and lively places in the city, and are related with DaVinci. He was the one who proposed a redesign of the dams and locks of the old canal network; thus he managed to make them more navigable, which improved access to the center of the city and connected it with nearby places, such as Lake Como or Pavia.
One of the navigli that he designed starts from Milan’s Ponte delle Gabelle and reaches Cassano d’Adda, 30 kilometers away. Its route follows a bike path that takes us by pedaling through fertile fields dotted with farms, abbeys, small towns and noble residences. You can also cycle along the course of other canals that start from the Lombard capital or run nearby.
Contemplating the greatness of The Last Supper, Ludovico Sforza decided to reward its author with a special present: a 16-row vineyard next to the garden of the Casa degli Atellani, owned by the nobleman Giacometto di Lucia dell’Atella, head of a prestigious family. of diplomats and courtiers. The painter of La Gioconda always had a great appreciation for this piece of land located just in front of Santa Maria delle Grazie. When the French conquered Milan he managed to get them to recognize it as his property, and even mentions it in his will.
At the beginning of the last century, the architect Luca Beltrami discovered the location of the vineyard and photographed its remains. Bombardments covered it with rubble in 1943, but it has been resurrected today. Archaeological excavations have revealed the rows where their vines grew, and genetics have made it possible to reconstruct the genetic profile of the vines, which in this way could be replanted in 2015.
Today they produce a small amount of wine made from the Malvasia di Candia Aromática grape and 16th century methods, similar to what Leonardo would (we know he did) enjoy. The vineyard can be visited, as can the Casa degli Atellani, which houses a museum dedicated to the Florentine genius and valuable pieces of art.
A ten-minute walk from the vineyard stands the Sforza castle, built in the 15th century on the ruins of a previous fortress, and which was the residence of our protagonist’s patron, who decorated it with the works of numerous artists, including those that Leonardo figured. The frescoes that he did in several rooms are not well preserved. The most impressive are those in the Sala della Asse, on the first floor of the northeast tower of the enclosure, where the Sforzas received guests and ambassadors.
Da Vinci painted a dense intertwining of mulberry trees on its ceiling and walls, demonstrating great botanical knowledge. Unfortunately, its condition is delicate, and the long restoration process keeps the room closed to the public. But there is another sample of Leonardesque ingenuity that you can admire in the castle library: the Trivulziano Codex, a 55-page manuscript with annotations, drawings and sketches of the projects that never stopped going through his head.
One of those projects never completed was to create the largest bronze equestrian statue in the world, a horse in honor of – of course – Ludovico Sforza, who commissioned Da Vinci, one of the first to do so. For a decade, the artist combined other tasks with the study of the anatomy and movements of the best court horses; he filled sheets and sheets with drawings, calculations and sketches for his colossal task: to lift a figure 7.3 meters high and weighing 150 tons.
In 1493, when a first version of the statue had already been finished in terracotta, the imminent threat of a French invasion led Ludovico to melt down the bronze reserved for the work, necessary to produce cannons and other weapons. Very disappointed, Leonardo wrote down this sentence in one of his notebooks: “I will never speak of the horse again.”
Fortunately, his plans for this work were preserved. In 1977, Charles Dent, an American art collector and passionate about the Renaissance, had the idea of ​​making the famous horse a reality, and he began to raise funds for it. In 1999, the bronze horse based on Da Vinci’s drawings arrived in Milan. Its execution corresponded to Nina Akamu, an American sculptor of Japanese origin, and can be seen at the entrance to the city’s hippodrome. By the way, the old terracotta figure was destroyed by bad weather in 1499, the year the French took Milan.
Always hand in hand with the Sforzas, Leonardo drew several sketches for the construction of a dome on the tower of the Duomo, the enormous Gothic cathedral that continues to be the most representative building in Milan. The initiative did not go beyond paper, and today we can see some of the sketches in the Trivulziano Codex that we talked about before.
As is well known, Da Vinci was a tireless inventor of gadgets that often did not go beyond his imagination. And he was also an acute observer of nature, an empiric far from the Platonic ideas that marked a good part of Renaissance thought. It is not surprising that the Museum of Science and Technology in the Lombard capital bears his name, and that it reserves a space for his work. In the building, an old convent from the 14th century, models faithful to the Tuscan designs are exhibited, and replicas of his looms with automatic functions and his rotating machines, among other things.
Many of these designs appear in the Atlantic Codex, a collection of more than a thousand manuscript pages exhibited on a rotating basis in the Ambrosiana library. Leonardo did not move without carrying papers and notebooks in which to capture ideas, drawings, detailed designs and whatever was on his mind. He did it throughout his life, and the aforementioned codex is almost like a life diary of the artist’s concerns and interests.
Since we are in the Ambrosiana library, we cannot miss its Pinacoteca, rich in works by great masters. The only known male portrait of the painter born in Vinci is preserved there. It is the Portrait of a Musician, completed around 1485. And also an excellent copy of a famous canvas by Leonardo: The Virgin of the Rocks.
A century after his death, Leonardo was already an icon. Today he is more than ever, and he continues to make Milanese proud, whom he seems to look at pensively with stone eyes from the top of the monument that pays homage to him in Piazza della Scala, the same one that houses the mythical theater.
