15 (Long) Minutes With ‘The Last Supper’

By Michael Kimmelman

Published: July 13, 2011

MILAN — The setting can seem a lot like quarantine. The entrance, through several holding pens and sets of automatic doors, leads to an enormous, vaulted, semiprivate room, the patient stretched out to the right. A bedside crowd coos appropriately.
Occasionally I have joined that crowd, before Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper,” in the former whitewashed refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, checking in on a beloved, hospice-bound but faded relative, expecting to make the most of the allotted 15 minutes tourists are permitted. Jesus delivers his message of betrayal, as always, and the shock wave disperses his apostles above the broad white tablecloth like bowling pins. It was a rainy, cold morning the last time I stopped in to see the picture, whose fuzziness and fragility don’t altogether obscure the flashes of coral, blue and pink. I started daydreaming about waves on a Caribbean beach.
I scribbled notes about economy of form and the faraway landscape, but the image kept slipping out of focus, up there high on the wall, in the glare of spotlights, with a buzz of people around and the clock ticking.
Why are the greatest, or anyway, the most familiar works of art sometimes the hardest to concentrate on? Is it the problem of seeing afresh what we think we already know in our minds’ eyes? Friends of mine, art historians, have lamented they can no longer abide “The Last Supper” because it’s too sad in its current state and they hate being hustled from the room after a quarter of an hour. I’m reminded of the borscht belt joke about the guy who complains about the restaurant that serves lousy food in such teensy portions.
But I’d bet most people are grateful for the time limit. How often these days do we pause for even a full minute before any work of art? I notice that visitors to Santa Maria delle Grazie tend to peer a few times at the Leonardo, in between scanning the labels fastened to the railing beneath the painting, then, after a few minutes, they amble toward the other fresco in the room, near the exit, stealing glimpses at their watches, as if calculating the moment it might be acceptable to slip out of the room.
Maybe Leonardo’s time has passed. Maybe that’s part of the problem. He belongs to another era, steeped in antique rhetoric and faulty materials. Like Laserdiscs, Yugoslavia and the ailing Czarevich Alexei, his “Last Supper” came into this world already ill fated. Not 20 years after it was finished, in 1498, it began to flake.
Giorgio Vasari, the artist and Leonardo’s biographer, declared it a ruin a few decades later. Poor restorations, alterations to the refectory, along with centuries of pollution and the occasional war left the picture in the condition I first discovered it, in the half light of a late summer afternoon, as a teenage art pilgrim during the late 1970s, shortly before it underwent its last round of reconstructive surgery.
That last round took 21 years. An altogether different painting appeared on newspaper front pages, previous restorations stripped away and vacant patches of lost pigment filled in by watercolor. The work looked ghostly, like breath on glass. Nostalgists fumed, naturally, but the patient was at least stable, conservators responded, and what survived of it demanded our forbearance. Viewing hours were henceforth to be by appointment only, 15 minutes per customer, for our sake and the art’s.
And so the picture I found filthy but florid during the gritty days of late Fellini and the Red Brigade had been reborn into the fastidious age of soy milk and nanotechnology. In lieu of lone pilgrims and natural light, package tourists making online bookings joined artificial lights that flattened the image. Modernized in its new climate- and crowd-control environment, one of the most familiar pictures in the history of art suddenly seemed alien, like vacuum-packed heirloom tomatoes and no-smoking parks. Even the time limit, a courtesy of the modern hospitality industry, only discouraged visitors from getting to the bottom of the bottomless.
We get the culture we deserve in the end, which represents us. The other morning I found myself drifting with the crowd toward the room’s second fresco, a huge Renaissance Crucifixion by Giovanni Donato da Montorfano: horses, soldiers and throngs of figures mill at the bases of crosses that tower like sequoias, rising into lunettes beneath the ceiling.
It’s a splendid, colorful work, I thought, then glanced back toward the Leonardo.
And almost uncons