There is never a dull moment in this story about late 1400s Italy - a hotbed of sodomy and syphilis as well as magnificent art and architecture - and the circumstances by which Leonardo da Vinci came to paint “The Last Supper.” This painting, writes King, which is arguably the most famous painting in the world, “is now 80 percent by the restorers and 20 percent by Leonardo.”

Leonardo was born in 1452 near Vinci, a hamlet sixty miles west of Florence. He was born out of wedlock, and so was not permitted by the laws at that time to go into the family business of being a notary. His illegitimacy also barred him from the legal profession or the university. His father could have arranged to have the situation fixed, but the author observes that “for unknown reasons he never legitimized him.”

However, the plus side was that Leonardo’s status freed him for more creative pursuits.

When he was 13 or 14 Leonardo began an apprenticeship in Florence with the goldsmith, painter, and sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio. This was about the time Verrocchio began working for the ruling Medici family. Leonardo stayed in Verrocchio’s workshop for at least six or seven years, “learning the trade secrets essential to a painter and sculptor.”

Leonardo went to Milan at age 30. Although he was astonishingly gifted at drawing and painting, his real loves were engineering and architecture. He had hopes, inter alia, of “inventing and constructing fearsome war machines such as chariots, cannons, and catapults.”

Alas, it was his art that earned him a living, and he began doing jobs for Lodovico Sforza, the ruler of Milan, within a few years of his arrival, mainly because Florence’s two greatest sculptors, Andrea del Verrocchio and Antonio del Pollaiuolo, were both busy on other projects. Lodovico was especially into staging spectacles, and he often used Leonardo to help with the costumes and sets for his extravaganzas.

King writes:

“By the age of 42 - in an era when life expectancy was only forty - Leonardo had produced only a few scattered paintings, a bizarre-looking music instrument, some ephemeral decorations for masques and festivals and many hundreds of pages of notes and drawings for studies he had not yet published, or for inventions he had not yet built. There was clearly a stark gulf between his ambitions and his accomplishments. Everyone who met him, or who saw his works, was dazzled by his obvious and undeniable brilliance. But too often his ambitions had been curtailed or frustrated.”

In his private notes, however, Leonardo wrote, “I wish to work miracles.” He finally got his chance, although not in the way he anticipated, with a commission in late 1494 tor early 1495 to paint the Last Supper on the wall of the refectory (the room used for communal meals) of Santa Maria Delle Grazie, a Dominican convent in Milan to which Lodovico had ties.

King tells us a lot about the Dominicans, who, along with the Franciscans, were the most active religious order in Italy. He also writes about other portrayals of the Last Supper in Florence, at least some of which Leonardo would have been familiar with. In particular, the Last Supper was a popular depiction in convent and monastery refectories.

King observes:

“A Last Supper was never an easy proposition, even on spacious refectory walls. The artist had somehow to fit around a table thirteen separate figures through whom he would illustrate either the moment when Christ instituted the Eucharist or announced, to general incomprehension, that one of the number would betray him.”

The painting was intended to be a fresco, but Leonardo did not have expertise in that technique, about which King provides details. He was, on the other hand, fascinated by the possibilities of working with oil paint, still not widely used at that time. For this commission he insistence on using oils, which he also mixed with tempera. By the summer of 1497 or at the latest the spring of 1498 Leonardo had finished "The Last Supper":

“The result was 450 square feet of pigment and plaster, and a work of art utterly unlike anything ever seen before - and something unquestionably superior to the efforts of even the greatest masters of the previous century.”

Leonardo had four versions of the Last Supper to guide him - one from each of the four Gospels. The details of the supper differed slightly in each account. In particular, John’s version of the Last Supper makes no mention of the institution of the Eucharist.

Dominican art was often meant to reinforce doctrinal issues. One such issue in which the Dominicans, as the church’s spiritual enforcers, took an acute interest was transubstantiation. This doctrine was established in 1215 in the opening creed of the Fourth Lateran Council, which stated that the body and and blood of Christ “are truly contained in the sacrament of the alter under the forms of bread and wine.”

(Thus) Leonardo’s Last Supper was created…for a band of Dominican friars who ritually commemorated Christ’s sacrifice through the celebration of the Eucharist.

John’s Gospel also differs in having John, called “the disciple whom Jesus loved most,” reclining on Christ’s bosom. On this point, Leonardo did not follow the Gospel of John, but rather used John as part of another seminal aspect of the supper, when Christ announced one of the group would betray him.

Leonardo had spent his life trying to show emotions through drawings of facial expressions and hand gestures, and depicting people in the act of speaking or listening. It was one of his preoccupations, along with linear perspective and the best chemical composition of colors and their juxtapositions in art. In a treatise he wrote on painting he claimed the artist had “two principal things to paint: that is, man and the intention of his mind. The first is easy; the second difficult, because it has to be represented by gestures and movements of the parts of the body.”

Part of the greatness of <em>The Last Supper</em> is due to the perfection of these artistic techniques in his painting, revealing Leonardo’s “astounding powers of observation and unsurpassed understanding of light, movement, and anatomy.” King writes:

“Above all, it possessed more lifelike details...than anything ever created in two dimensions. An entirely new moment in the history of art had been inaugurated. . . . Art historians identify it as the beginning of the period they used to call the High Renaissance…. Leonardo had effected a quantum shift in art, a deluge that swept all before it.”

Alas, we only know of its greatness indirectly. The painting began disintegrating within twenty years of its completion. Over the years, the painting suffered from the paint’s defective adhesion to the wall; dampness, humidity, steam, smoke, and soot from the convent, the resulting mold; flooding, invasions, looting, and later even bombing in wartime. The refectory in which it was painted became a stable for Napoleon’s troops in 1796. The soldiers scratched out the apostles’ eyes and lobbed rocks at the painting. (Fortunately, the mural began some eight feet above the ground.)

By 1726 the work had become so dim and illegible that the friars began hiring restorers, some of which were untalented frauds.

Fortunately Leonardo’s student Giampietrino (probably Giovanni Pietro Rizzoli) did a faithful copy in about 1520.

In 1977 the latest campaign for restoration began, taking a total of twenty-two years to complete before the unveiling in May 1999. Giampietrino’s work was used as a guide.

King also includes many fascinating details about Leonardo’s personal life and about the social and political atmosphere in Europe in his time. For example, Leonardo, who was undoubtedly gay, had to pick up and leave town several times for “scandals.” The author notes, interestingly, that “In the fifteenth century, Florentines were so well-known for homosexuality that the German word for sodomite was Florenzer.” The historical and religious context for the work is what gives this account so much piquancy and appeal.

Color plates are included.

Evaluation: I found this book to be so riveting I determined to move on to the author’s other works that purport to combine stories of the origin and background of great art with riveting details of the times, such as the positively reviewed "Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling."

I was drawn to this having read "The Agony & the Ecstasy" by Irving Stone, and "A Name in Blood" by Matt Rees (on Caravaggio). And like many others, I am curious as to how Leonardo came to create this fresco painting, a departure from his normal medium (oil painting). It is also a tale of the man himself set against the backdrop of the Italian wars with the French.

Having read a couple of fiction books about the Last Supper, it was interesting to read a non-fiction study. King does a great job of discussing Leonardo - his passions, his background, his style, etc. - but leaves some of the Last Supper out. What I mean is, there's information I would have liked to know (particularly about the actual painting, as Leonardo used oil rather than tempura) that wasn't included. Instead readers will get long digressions into the political situation in what we now call Italy and some about the religious issues of the time.

There is lots of trivia, and not a few unanswered questions (for example, why did the painting have a spot 15' in the air as its perfect perspective point?) that will fascinate readers. By the end, you'll know less about the painting and more about Leonardo. Which isn't all bad.

My apologies; if I requested this book, it appears that due to family commitments I was not able to read it before the book was archived. I'm sorry it has lingered this long.