The Last Supper

Leonardo da Vinci painted The Last Supper between 1495 and 1498 on a wall of the refectory at Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. The mural captures the exact moment after Jesus announces that one of his twelve apostles will betray him. Shock, denial, and anguish ripple across the table in waves of gesture and expression, each figure responding with distinct personality.

Leonardo's composition revolutionized how artists depicted this biblical scene. He grouped the apostles in four clusters of three, creating rhythmic visual movement that flows toward Christ at the center. Judas Iscariot sits with the other apostles rather than isolated across the table as earlier painters showed him. You can identify Judas by his shadowed face, the money bag he clutches, and his recoil from Jesus.

The experimental technique proved disastrous for preservation. Leonardo painted on dry plaster (a secco) rather than wet fresco, allowing him to work slowly and achieve soft shadows impossible with traditional methods. The paint began flaking within his lifetime. By 1556, Giorgio Vasari called it "a muddle of blots." A doorway cut through the bottom in 1652 destroyed Christ's feet. Napoleon's troops used the room as a stable. Allied bombs in 1943 destroyed the refectory but sandbags protected the mural itself.

The work measures 460 by 880 centimeters (15 by 29 feet), covering an entire wall. A major restoration from 1978 to 1999 removed centuries of overpainting and stabilized the surface, though only about 20% of Leonardo's original paint survives. Visitors now view it in small, timed groups at Santa Maria delle Grazie, designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1980 specifically because of this Renaissance masterwork.