With all the snow we’ve had lately, it’s difficult to
remember that “Lent” means
Through forty snowy days, Christians contemplate all the events that lead up to Easter. I have a friend who always gives up chocolate through Lent. I, on the other hand, think Lent, like most seasons, is a fine time to eat rather than to fast. We need to keep up our strength and push through to tulip time. After all, that’s what Jesus himself did. Look at all those empty plates.
I look forward to the possibility of actually seeing this da
Vinci painting on the back wall of the dining hall at Santa Maria delle Grazie
in Milan this summer and then imagine all those monks looking at it as they ate—through Lent right up through Easter and
beyond.
Maybe with the exception of Mona Lisa, this is the most talked about
painting Leonardo created. He was careful to place the disciples into four
groups of three like "trinity-knots," each reacting to Jesus’ news of his
forthcoming trials: one in a garden, one in a court and the final one on a windy hill.
Da Vinci wanted truer colors so he painted it on a dry wall with oil and plaster rather than fresco. It almost immediately began to flake off--down to about 20% of the original, to be exact. The figure most believe to be John at Jesus' right could also be Mary Magdalene. Another beardless male, the third figure to his left, most commonly believed to be Philip,might be female—perhaps another close friend, Martha. Of course including those women would throw off the apostle count.
Like seeing images in clouds, people have spent lifetimes
charting possible embedded symbols. A dagger or knife? A grail? Why only eleven
glasses? And is there a musical composition using hands and loaves of bread as
notes? It’s not Passover because leavened bread and fish were served.
Leo got the commission some twenty years before he finally
finished it and two years after he started painting, he announced, “It’s almost
complete.” The original abbot who commissioned it died and when the new abbot
came around, sternly demanding to know why it was taking so long, Leonardo said,
“I can finish it now. Since you have arrived I finally have the model for
Judas.” And so he did, in 1498.
Of course, he originally gave Christ feet, but in 1650 somebody decided to put in another door to the refectory and cut smack-dab into the bottom middle of Leonardo’s painting. When Napoleon came by shortly before 1800, he stabled horses in the dining hall and for sport, his soldiers threw bricks at the apostles’ heads. During World War II a bomb fell on the roof.
Like spotting early flowers through the snow, the original colors have been restored in a pixel by pixel high-def digital version. (See here for more information on this amazing process.)
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