Treatise on humanity: Leonardo’s Last Supper

Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper presents the most dramatic and significant moment of the final hours of the life of Christ, told in the Gospel according to John, when the Redeemer consciously announces his fate, saying “One of you will betray me.” Upon hearing this terrible prediction, the apostles, aghast, become agitated, with expressions ranging from shock to anger, disbelief, doubt, and uncertainty. The three-dimensional model of the Last Supper displayed in the Refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan (the location of the original masterpiece, the result of Leonardo da Vinci’s genius and technical experiments), required the transformation of 15^th-century visual perspective values into tactilely perceivable three-dimensional values. The guidelines formed in convex planes corresponding to detached profiles, projecting from the surface, codify the perspective and make it tangible. The bas relief, in a scale smaller than the original, considers tactile thresholds and pays attention to every minimum detail, expressing the painting’s esthetic qualities and allowing them to be fully appreciated. Likewise, when transforming the work into a bas relief, designed and executed in collaboration with the Tolomeo Museum, all formal and iconographic values were respected in order to reproduce the painting concisely and completely. It is certainly advisable to read Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s magnificent description of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, written in 1817. It is dazzling for anyone who wishes to approach the work and wants to understand its evangelical and human content with feeling, heart, and intellect. The German poet and thinker reveals to the reader the flow of emotions racing through the twelve apostles as Christ consciously announces his fate. Hearing the Master, apostles, aghast, become agitated, with expressions ranging from shock to disbelief, fear to doubt, destruction to responsiveness: the result is an articulate and sincere reflection on human nature and its complexity. Goethe writes that the thirteen characters are portraits “from the adolescent to the elder: one calmly resigned, one frightened, eleven agitated and upset by the thought of betrayal within their family. We see the meekest and calmest demeanor as well as the expression of the most violent passions. If all this had to be taken from nature, think of the time needed to discover so many details and put them all together! So it’s not at all improbable that Leonardo struggled with the work for sixteen years, without reaching a conclusion with either the traitor or with God made man, precisely because both are only concepts and cannot be seen by the eyes.”

The Last Supper is a total work demonstrating the unsurpassable power with which Da Vinci penetrates the physical and metaphysical nature of things, truth and mystery, in both theological and philosophical terms. This is why the work, the result of Leonardo’s experimental painting technique (tempera and oil on plaster), suffering slow but unstoppable decay, evokes the principles of transiency and eternity, despite the help and wonderful results of the latest restoration. In early May, the Anteros Tactile Museum of the Francesco Cavazza Institute for the Blind in Bologna provided professional training to the guides at the Leonardo’s Last Supper Museum and to representatives of educational services at the Brera Picture Gallery by means of lessons for the description and tactile exploration of the Last Supper. It was a highly valuable experience both for the expertise and commitment of the guides and for the willingness to learn and consistently apply the teaching methods acquired, with a well-organized educational service dedicated to blind and visually-impaired visitors.

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