Close Encounters of the Leonardo Kind

Or, musings on impermanence and perpetuity

The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci. Photo © Cheryl A. Ossola

My son and I will be jaunting around northern Italy this week, and the way things have played out, we’ll need to boomerang back to Milano (where we will have already spent a few days) from Bologna, effectively losing an entire day and around €100 in train and entry tickets to spend 15 minutes gazing at Leonardo da Vinci’s Cenacolo (Last Supper). But now there’s a problem with this plan, and we either have to forfeit the €100 or tack on another €48 to change our tickets to an earlier train. There are bigger problems in life, but this one has provoked some thoughts that go to much deeper places than questions of money or opportunity. And all because my son, when presented with this choice to make (I’ve seen the Cenacolo twice already, so the loss would be more his than mine), said this: “I’d like to think The Last Supper will always be there, but who knows?”

And his words carry more weight than he realizes, compounded by the news I just got that a man I once loved has died. Maybe that heightens what is, for me, the most emotional part of going to see the Cenacolo—coming to the full understanding, only achievable by standing in this place, that when the Chiesa di Santa Maria delle Grazie, which houses this masterpiece in its refectory, was bombed during World War II, the wall carrying Leonardo’s artwork was left standing. Not much else was.

This gives me shivers. Which are intensified by the knowledge that Leonardo himself, because of his dislike for the necessarily rapid pace of fresco painting, nearly doomed his Cenacolo to oblivion. Fresco requires that you paint on wet plaster, which as it dries literally becomes one with the paint and thus limits your ability to make changes. (There are some workarounds.) Leonardo, a tinkerer by nature, didn’t want to work at warp speed, so instead he applied tempera and other media directly to the refectory’s stone wall. An experiment that didn’t end well.

Yet the painting endures—brighter and with more visible details after a restoration done in 1999, though still faded, and despite the indignity of a door having been cut in the wall in 1652 by the resident monks, which eliminated the part of the painting containing Christ’s feet. (It was a dining hall, after all, and the monks needed to go where they needed to go.) The painting is a masterpiece of narrative storytelling that captures more than a single moment. In showing, simultaneously, Christ’s announcement of the betrayal to come and the apostles’ dawning understanding and shift into reaction, Leonardo has created a nuanced, intense visual expression of thought and psychology.

So a painting, destined by its own creator to flake and fade, survives, improbably, a bombing, and now, some 80 years later, draws half a million visitors each year who pay €15 to commune with it for 15 minutes. Some of them, no doubt, come to Milano expressly for this purpose; this painting is that important. It has lived for 524 years now, and having survived what I’ve just described, is housed in a temperature- and humidity-regulated space designed to keep it alive. But for how long? And does it matter?

Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie after the 1943 bombing. Photo from Wikipedia.

I think about this a lot—my own infatuation with the past and its artifacts, what they show us about life however many hundreds or thousands of years ago and what they tell us about ourselves. I haven’t come to any profound realizations; I’m not a great thinker in that respect. All I know is that seeing these old things, knowing how long they’ve lasted and despite whatever odds, makes me ache with longing. I want to throw myself back in time, be there to see these moments of creation, know the creators. Which is, of course, a silly idea, because no one knew then, at least not fully, the importance and significance of a painting like the Cenacolo, a piece of art intended to gaze upon the dining tables of monks. Such frescoes were commonplace. And not only that, they were alla moda, fashionable. Modern. New. People in Leonardo’s day, like all of us, were looking forward, not back.

It’s not that no one realized Leonardo’s genius back then; people did, including those great influencers of their time, the Medici. In the late 1400s Lorenzo (the Magnificent) de’ Medici was Leonardo’s patron; Giorgio Vasari, the famed chronicler of the lives of the artists (and no slouch with a paintbrush himself, or an architect’s tools), wrote that Leonardo was “so favored by nature that to whatever he turned his mind or thoughts the results were always inspired and perfect; and his lively and delightful works were incomparably graceful and realistic.”

People gawked over Leonardo’s works then as they do today, but what they admired were his technique, his innovations, his eccentric brilliance (which drew criticism because he often had trouble finishing what he’d started). That fantastic brain of his resisted being reined in by the inadequate speed of his pencil moving on the page, the demands of his preferred method of oil painting (he was an early adopter of the medium in Europe) in which he used very thin paints in a layering method that took months to complete. Even his now-famous mirror script proclaims his uniqueness, his oddness, his—because there’s really only one word that fits him—genius.

Seeing the Cenacolo is an emotional experience that, for me, has nothing to do with its religious subject and themes of betrayal and sacrifice and hope. It brings me to tears because it’s still here, faded yet glorious, and ephemeral in a way that Milano’s Duomo and Roma’s Colosseum, for example, are not. And fragile seeming, in a way that Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and other paintings are not, because of its astounding against-all-odds survival.

You’d think the Cenacolo’s survival would make it seem less fragile, less ephemeral, more enduring, more permanent. But to me it doesn’t. I can’t help but imagine, despite the efforts of art conservators, that flake by flake, over time, the painting will disappear. Or that we humans in our persistent self-destructive ways will annihilate it—not the painting, specifically, but the world—which is an absurd thought because if that were to occur we wouldn’t be here, and if we were, we’d have bigger worries than the loss of a painting on a wall.

The bottom line, I guess, is that the Cenacolo, by all rights and chances, shouldn’t be here, and that’s what makes the desire to see it seem necessary, urgent. In terms of art history it’s a miracle, no less. And without suggesting a belief in the existence of God, or at least not one who would be concerned with such a minor thing as a painting, its survival seems intended somehow.

I can’t say why I feel this way. Leonardo’s Cenacolo wouldn’t make it onto my top 10 list of favorite paintings, if I could force myself to make those impossible choices. (I can say, though, that Botticelli’s works would dominate the list.) I’m not sure any of Leonardo’s paintings would make the cut, though Lady with an Ermine stands a chance. I’m a huge Leonardo fan, but of the man himself more than his paintings, of the scope of his brilliance, his never-ending quest for knowledge, and his remarkable ability to imagine (and sometimes draw or build) what couldn’t yet be.

Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine. Image from Wikipedia.

I wonder what Leonardo would say about permanence and perpetuity, the value of artwork (or anything else) over time. He was always in a hurry to get to the next thing, to put down on paper or canvas or wood or stucco his latest imaginings. But then he would refine them, often over many years, always reluctant to call something finished. So maybe he did value the idea of perpetuity. Maybe his constant struggle for perfection was driven partly by his awareness of his own genius and his hope/desire that it would live forever.

Sometimes I think that if we were ever to experience another Renaissance, no one would ever know it. Life moves too quickly now, with changes happening so fast that what’s being replaced hardly has a chance to be, much less develop its potential. We are fickle, eager for the new, willing to be influenced, maybe even afraid to sit with ourselves and contemplate anything, much less art.

Then again, for Leonardo and his fellow Renaissance-ers, time probably whizzed by as quickly as it does for us. Probably they were just as eager as we are for the next innovation, the next life-changing development. Still, the realities of their existence necessitated a certain amount of patience. How could it not, when reaching a destination on horseback or by carriage or ship, or receiving a letter or message could take days or weeks. It took months to illuminate a manuscript, years (often filled with loss and grief) to build a family large enough to endure for centuries.

I’ve started with the idea of impermanence and ended up questioning the pace of our existence, the overwhelming volume of things we need to learn in order to navigate our digital lives, the barrage of truths to parse and lies to combat. Rumors have always spread astonishingly fast, but the internet has made their reach worldwide. As for permanence, items we see online are gone in a flash, yet we’re told they live forever, somewhere in the deep, dark bowels of the internet. Our world grows constantly less tangible; it’s permanent only in a way we can’t touch. We don’t need to travel to Milano to see the Cenacolo—we can see it online, zoom in on every detail.

But more and more, as I go to places I’ve dreamed about, see the streets and vistas and artworks I’ve studied so carefully online or in books, they are not as I expected. Whether better or worse, they are different. Virtual reality, it seems, is often approximate, often false. If we are to experience any degree of permanence, the kind that helps us understand and thus preserve or at least value the world we live in, we need to feel what’s beneath our feet—the spring of the earth, the smooth glide of a marble floor, the rough going on a rocky shore. We need to be present, heart and soul and body. We need to observe with all our senses in order to pass judgment, to determine what we value—and what’s important enough to deserve perpetuity.

I think Leonardo would disagree. He probably would have loved the digital age and its endless possibilities for revision. But I still believe he’d have been overjoyed to know that my son and I, and millions like us, want to stand before a stone wall brushed with pigment and hold our breath. We want to stand there in person—not close enough to touch it, but close enough to be touched.

© 2022 Cheryl A. Ossola

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Books of the week:

• Leonardo da Vinci: The Biography by Walter Isaacson

• Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper by Pietro C. Marani

• The Lives of the Artists, Vol. I by Giorgio Vasari

Poem of the week:

• “Nothing Gold Can Stay” by Robert Frost (an oldie but a goodie)

• “Immortality” by Clare Harner