Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper

by Leo Steinberg

A picture universally recognized, endlessly scrutinized and described, incessantly copied, adapted, does Leonardo’s near-ruined Last Supper still offer anything new to be seen or to be said? This book is a resounding Yes to both questions. With direct perception ― and with attention paid to the work of earlier scholars and to the criticism embodied in the production of copyists over the past five hundred years ― Steinberg demonstrates that Leonardo’s mural has been consistently oversimplified.

This most thought-out picture in Western art, painted in the 1490s on the north wall of the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan, is a marvel of compressed meanings. Its subject is not one arrested moment, but successiveness and duration. It is not only Christ’s announcement of the forthcoming betrayal, but in equal measure the institution of the Eucharist. More than the spur of the moment animates the disciples, and more than perspective determines their housing.

Though Leonardo’s geometry obeys all the rules, it responds as well to Christ’s action at center, as if in emanation from the prime mover. The picture is simultaneously narrative and sacramental. As its protagonist is two-natured ― as the twofold event of this night is both human submission and divine dispensation ― so the entire picture is shown to have been conceived as a sublime pun.

Meanwhile, the unending disagreement as to what exactly is represented, what the depicted actions express, how and where this assembly is seated ― all these still raging disputes are traced to a single mistaken that Leonardo intended throughout to be “unambiguous and clear,” and that any one meaning necessarily rules out every other.

As Steinberg reveals an abundance of significant interrelations previously overlooked, Leonardo’s masterpiece retains the freshness of its initial conception and the power to fascinate.

Genres: Nonfiction, Art

320 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2001

About the author

Leo Steinberg, born in Moscow, Russia, was an American art critic and art historian and a naturalized citizen of the U.S.

Though an important 20th-century art critic, Leo Steinberg was also a historian and scholar, particularly of the works of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and other Italian Renaissance artists. He had a particular interest in the depiction of Christ in art, but this caused controversy and debate. He was also a recognized authority in the field of modern art criticism and produced important work on Pablo Picasso, Jasper Johns and Willem de Kooning. Because he had experience as a historian, his work on contemporary artists could place them in historical context. One of his most significant essays was Contemporary Art and the Plight of its Public, which appeared in March 1962 in Harper's Magazine.

Steinberg took a less-than-formal approach to criticism, sometimes using a first-person narrative in his essays, which personalized the experience of art for readers. In many of his writings, he expressed his love for art's ability not only to reflect life but also to become it and commented, "Anything anybody can do, painting does better." He believed that the difference between modern painting and that of the Old Masters was the viewer's subjective experience of that artwork. He also believed that Abstract Expressionist action painters, such as Pollock, were more concerned with creating good art than with merely expressing a personal identity on canvas, a point of view contrary to that held by Harold Rosenberg, another American art critic of Steinberg's era.

Reviews

[Patrick Gibson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Milano, for me is La Scala. There is no other reason to visit. Although, once, on a bored afternoon, I decided to take a detour to see The Last Supper. It is located in one of the ugliest little buildings imaginable. The lines to get in are long. Once inside, there it is—in all its doorway-cut-through ragged peeling warped spender. Did I say ‘spender?’ Huh. The thing is a wreck. I couldn’t decide while standing in front of it, if the world has been sold a cosmic joke for four hundred years or if I was really standing in the presence of genius. To this day, I still don’t know. I mean, uh, it’s nice and all, but to be reproduced a billion times?

Voila! Now another intellectual, rigorous book about da Vinci's Last Supper, with fresh perspectives on how to analyze and interpret the painting—amalgamating an enormous amount of information. Including that feeling of ambiguity you get after looking at it for more than a few minutes. Kinda like my experience. Unlike myself, this author is profoundly in love with the paint on the plaster.

The author shows how Leonardo possessed an advanced understanding of perspective and created an impossible location; and the book contains an overview of Last Supper copies throughout history. No discussion of John the Baptist being a woman or more speculative aspects of the Last Supper such as secret society messages—only an analysis of the painting, unearthing the why and how Leonardo da Vinci put paint to brush to wall.

[Ingrid · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun delve into all the complexities in a famous work. I love Leonardo da Vinci, and I'll read pretty much anything about him.

[Jen · Rating 3 out of 5]

It got too technical for me to fully understand, but I enjoyed a peek into the world of art criticism.

[Al Adducci · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very impressive research and analysis

[Hol]

I ended up skimming some of the more academic parts of this book, but overall it was a lot of fun to have an art history monograph in my hands again; it’s been a while. What was fascinating is how manifold the interpretations of this painting have been, and how they continue to accumulate by the decade--people have been discussing and debating its meaning(s) for more than half a millennium now. Steinberg rightly focuses on how Leonardo’s artistry made this multifaceted interpretation possible, rather than on what ideas about it hold the most water, but of course he has his own opinions, too, and hints at their preeminence. For instance, he summarizes nine hypotheses of the significance of Thomas’s upturned finger before presenting his own presumably supreme theory (and then challenges anyone to surpass it). I was left thinking that the fact that a single painting can be alive and newly revealing throughout so many historical periods must be one of the more interesting ways you could define it as "art."