A picture universally recognized, endlessly scrutinized and described,
incessantly copied, adapted, lampooned: 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 double: 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
assumption: 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.
