The Last Supper (Leonardo)

Lore & Background

The work was commissioned as part of a plan of renovations to the church and its convent buildings by Leonardo's patron Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan. In order to permit his inconsistent painting schedule and frequent revisions, it is painted with materials that allowed for regular alterations: tempera on gesso with an oil-based medium. The Last Supper is Leonardo's largest work, aside from the Sala delle Asse. The theme was a traditional one for refectories, and the room was indeed the refectory of the convent when Leonardo painted the mural. The main church building was largely completed by the 1490s, with only the tribune still under construction while Leonardo was composing the painting. Leonardo's patron, Ludovico Sforza, planned that the church should be remodeled as a family mausoleum. To this end, changes were made, perhaps to plans by Donato Bramante. These plans were not fully carried out, and a smaller mortuary chapel was constructed, adjacent to the cloister. The painting was commissioned by Sforza to decorate the refectory wall. The lunettes above the main painting, formed by the triple arched ceiling of the refectory, are painted with the Sforza coat of arms and decorative motifs. The opposite wall of the refectory is covered by the Crucifixion fresco by Giovanni Donato da Montorfano, to which Leonardo added figures of the Sforza family in fresco, the same technique as Montorfano's work; these figures have deteriorated severely, though the Montorfano fresco itself is in better condition. The beginning date is not certain, as the archives of the convent for the period have been destroyed. A prior from the monastery reportedly complained to Leonardo about its delay. Leonardo wrote to the head of the monastery, explaining he had been struggling to find the perfect villainous face for Judas, and that if he could not find a face corresponding with what he had in mind, he would use the features of the prior who had complained.

Reader's Guide

The Last Supper is significant for its innovative composition and emotional depth. Leonardo chose to depict the moment of Jesus's announcement of betrayal, capturing the distinct reactions of each apostle. Instead of isolating Judas, Leonardo places him among the others but in shadow, clutching a small bag and tipping over a salt cellar. The painting demonstrates masterful use of perspective, with the vanishing point at Jesus's right cheek, drawing attention to his face and hand. The work is also notable for its experimental technique: Leonardo used tempera on a stone wall sealed with gesso, pitch, and mastic, rather than traditional fresco. This allowed him to work slowly and make changes, but the method proved fragile. The painting's influence is seen in its pivotal role in the transition to the High Renaissance, and it remains one of the most recognizable and studied artworks in Western history.

Did You Know?

• The painting is on a brick wall sealed with a double layer of gesso, pitch, and mastic, but the paint itself is tempera on gesso with an oil-based medium.
• Leonardo reportedly used the likenesses of people in and around Milan as inspiration for the painting's figures, and threatened to use the complaining prior's face for Judas.
• Two early copies by Leonardo's assistants, Giampietrino and Cesare da Sesto, survive with much original detail intact.

The Polymath Behind the Brush

He worked as a draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect, and his surviving notebooks reveal a mind that wandered across anatomy, astronomy, botany, cartography, and even palaeontology. This breadth of curiosity is what earned him the reputation of a genius who embodied the Renaissance humanist ideal. His collective artistic output, while numerically modest, shaped European art in ways matched only by his younger peer Michelangelo. The Last Supper, painted during his Milanese period under the patronage of Ludovico Sforza, stands as the religious painting most widely reproduced in history. Yet to view it solely as a devotional commission would miss the engineer's eye for structural composition and the anatomist's precision in rendering each apostle's gesture. Leonardo's fame initially rested on his paintings, but it was the sheer range of his intellectual pursuits that cemented his place as a singular figure in Western cultural memory.

A Life Shaped by Patronage and Place

His early education in Florence came under the tutelage of Andrea del Verrocchio, the leading painter and sculptor of the day, where he trained from roughly age fourteen through his early twenties. His professional life was defined by movement between courts and cities: he began in Florence, then spent significant years in the service of Ludovico Sforza in Milan, returned to Florence, worked in Milan again, and briefly set foot in Rome. A large following of imitators and students trailed him throughout. This peripatetic career meant that major works like The Last Supper were born from specific patronage relationships rather than from a single stable studio practice, and his output was always shaped by the demands and resources of whichever court or city held him at a given moment.

Few Paintings, Enduring Reverberations

Despite being widely identified as one of the greatest painters in Western art history and often credited with founding the High Renaissance, Leonardo left behind fewer than twenty-five attributed major works, many of them unfinished or now lost. This scarcity only intensifies the impact of what survived. The Last Supper holds the distinction of being the religious painting most widely reproduced in history, while the Mona Lisa is regarded as the single most famous painting in the world and his Vitruvian Man drawing has become a cultural icon in its own right.

The Engineer Who Never Published

Beyond the studio, Leonardo's notebooks contain designs for flying machines, an armoured fighting vehicle, concentrated solar power systems, a ratio machine applicable to adding machines, and the concept of a double hull. Relatively few of these were ever built or even feasible in his lifetime, since modern approaches to metallurgy and engineering were still in their infancy during the Renaissance. Yet some smaller inventions slipped quietly into manufacturing without fanfare, including an automated bobbin winder and a device for testing the tensile strength of wire. He also made substantial discoveries in anatomy, civil engineering, hydrodynamics, geology, optics, and tribology. The critical limitation was that he never published his findings, so they exerted little to no direct influence on the science that followed. This silence means that The Last Supper and a handful of other paintings became the primary vehicles through which his genius reached the world, while the vast intellectual architecture behind them remained locked in private codices for centuries.