The Last Supper

Each apostle reacts in his own way, and the twelve fall into four groups of three. Judas leans back into shadow clutching his purse. Christ sits at the still centre, and all the lines of the ceiling and walls run toward his head. A nail hole at that point survives, where strings were tied to lay out the perspective.

Fresco must be painted quickly into wet plaster. Leonardo wanted to work slowly, adding and changing, so he painted in tempera and oil on a dry wall. The paint soon began to flake. A twenty-year restoration finished in 1999 removed centuries of repainting and recovered what remains of his surface.

The novelist Matteo Bandello remembered watching him work, sometimes painting from dawn to dusk without eating, sometimes standing before the wall for hours only looking.