Take a look at Leonardo da Vinci s Last Supper Documentary

The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci, when it was first shown in 1499, it created shockwaves through Italy and beyond, changing the world of art forever. But a 20-year restoration effort has revealed the awful truth. Of the original fresco, only some 20% is still visible. Simply put, we can no longer see nor understand why this painting had such a devastating impact. Or can we? This is the incredible story of a hunt across Europe, following a trail of clues and documents hidden for centuries that suggests that Leonardo and his workshop painted another Last Supper. A huge, life-size canvas for none other than the King of France. Does that painting still exist? And if so, can it reveal the secrets of the original fresco? This is where our story starts, in Milan, the most important fashion and business city in all of modern Italy. And in that sense, not much has changed. Even in the 15th century, Milan was a bustling city, filled with artists and musicians. Of all the city-states in Italy, the Duchy of Milan was the most powerful, the most exuberant, and the wealthiest by far. No wonder that many kings in Europe wanted to conquer it. Particularly because the man in charge, a Duke named Ludovico Sforza, was a tyrant who had seized power in 1481. And like many other such rulers, he was desperate to cloak his illegitimacy with the splendor of a Renaissance court. The Duke had many projects, a monastery complex called the Certosa di Pavia, and a new church building right here in Milan called the Santa Maria delle Grazie. But the biggest project of all was this massive cathedral, deliberately designed to be the biggest church building in all of Italy. So naturally, this city was a magnet for young artists and sculptors from all over the region. But why Leonardo? This artist wasn't from Lombardy. He was from Florence, the most exciting city in all of Italy, the wellspring of the Renaissance. What was he doing painting a fresco in Milan? The answer may be found in a small village outside of Florence called Vinci. Leonardo was a natural child, the son of a farmer's daughter, Caterina, who one day had a roll in the hay with a promising young notary called Ser Piero. Of course, marriage was out of the question. A bright future awaited Ser Piero, provided he married a wife from a prestigious family. That's why Leonardo was never truly part of the creative circles of Florence around Lorenzo de' Medici, with artists like Ghiberti, Ghirlandaio, or Michelangelo. These were folks who wrote Latin, sonnets, and could hold their own in fine society. Leonardo was never part of that. But Ser Piero never forgot his son and was always ready to use his connections to help him get work. But the lack of a proper education left young Leonardo at a major disadvantage. Instead, he was apprenticed to the workshop of one of the most prolific artists of Florence, Andrea Verrocchio. Here, Leonardo learned how to mix pigments, prepare panels, or transfer large fresco drawings, called cartoons, to a plastered wall. Eventually, Verrocchio allowed him to paint one of the angels in his panel of the Baptism of Christ. It's obvious that Leonardo's angel is much more beautiful than the rather dour angel to the right, painted by Verrocchio himself. So how did he create such lovely, angelic faces? The answer? By using a new invention called oils. Whereas most of Florence still used the flat colors of tempera paint, which dries quickly, Leonardo had begun to experiment with pigments mixed with oils, a technique first developed in northern Europe. The advantage oil has versus egg tempera is that in order to create a three-dimensional object, you pretty much have to mix every single color that you put in there or crosshatch it so you get the feeling of dimension. But with oil, you didn't have that problem. You can have an incredible range from black to white. Almost seamlessly. And so this was a huge shift for the artists in the Renaissance. Gunnar Amer is a classically trained artist who painted a life-size recreation of the Sistine Chapel for the motion picture Angels and Devils. And how were these oils made? Well, they were ground-up pigments that could be anything from bones to dry parsley to, of course, the famous ultramarine blue that came from Afghanistan that was so expensive that it cost more than actual gold in its own weight. My God, more than gold. Yeah. Yes, it did. The 15th century, the Quattrocento, was an exciting time to be in Florence. It was a time of rebirth, the Renaissance, the revival of the ancient world in the arts, in science, in literature, and in engineering. Here, for example, Filippo Brunelleschi used Roman engineering to create this vast dome over the Duomo, the Cathedral of Florence. While Brunelleschi was taking measurements of ancient temples in Rome, he had discovered that when you draw a street or a building, all the horizontal lines seem to converge to a common center, what today we call the vanishing point. Brunelleschi had discovered the laws of linear perspective. It revolutionized Renaissance art. Suddenly, painters could create an illusion of three-dimensional space, as if the image they painted was a window on another world. You know, for us, it's almost impossible to imagine the impact of this innovation. Why? Because today we are surrounded by simulated images in the form of billboards, television, cinema. They have conditioned our brain to interpret flat images as three-dimensional reality. But in the Middle Ages, men and women never had that experience before, and so they must have been utterly amazed by a painting like this one, The Crucifixion, by Masaccio, the first fresco in history to use linear perspective. People in those days must have thought it was some form of magic to see space where there was only a flat wall. Leonardo was also trained in the magic of linear perspective in the workshop of his master Verrocchio, and he too was amazed by the possibilities. But as he began his first major painting, Leonardo realized that linear perspective had one major drawback. It tended to stifle the figures and inhibit their expressive power. In many paintings, the figures became like puppets fixed on a rigid grid. Ten years later, Leonardo would write, So what Leonardo is saying is, don't let geometry deprive your characters of feelings, of emotions, of psychological drama. And the first bold attempt to do just that is a painting that hangs right here, in the Uffizi, called The Adoration of the Magi. Unfortunately, the monks who commissioned the panel weren't interested in moving the boundaries of Italian art. They simply wanted a pretty picture of the nativity that people could recognize and worship. And so the work was stopped, and the painting remained unfinished. It would take nearly two decades before Leonardo could realize his great vision. He talked about wanting to create his work of fame. He could see Brunelleschi's work of fame, he could see Donatello's works of fame, and he wanted to create his own. And so his destiny, he felt, lay with a large court, with a grand patron, a single person who was going to be writing the checks. And that happened to be the most powerful man in Italy in the 1480s and 1490s, was the Duke of Milan, Lodovico Sforza. And so that's why he went north in 1482, to begin working for someone who was in effect a prince, not just a group of monks. That's why Leonardo decided to turn his back on Florence, and that's why he came here, in Milan, filled with ambition. Not as an artist, but as an engineer, a military engineer. He even prepared an impressive pitch for the Duke that cataloged all of his military talents. I have methods for destroying every fortress or stronghold, and that's built on a rock. I can also design different types of cannon, which will hurl stones and ball like a hailstorm. Leonardo's hopes came to naught. It took several years for Duke Lodovico to finally notice the Florentine artist. But the project he gave him, a huge equestrian statue, ended in failure. The only thing that remains of this massive project are his studies. Leonardo was ready to tackle the greatest, most ambitious composition of his young career. A series of 13 live-sized portraits of men seated at a table for a wall in Milan. How did the Last Supper project come about? And who asked Leonardo to paint it? This may come as a surprise, but we really don't know. What we do know is that the Duke's forza tended to favor home-grown artists like Giovanna da Montelfano. They may not have been particularly imaginative, but they delivered their work on time and on budget. Like this fresco of Saint Peter Martyr. What we do know is that the Duke had chosen this church to become the pantheon of his dynasty. Actually, it was part of a Dominican convent, and the abbot right away saw his opportunity. So he asked the Duke if he would build him a new refectory, a place to have meals for the monks, complete with frescoes. A refectory was usually decorated with two paintings, a Last Supper and a Crucifixion of Christ. The Last Supper illustrated the institution of the Eucharist, whereas the Crucifixion depicted the redemption of mankind to the suffering of Jesus, the two counterpoints of Christian theology. The most important fresco, destined for the south wall, was the Crucifixion of Christ. This the Duke gave to Giovanni da Montelfano, whose family had been working on the Cathedral of Milan for many decades. But who was going to paint the north wall? Leonardo da Vinci? Up to this point, what Leonardo had done, other than the failed equestrian project and the two small portraits, was the production of plays and masks for the entertainment of the Duke and his court. Was he truly going to be given this monumental fresco? But Leonardo was, in effect, the special effects man for the Duke. And so I guess we would think of him as a sort of a combination set designer, costume designer and special effects person for these spectaculars that Lodovico would have staged maybe a couple of times a year in Milan. That is why Leonardo was determined that with this fresco, he was going to astonish them all. And they probably would have been expecting that he would have done a Last Supper akin to all of those that had been done primarily in Florence, in Tuscany, Siena, for the previous 200 years. But of course he did something quite different. That archetype showed Christ breaking bread, thus establishing the first Eucharist. But like a skilled film director, Leonardo picked a far more dramatic scene. The moment when Jesus declares that one of the men in the room is a traitor. That news literally explodes from the center and hits the apostles in various poses of shock, disbelief, sorrow, even anger. The full panoply of human emotions is laid bare. The same idea that had galvanized his adoration of the Magi some 25 years earlier. Leonardo wanted action and he also wanted the emotion and the dramatic intensity of what happened in those seconds in Jerusalem. And that of course is one of the magnificent things about the painting. He brings that to life and we see that and instantly I think we can understand what's happening there. It's that whole vortex of human drama. That's right, where everyone is reacting differently. They're asking each other, there's incredulity, there's disbelief, there's anger. In the case of someone like St. John, he just appears to be coming awake and he's being interrogated by St. Peter. And so he does, he takes each of these 12 and gives them some characteristic, some facial expression, hand gestures, things like that, in order to take us into the character. But here is the great tragedy. Most of these beautiful expressions are no longer visible today. Unlike Montorfano, who used conventional fresco techniques, Leonardo could not resist experimenting with his pigments. To try to create the same optical effects that he had pioneered with his oil paintings. The result was catastrophic. I think the thing that's so interesting about him is that he's got different intellectual interests. And so he's trying to achieve different goals with paint, but he's asking different questions of them. Larry Keith is the head of conservation and keeper at London's National Gallery. But also I think he really was interested in exploring nuances of tonal gradation. All those kinds of distinctions that I think are really not possible to achieve in fresco. In 1517, an influential cardinal named Luigi d'Aragon and his secretary, Antonio de Beatis, went on a tour. And among others, visited the convent in Milan to see the Last Supper. As de Beatis would write, It is most excellent, although it is beginning to decay, either because of the dampness of the wall or some other form of neglect. In the centuries since, the fresco continued to deteriorate. Because it was adjoining a kitchen, so all the moisture was trapped in the wall. In the end, there's really no way to know what Leonardo's great masterpiece looked like. Or is there? Long before Antonio's visit, another even more distinguished visitor came to Milan with an army in tow. This was the newly crowned king of France, Louis XII. Just one year after his elevation, the king marched on Milan to claim the city as his own. And what was the first thing that King Louis did after he set himself up here in the Castello Sforza? The answer is in the book written by Leonardo's first biographer, Giorgio Vasari. As Vasari says, the king went on a visit. He went to see the Last Supper. The king was deeply impressed by the excellence of this picture, both in composition and execution, and convinced that he should take it back to his kingdom. So he tried to find architects who could build a framework of wood and iron to safely transport the fresco back to France, with no regard for expense, so much did he want to have it. But since it was painted on a wall, his majesty could not have his desire. But kings aren't used to being told what they cannot have, and so Louis decided on an even bigger gambit. But for that, he needed Leonardo himself. At least, that's our theory. Even though Leonardo was in Milan, he was wanted back in Florence to finish another fresco, the Battle of Anghiari, in the hall of the 500 of the Palazzo della Signoria. So he wasn't in a position to stay in Milan and do whatever the king had in mind for him. But then, something extraordinary happened. Something that changed everything. This is the Archivio dello Stato di Firenze, the state archives of Florence, with documents that go back over a thousand years. And here we found a truly remarkable letter. Here is a letter from the French king himself, King Louis XII, to the Confaloniere, the president of the French Republic, the Signoria, asking, As we have need of Master Leonardo da Vinci, painter to your city of Florence, and want to make him do something by his own hand, we beg you to kindly let Leonardo work for us for a period of time and carry out the work we intend him to do. I think it's becoming clear what the French king wants Leonardo to do. If he can't have the fresco itself, he will have the next best thing. A copy on canvas that he can take back to France. And what's interesting about this is that the king doesn't tell the Signoria what he would like him to do. He is very cagey about it. The king doesn't say how long, because if our theory is correct, and he wants Leonardo to make a copy of The Last Supper, that would take a very long time indeed. The idea of such a life-size copy was not far-fetched. Leonardo was arguably one of the first painters in history who used his studio to make copies of his own works for sale, such as The Virgin of the Rocks, painted with his associate Ambrogio de Predis. The Madonna of the Yarnwinder, possibly painted with his pupil Francesco Spagnolo. The Saint Anne, painted with his assistant Melzi. And of course the Mona Lisa, painted by his pupil and close companion Salai. There was a good reason for that. Here in the Santa Maria Novella, Leonardo had a large studio with lots of assistants. But he worked very slowly. And it's difficult to maintain a large studio when you have a very limited output. But it's not so hard if you use your best assistants to make copies of your works for sale, under the master's supervision of course. So what happened to this copy of The Last Supper? Who painted it? And does it still exist? There's only one way to find out, and that is to go to France. Today we think of Paris as the world's epicenter of art, culture and fashion. This is where the world comes for beauty and refinement. But in the 16th century, things were very different. People sometimes forget that, but in the Middle Ages it was actually Burgundy, Bourgogne, which dictated French culture, not just in art, but also in poetry and music. But then came the scourge of the Black Plague, and the Hundred Years' War, in which Joan of Arc would play such an important part. So by the time Louis XII came to the throne, France was a mere shadow of its former self. And Louis was very much aware of that. He knew that French artists needed to take their cue from the Italian Renaissance. And I think that's why he was so incredibly keen to get The Last Supper into France. But if that's true, and if a life-size copy of The Last Supper was actually made, where did it go? The answer, I think, may be hidden behind these walls. This is the Chateau de Gaillon, which once served as the residence of Georges d'Amboise. Georges d'Amboise was the most important man besides the king Louis XII, a sort of prime minister. We can underline the fact that he was as powerful as the king. Like his master, King Louis, d'Amboise was deeply smitten with the beauty of Italian art. He decided he wanted to build a chateau that was entirely in the Renaissance style, the first one in France. And so he brought back scores of Italian artists and masons to do just that. An Italian artist went here to sculpt, like this, and also for painting, like Andrea Solario. Andrea Solario? The pupil of Leonardo da Vinci came here? Yeah. And what did he do here? He did lots of things to decorate the Hague Chapel, one of the most beautiful chapels of the 16th century in France. The fact that Andrea Solario, one of Leonardo's leading pupils, was working in this chateau around 1509 may be the missing piece of the puzzle. Unfortunately, the chapel and much of the chateau were destroyed in the French Revolution and the turmoil that followed. But one work that Andrea painted for the chateau still exists, a deposition from the cross, which today hangs in the Louvre. So Andrea Solario, what we know of him is that he was from a family of artists. We think he was probably working in Venice in the period when Leonardo was very first in Milan. So he wasn't there with him right from the beginning. And around 1495, he probably came back from Venice to Milan with his brother, Cristoforo, which is of course exactly the moment when Leonardo's beginning to work on the Last Supper fresco. If that's true, then Solario must have been present as the great fresco of the Last Supper took shape on the refectory wall. And since he was one of Leonardo's most talented pupils, could he have been the one who painted the copy for the French king? In the archives of the chateau, we find a key piece of evidence, an inventory of all property, including paintings from the 1540s. One of these paintings is La Sainte Fertantoile en Grand Personnage qui fait Monseigneur Fils-à-Porter de Milan, A Last Supper on Canvas with Monumental Figures, which His Grace had brought over from Milan. Could this be our first hard piece of evidence of a life-size copy of the Last Supper? En Grand Personnage with Monumental Figures? Put this together with what we know, that Andrea Solario was in Gaillon in 1509, and the pieces begin to fall into place. There is little doubt that Solario was a favorite of the D'Amboise family. In 1507, he even painted a portrait of George's nephew, Charles d'Amboise. Charles was none other than the governor of Milan at that time. But given the short time frame in which the copy was finished, between 1507 and 1509, it is likely that not only Solario, but also other Leonardo pupils were involved, including, for example, Giampietrino. But here's the next question. Where is this canvas? After all, if it's as big as we think it is, it's not something you would lose very easily. And that's why we find ourselves on the train to Antwerp in Belgium to follow the next trail of clues. We usually think of Antwerp as the city of Rubens, the painter of the Baroque. But even in the early Renaissance, Antwerp was a very important city, primarily because it served as the major port of the Low Countries. But things started to change in the early 16th century, primarily as a result of the growing tensions between the Protestant North and the Catholic South, which ultimately produced the Eighty Years' War. This is when the Catholic Church looked for every which way to defend the faith in the Low Countries and found it in this abbey, the Abbey of Tongerlo. Now what I think is so interesting is that Dutch Calvinism rejected all forms of religious imagery. Paintings, sculpture, even stained glass. It was all torn down and destroyed. I think that's why the Abbot of Tongerlo decided he should get the biggest painting of Christ and his apostles he could find to deter the North and give a boost to the Catholic faithful in the South. Reportedly, this painting still exists in a small chapel on the grounds of this very convent. Thank you. There it is. There it is, yes. This is the painting we've been looking for all these weeks. Yeah. It is magnificent. So the painting was brought to Antwerp. And just in that specific moment, the Abbot of Tongerlo has asked somebody to look after a beautiful, huge, great religious painting for the new Abbey Church. He wrote a letter to the Abbot that the Last Supper of Leonardo da Vinci was sold on the 2nd of February in 1545. So the painting was actually presented and sold as a product of Leonardo da Vinci. Yes. It was painted by Leonardo da Vinci. Well, in those days it was not that important. But probably 90% of the painting is the work of the disciples, pupils of da Vinci. Tell me about this theory of who painted Christ and Saint John. Well, Pino Brambiglia, the lady who has been restoring for 22 years the original fresco in Milano, she said this is a work of a group of pupils, disciples of da Vinci. But she said, I am convinced that Christ, and especially also the Apostle of Saint John, the favourite model of da Vinci, has been painted by himself. By Leonardo? Yes. Why is that? Well, it's a quality. When you look at the painting, you see that Saint John is very nice. It's exceptional, the quality is very, very well. And they also made x-rays some 20 years ago, and they are under the Apostle's schedules, except for Saint John and Christ. You're telling me that there is an underdrawing under all of the Apostles, except for John and Christ. That is painted directly on the canvas. Yes, that was the result of the x-rays. That is an astonishing discovery. So, we might conclude that even though the Apostles may have been painted by his pupils, including perhaps Andrea Solario, that Leonardo himself painted Christ and the most important figures on the Last Supper painting. And also, they bought the painting as a work of da Vinci. That's fascinating, that's fascinating. It is a beautiful work. But is this the painting that King Louis XII ordered from Leonardo in 1507, and that Andrea Solario brought to France in 1509? Fortunately, the Abbey has an extensive archive going back many hundreds of years. And here we find an astonishing eyewitness account. It is said that the painting is made after an original painted on a wall that is now in bad repair. And that when the King of France, who conquered Milan, saw the painting, he was very disappointed that he could not take it with him, since it was painted on a wall. And so he gave the order to have a copy made. And that's the copy that hangs in the choir today. So, what we have here is an eyewitness document from the 16th century that confirms our theory that Louis XII ordered a copy of The Last Supper from Leonardo da Vinci, and that this painting now hangs on the wall of this beautiful Abbey in Belgium. But then the plot thickens once more. As we saw, such a large canvas could not have been painted by just one artist in such a small time frame. So who would have painted it other than Andrea Solario? The most likely candidate is an Italian artist called Gian Pietrino. For as we will discover in London, he went on to make a second copy. For 250 years, the Royal Academy at Burlington House in London has been training generations of British artists by drawing inspiration from the work of the great masters. So we're sitting here in the library, which very much relates to the training of the artists. These were all what we call materials for artists, to inspire them, for them to look at. When did the Royal Academy acquire the copy of The Last Supper, and why did they acquire it? So, it was 1821. The Academy bought it for 600 guineas, which then was a lot of money. As a sort of comparison, in 1820 the National Gallery bought a real Titian for just over £300. So to spend £600 on what was a copy was an immense amount of money. So they had to gather all the artists together, they all had to vote on it, and agree that this was a good purchase. It was this extraordinary example of Leonardo's work. I mean, although it's a copy, I think it was seen as a real window into the achievements of Leonardo. And to have that in the schools for the students to look at was amazing. There's a note by Leonardo that refers to a Gian Pietro, who we think is probably the same person. And we know that a figure more or less of this name is working in Milan from at least around 1507. So in that second period after Leonardo has been back to Florence and has then returned to Milan. And would you agree that he is probably one of the principal artists on the copy in the Royal Academy? Yes, so that's very much the current line of thinking. Although Pietro Morani has recently, going back to the technical drawings underpinning this work, and has, due to technical analysis of the underdrawings of the work, has asserted that in fact it's probably Old Traffio's hand initially, and then Gian Pietrino coming in as a secondary hand. If it's true that Gian Pietrino worked on both the Tonolo version and then later, around 1520, on this copy, it would seem that between these two paintings we would have a very accurate sense of what the original fresco once looked like. I think the scale of it, it does appear to be very, very close to the original. And certainly these heads that we can investigate further seem to be very close to the original. Old Traffio and Gian Pietrino obviously had access to Leonardo's drawings, cartoons, and I think there's possibly evidence that there may have been some sort of pricking out or tracing from these original cartoons. So, you know, this is really interesting that the basis may be even closer than we originally thought. Now that we've found not one, but two life-size versions of The Last Supper by Leonardo and his top pupils, do we, at long last, have a key to see what the fresco in Milan truly looked like? A Last Supper painting that would go on to transform the course of Western art. Could anyone in the 1490s have anticipated the tremendous impact that this fresco would have? He would have been told by the Lodovico and the prior of Sant'Emilio della Grazie to do a Last Supper. And they probably would have been expecting that he would have done a Last Supper akin to all of those that had been done primarily in Florence, in Tuscany, Siena for the previous 200 years. But Leonardo, of course, did not work like that. And he did say that the way to make a painting was not to look at other paintings, it was to look at real life. And so I think what he wanted to do and why he bought the Bible was find the drama in the story. It was almost like he was the director of a film and he was given the brief, this is the film you're going to make, you're going to make a film of the Last Supper. Leonardo wanted action. And he also wanted the emotion and the dramatic intensity of what happened in those seconds in Jerusalem. And that, of course, is one of the magnificent things about the painting, that he brings that to life. And we see that and instantly I think we can understand what's happening there. Three paintings and yet one vision. A vision of depicting the most familiar scene from the Gospels in a way that had never been done before. And now we know what that original vision once looked like, thanks to a canvas and a remote convent in Belgium. Of course, in the years to come, the High Renaissance would produce some of the most memorable frescoes in history, including Raphael's Stanza in the Vatican and Michelangelo's immortal ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But all that incredible realism, all that monumental grasp of the human figure, first started with a fresco on the wall of a refectory in Milan.