Discover Santa Maria delle Grazie & The Last Supper by da Vinci

Santa Maria delle Grazie is two visits at one address, and they are booked, priced and experienced completely differently. One is a working Dominican church, free and open most of the day. The other is the refectory next to it, which holds Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper and is among the most tightly rationed rooms in Europe.

The church went up between 1463 and 1497 and shows the join plainly. Guiniforte Solari built the long Gothic nave in Lombard brick; thirty years later Ludovico Sforza had Donato Bramante replace the east end with a domed tribune, meaning it as a mausoleum for his family. He lost Milan before it could become one. The two halves sit against each other in the same wall, and the change in ambition between them is visible from the street.

The Last Supper is on the north wall of the refectory, where Leonardo painted it between 1495 and 1498. It has been deteriorating since within his own lifetime, because of how he chose to paint it, and what survives is the result of a restoration that ran for twenty-one years. The room is now climate-controlled and entered in small groups through a sequence of sealed chambers, on fifteen-minute rotations.

Church and refectory together have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1980.

This is two buildings in one wall, and the seam is the most instructive thing about it.

Solari’s nave (1463–1482). Lombard Gothic in brick and terracotta: a long, relatively low aisled hall with round oculi above the side chapels and the dogtooth cornices typical of Milanese brickwork of the period. It is conventional, competent and provincial, and it was designed for a preaching order rather than a dynasty.

Bramante’s tribune (1492–1497). A cube carrying a sixteen-sided drum and a hemispherical dome, with a deep apse and two transept-like chapels — a centralised, geometric space attached to the end of a Gothic nave. Bramante decorated it with the flat pilasters, roundels and grey-on-white articulation he would take to Rome a few years later. From inside, the shift from the dim nave into the light of the crossing is abrupt.

The Chiostro delle Rane. The small cloister off the north side, named for the frogs on its central fountain, is also attributed to Bramante and is the quietest part of the complex.

What to notice from outside. Stand where the nave and the tribune are both in view. The brick is continuous, the ambition is not: one half was built to house a congregation, the other to hold a family’s tombs.

The Last Supper is famous for the wrong technical reason. It is not a fresco, and that single decision explains its whole physical history.

What buon fresco requires. True fresco is painted into wet lime plaster, which carbonates as it dries and locks the pigment into the wall. It is extremely durable and completely unforgiving: the painter must finish each patch of plaster the day it is laid, and cannot go back.

What Leonardo did instead. He sealed the wall with a ground and painted on it dry, in tempera and oil. That let him work at his own pace, build up translucent layers, and revise — the subtle modelling of the faces and the depth of the shadows are only achievable this way. The cost was that the paint sat on the wall rather than in it.

The consequence. Flaking began within about twenty years, in a damp room on a north wall. By 1556 Vasari found it barely legible. Repeated repainting from the eighteenth century onward added more material than it saved, and the restoration of 1978–1999 was largely a matter of taking that later work back off again.

The control experiment is in the same room. Montorfano’s Crucifixion was painted on the opposite wall in the same year, in true fresco, and it is still substantially there. Nothing about the building explains the difference; the method does.

How much of what I am looking at is actually Leonardo? Less than most people expect. The 1978–1999 restoration removed the repainting of earlier centuries, which means the surface is now honest about its losses rather than smoothed over — the faint passages are faint because nothing survives there.

Why did it decay when other paintings of the same age did not? Because of the technique, not the conditions. The Crucifixion on the opposite wall of the same room is the same age and in far better condition; it was painted in true fresco.

Was it damaged in the war? The room was; the wall was not. The bombing of August 1943 took the roof and the far wall, and the painting came through behind its protective sandbagging.