Volume 48, Number 13 · August 9, 2001
The Last 'Last Supper'
By Charles Hope
Leonardo: The Last Supper
with essays by Pinin Brambilla Barcilon and Pietro C. Marani,translated from the Italian by Harlow Tighe
University of Chicago Press, 440 pp., $95.00
Il Genio e le Passioni: Leonardo e il Cenacolo: Precedenti, innovazioni, riflessi di un capolavoro (The Genius and the Passions: Leonardo and the Last Supper: Precedents, Innovations, Reflections of a Masterpiece)
Catalog of the exhibition edited by Pietro C. Marani, with a preface by Ernst H. Gombrich
an exhibition at Palazzo Reale, Milan, March 21–June 17, 2001
Skira, 474 pp., L120,000
Leonardo da Vinci
by Sherwin B. Nuland
Lipper/Viking, 170 pp., $19.95
Leonardo: The First Scientist
by Michael White
St. Martin's, 370 pp., $27.95
To be published in paperback in October 2001.
Leonardo belongs to the very small group of painters who are as famous for their personalities or their lives as for their work. The basic elements of the legend are already present in the biography produced by Vasari in 1550: his precocious and prodigious talent, the range of his interests, his extraordinary physical beauty and charm, which could persuade people of his ability to carry out even the most extravagant schemes, his lack of religious belief, his love of animals, his reluctance to follow a conventional career, his unsystematic manner of working, and, finally, his death in the arms of Francis I, King of France. Vasari had much less to say about Leonardo's works. He provided a long and rather misleading description of the Mona Lisa, which had left Florence well over thirty years before, and shorter references to works in private hands, none of which can now be identified apart from one drawing. But the only picture on public display he mentioned was the Last Supper in the refectory of the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, which he praised in enthusiastic terms. At that time Vasari himself had never seen it, but when he did so, sixteen years later, he complained that it was no more than an 'indistinct smudge.'
Review, 4612 words
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