Page:Masters in art. Leonardo da Vinci.djvu/40



N all probability a genuine work, this picture, once in the collection of Francis I., has darkened greatly, and bears signs of having been repainted in some parts; but the delicacy and refinement of modelling in the face, and the characteristic and subtle type of beauty, could have come from Leonardo's hand alone.

"Surely this enigmatic figure, glowing suddenly out of the profoundest shadow, whose face wears an expression half voluptuous, half sardonic, and altogether disturbing and impenetrable," writes Théophile Gautier, "cannot, in spite of the cross of reeds and the heaven-pointing finger, be the ascetic hermit of the Scriptures, whose loins were bound with hides, and whose meat was locusts and wild honey. Nay, rather is he one of those decayed gods, Pan, perhaps, that Heine tells us of, who, to maintain themselves after the fall of paganism, took employment in the new religion. He makes the accustomed gesture indeed, but he knows more secret rites, and smiles his subtle smile at those whom he would take into his confidence."

OST important of all Leonardo's works," write Woltmann and Woermann, "is 'The Last Supper.' Painted within a few years of the end of the fifteenth century, in oils, on a wall in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, it cast everything that art had up to then produced altogether into the shade. What now remains is but the pale ghost of what the picture originally was; for Leonardo's attempt to apply the technique of oil-painting to wall decoration on so vast a scale has been fatal; and as early as 1566 Vasari speaks of the work as a ruin. Moreover, it has suffered every kind of damage; a door was cut through it in the seventeenth century, over which an escutcheon was nailed to the wall, and in the eighteenth a bungling restorer continued the work of destruction. The coup de grâce was given during Napoleon's invasion, when the hall was put to every variety of base use. At last came a time of more intelligent restoration, and the defacements of later painters, at any rate, were removed. At the present time, in spite of its deplorable condition, the spectator cannot fail to be struck by the grandeur of the figures—almost twice the size of life—and by the sculpturesque simplicity of the composition."

"It is the first masterpiece of the perfected Renaissance," writes Symonds. "Other painters had represented the Last Supper as a solemn prologue to the Passion, or as the mystical inauguration of the greatest Christian sacrament; but none had dared to break the calm of the event by dramatic action. The school of Giotto, Fra Angelico, Ghirlandajo, Perugino, even Signorelli, remained within the sphere of symbolical suggestion; and their work gained in dignity what it lost in intensity. Leonardo combined both. He under-