Cenacolo!

Yesterday I went and saw DaVinci's Last Supper (called Cenacolo in Italian).  Given that it is painted on a wall, it is in a stand-alone museum.  It is somewhat impossible to get tickets.  Groups of 25 people are let in for 15 minutes, so the number of tickets are exactly specified.  They release 3 months of tickets at a time, which are not that affordable, but immediately snatched up.

Given that I hadn't jumped on getting a ticket when they were released, my only option was to buy a ticket through one of the tour companies in Milan.  Either you can book a tour that includes the Last Supper, or you can buy a spare ticket to only the Last Supper.  The tour companies only release the tickets that haven't been bough for full tours at the last minute...

I bought a last-minute ticket (which has a bit of a markup) and took the afternoon off.  The picture was painted on the wall of what became the refractory of a monastery that was (is?) associated with Santa Maria delle Grazie.  The church itself, which I looked at beforehand, was very lovely.  (As far as I can tell, all churches in Europe are lovely)

The Last Supper has an interesting story.  Because of the experimental technique used, it degraded more quickly that normal frescoes.  The attempts at "fixing" it over the centuries were mostly bad, so the most recent restoration (lasting 22 years) mostly removed all of them.  The goal wasn't to make the image look "like new", but to return as much of it as possible to Da Vinci's original work.

In order to further preserve it, the room has been sealed off and carefully temperature and humidity controlled.  There are a series of airlocks to enter the room, which is why visits are so limited.  There is another amazing fresco in the same room, but that gets a lot less attention (and was not by Da Vinci).

The building itself was bombed - directly - during WWII.  Um, by Allied bombers... The building was destroyed, but the frescoed wall had been protected by scaffolding and sandbags.  Yay Italy, saving the art!  Booo, Americans, bombing the art!  In the picture below, the bright white is the plaster of the new building constructed around the wall.

Anyways, The Last Supper was incredible.  It is very big, which is part of why it makes such an impression.  It is a whole wall... and a big wall.  It really does look 500 years old, but it is also more clearly a masterpiece than other old frescoes that I've seen.

Like Jesus Chris Superstar, but with less singing.

For scale, the dark rectangle under Jesus is a door that the monks added.  It has been since bricked up, but the monks seriously cut a chunk out of the art to add a door.