If you’re in Milan you’re almost certainly going to want to pay a visit to the chapel of Santa Maria delle Grazie, home to Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. This is possibly the most famous picture on the planet just now, replacing the previous most famous painting on the planet – the Mona Lisa, also by Leonardo. The reason for that isn’t so much to do with Leonardo’s genius (though that’s beyond dispute) but more to do with the painting’s central role in ‘The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown (whose genius is). If you’re one of the half dozen people on the planet who haven’t read the book (I polished it off on a transatlantic flight between Heathrow and New York, and found it entertaining if historically, ahem, questionable) it suggests that the apostle John to Jesus’s right is not John but Mary Magdalene. It’s a theory Dan, but it rather falls down for reasons too numerous to enumerate here but there’s an interesting (and usefully sceptical entry at Wikipedia on the subject. Santa Maria delle Grazie has its own pages worth checking out.
Okay, the big thing to remember is that The Last Supper isn’t a painting but a wall, the painting directly rendered onto the side of the chapel, though for technical reasons the painting can’t be called a fresco as Leonardo painted onto dry wall rather than wet plaster. That was a mistake, as the work very quickly began to deteriorate. Incidentally that, and a succession of restorations of varying success over the centuries mean that the Last Supper we feast our eyes on today contains very little of Leonardo’s original work.
As a wall painting the piece has never been moved of course (though one guy made a very unsuccessful attempt at doing so a couple of centuries back) and Santa Maria delle Grazie is small. That means tickets are limited and once you’re in you’ve just got a quarter of an hour. And with the much touched-up picture up on the wall it’s pretty hard to suss out if John is a lady or not. You can’t just drop in, you have to reserve tickets well in advance. Once there, you’re whisked through four sets of security doors, you get your 15 minutes with fame, and then bye bye … out to the museum shop. Well at least you can examine the picture on the postcard you’ll buy!
Hey, I’m being scathing here. Santa Maria is a lovely little chapel (a miracle it’s still intact having been bombed in World War II) and there is an undeniable sense of theatre and event about viewing the picture. And unlike the Mona Lisa (a postage stamp behind glass) it’s an impressive setting and picture. An essential stop in Milan … but plan ahead!
Loads and loads of good hotels to stay at in Milano and we stayed in the improbably named Hostel Demo … which sounds like something from seventies student politics but was actually very nice, very affordable and only a hundred yards or so from the main train station.
