Taps microphone. . .”is this on?” Assured by his readers it works, Glen launches into his joke. . .
“Jesus walks into the restaurant. Says, “We need a table for 26, please.”
Maitre d looks over Jesus’s shoulder, and says, in a baffled tone of voice, “But there’s only 13 of you.”
Jesus shrugs, “Well, yeah, we all like to sit on the same side of the table.”
Audience laughs uproariously.
Glen: Mic drop.
As soon as you know the dates you are going to Milan, get yourself tickets to see the Last Supper. If you wait till a few weeks before you are going, you won’t be able to get tickets. I remembered to order about 45 days left, and of the three days we would be in Milan, I could find only two tickets in one time slot on one day, so I immediately snapped them up, which means the next person looking for tickets those days was left high and dry.
Phew.
Most of the tickets are through groups like Viator and Get Your Guide. And that’s fine. . .groups of 25 are allowed in every 15 minutes, so it’s helpful to have a good guide to walk you through the process, the history, and the painting itself.
We had 4:30 tickets through Viator for the day of our arrival in Milan. We had seen the Last Supper two years ago when we were passing through Milan for five hours or so on our way to Lake Maggiore. Europe was going through a brutal heat wave then, and I had almost passed out when taking a tour of the Milan Duomo. So I wasn’t in the best of condition to see the Last Supper. Enough of the past and my near heat stroke; back to this trip.
The kids at the local Catholic school were playing games in the small plaza outside of the church where the Last Supper is located, and I almost made the faux pas of cutting through their soccer game before Carol stopped me from being an unwanted interloper.
So, the first order of business on arrival is to find your tour guide. So we started grabbing anyone who had a clipboard and asked if they were with Viator. After striking out a few times, we finally found our guide. Turns out she had our names on a list and we didn’t need the voucher which Viator claimed that, if we didn’t bring the voucher, not only would we NOT get to take the tour, but we would immediately be put to death on account of not following directions.
Once everyone is gathered together in the group (still outside in the small plaza). I struck up a conversation with a nice young couple from Newport Beach, California, who had their three daughters, ages 5, 7, and 9 with them. Carol joined in. . .we chatted about having three daughters, traveling, the Last Supper, and some more. Very nice people. I then told them my Last Supper joke (see above).
Carol was aghast to learn later that I struck up the conversation with the goal of telling them the joke (hey, they both laughed). My wife had thought I was being nice or something. Heck, the nice couple are probably still laughing at the joke.
(Editor: You really like that joke, don’t you? Writer: Well, yeah. It fits two important criteria – it’s both funny and easy to remember.)
Anyhow, Leonardo da Vinci, was hired by the Sforza family, the richest and most powerful family in Milan, to decorate the dining hall of the Dominican monastery that is next to the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie. So, it’s not in the church, but in a next door building.
It took Leonardo four years to sketch and paint. Imagine being a monk, having to remain silent during meals, and taking in the Last Supper at each meal. The Sforzas hired Leonardo to entice the monks to allow the family to place their family tomb in the church, which they never got to do because French conquered Milan first.
So first our guide – who spoke only slightly accented English and sprinkled a few jokes into her patter – talked about the history of the painting. Then she took us into the church itself, before we went back into the plaza, then into the small outbuilding where we picked up our tickets and put my small backpack and Carol’s purse into a free locker. Back out into the plaza, we waited until signaled we could enter.
(In the church, be sure to admire the Renaissance dome designed by Bramante.)
We went through security, into an anteroom where our guide told us that, despite the church being bombed in World War II, the use of sandbags to cover the painting kept the wall standing and the painting untouched.
Then we watched through the smoked glass as the previous group exited, and then we finally got to go in. The humidity is carefully controlled. The paint is faded – it had been touched up multiple times over the centuries, but a 1999 restoration project restored it much closer to the original.
The point of the painting is not the vibrancy of the colors (or lack thereof), but the personalities of the apostles captured by Leonardo reacting to Jesus saying that “One of you will betray me.” Jesus is in the middle of the painting, and is the brightest and clearest of the 13. Leonardo was the first great artist to fully capture the humanness of people, their expressions, and that the eyes are a window to the soul.
I am certainly not qualified to write about great art, as I’ve proven multiple times. (I am, however, qualified to write (rant?) about the dreckiness (drecknicity?) of lots, but not all, modern art.
There is a fresco of the Crucifixion on the wall at the other end of the dining hall. It only took three months to paint the fresco, and lacks the depth of the Last Supper. It’s still worth noting, as it is more impressive than any fresco you or I have ever painted.
During our 15 minutes, I alternated between listing to the guide and turning off the audioguide she was speaking through so I could concentrate on the genius of da Vinci and the expressions of the shocked disciples.
Although I took a number of photos, only a few came out well. Fittingly, the best photos focused on Jesus while the worst focused on Judas. I doubt when Leonardo painted the fresco he was thinking about someone over 500 years later taking pictures (although he was such a genius that there is no doubt he made sure Jesus was represented by light and Judas by dark).
After our 15 minutes with fame, the group left the room for the next group to come in. We were all pretty silent, chewing over the brilliance of the painting (except for the California couple -- like you are now, they were still laughing to themselves about the brilliance of the joke I told them).
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