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Leonardo painted in a grand, dominating scale for a small space. Even standing in the far back of the refectory, it is difficult for the eye to decipher the whole painting all at once. He painted The Last Supper in such a way as to force the viewer to enter the painting, physically and emotionally, and to viscerally become part of the narrative.
Only when the viewer stands under the painting can it be seen as it was intended to be (plate A). Leonardo had a specific visual message for those who stand under the painting. He had the visual sophistication to carry off what very few artists could even dream of doing: he painted the complex psychology of betrayal. It starts with Philip, and ends in a moneybag. Invited to walk into Leonardo's funhouse of mirrors, we are all meant to be part of this narrative, which is refracted within our own dark journeys.
As an artist, I naturally try to identify the source of light in a painting, because I know that artists often use light to reveal what they want the viewer to see. In this painting, it would be easy to assume that the light is coming from behind from the windows, through which we see a Renaissance landscape. But the source of light in this painting actually is the face of Jesus reflecting on all of the disciples—all but Judas, who is underpainted with black, denied a brightened countenance.
The source of light points to what anchors the painting: the presence of Jesus. This is emphasized by the use of perspective, a Renaissance invention conceived to create an illusion of three-dimensionality in a two-dimensional space. The windows and other architectural elements create lines that end up in a single point, called the "vanishing point." In The Last Supper, the vanishing point is on the forehead of Jesus, the centerpiece of the painting. But if the painting were an equilibrium centered on Jesus, it would not create the psychological tension we feel from it. And this is because Philip breaks up the visual stasis.
In any reproduction one sees in a book or a photograph (plate B), Philip's body gets flattened. However, for a trained artist/viewer, the visual response to the actual piece is to see Philip's body contorted, surrounded by negative spaces. The angle compresses his body and accentuates the movement of his reaction. Leonardo's genius not only used the vanishing point to anchor the painting but also to create waves of motion that shock us into shedding visual conventions.
If you are an artist working on a large commission, you know that looking up at a painting distorts what you paint, so you account for that by exaggerating the vertical. In other words, you make the figure taller than it needs to be. What I noticed looking up at the painting is that Leonardo did not make Philip's body taller but kept it twisted, compressed and angular. That is why in reproductions of The Last Supper Philip's body does not stand out.
If Leonardo did not elongate the figure, why does Philip stand out?
It took me the whole fifteen minutes I was allowed in St. Maria delle Grazie to understand what Leonardo did. And then the painting began to open up to me. In a visual code quite different from the fanciful interpretations given currency by Dan Brown's novel, Leonardo reveals both his genius and the true message of the work.
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