Tickets to see Leonardo da Vinci's famous masterpiece "The Last Supper" sell out about three months in advance, so visitors are urged to book ahead. However, if you are staying in Milan for a few days, you should be able to get lucky to find tickets through a tour operator during a guided tour or an after-hours evening tour as long as you do plan in advance. I was able to book tickets through a tour operator a week prior to my departure in order to see "The Last Supper", which is located at the Santa Maria della Grazie and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Santa Maria della Grazie is a church and monastary, and "The Last Supper" was painted in the refectory on the wall shared with the kitchen between 1494 and 1498. The work took this many years to complete due to the technique that Leonardo da Vinci used by painting the colour onto the wet plaster. This is a slow process but ensured colour and detail to be absorbed into the wall.
The monastary can be seen through a set of double doors before you enter the room where the painting is located, and it is a beautiful building. Visitors have to wait outside the room because only a capped number of people can be in the room at a time, and visits are limited to fifteen minutes. This is due to the protection and restoration efforts of the painting. Visitors to museums bring in humidity and pollen/items on their clothing which can damage artwork, and air filter systems are in place to remove the humidity and damaging items. This is why only a few people can enter the room and visits are capped to 15 minutes.
The artwork is painted on one side of the room. Measures were put in place to ensure it was protected in World War 2, but the roof and another wall did collapse. The room stood open for a while to the elements, and Napoleon used the room as a stable, so the wall would have gotten dirty. Also, other painters would have tried to restore the artwork over the ages and made some changes. Other damage occured due to the humidity of the kitchen on the other side of the wall and a doorway cut into the wall for access to the kitchen. The central figure (Jesus) lost his feet in this change. Another change found while restoring the artwork to the original was that Jesus has his mouth slightly open instead of closed. The latest restoration was completed in 1999 after twenty years where layers of dust and paint were removed.
We learned about these facts and more during our visit to the room, and the tour concluded with more explanation in the courtyard and in front of a large television screen that projects a copy of the artwork so that it can be talked about more in depth. In general, I think this captured the imagination of the people because so much is happening in the artwork, and the figures are arranged in groups of three and interacting. A lot more is revealed in the story of Jesus' last supper for people who study Christianity.
The work took so long to complete, and because of the technique used, the older bits of painting started to deteriorate before Leonardo da Vinci was finished. In fact, some days he would spend hours on the scaffolding creating the artwork and other days he did not do any painting (but he was probably thinking about the painting). There are written accounts about this and I can imagine that the monks living there just wanted the work to be finished.
"The Last Supper" is Jesus Christ and his twelve friends (disciples) who gather around the table as they probably did often. However, on this day, Jesus is in the middle of telling them that one of them will betray him to the Romans where he will be killed. Each of the figures deals with the news and their reactions in a different way, related to the character of the disciple or their actions at some point in the Bible. The hands of the figures are looked at with attention to Judas, the betrayer, who is reaching out to grab with his head turned in an uncomfortable way.
I thought the figure to the right of Jesus looked like a female figure, and apparently it may be. But others claim that it is John the Baptist as he was young. I am not sure. He has long hair, but then so does Jesus.
On the other side of the wall is another painting, which was started at the same time as Leonardo da Vinci's bit finished in less time.
I took a picture of the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, which is still a working church and a monastary. The church is located in Milan centre, but it's on the edge of the centre and is about a fifteen-minute walk from the duomo (cathedral) and main town square. Note that we received a lot of information about the painting, and the tour was approximately an hour long, and we got to spend more time in front of the painting than some of the other groups did. The best way to see the "The Last Supper" (unless you're an expert and have studied it) is probably through a tour so that the guide can point out the details in the painting and the story.
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