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Updated: June 13, 2025
She would ask Swann if the picture had not been engraved, preferring, when possible, old engravings with some interest of association apart from themselves, such, for example, as shew us a masterpiece in a state in which we can no longer see it to-day, as Morghen's print of the 'Cenacolo' of Leonardo before it was spoiled by restoration.
The story related by Giraldi concerning the head of Judas in the "Cenacolo" at Milan, sufficiently illustrates the method of Lionardo in creating types and the utility of such caricatures as his notebooks contain. It is told that he brought into his room one day a collection of reptiles lizards, newts, toads, vipers, efts all creatures that are loathsome to the common eye.
Every painter ought once in his life to stand before the Cenacolo and decipher its moral. Mix with your colours and mess on your palette every particle of the very substance of your soul, and this lest perchance your "prepared surface" shall play you a trick! Then, and then only, it will fight to the last it will resist even in death.
He was fourteen years at the court of Milan, where, among other works, he painted his 'Cenacolo, or 'Last Supper, one of the grandest pictures ever produced. He painted it, contrary to the usual practice, in oils upon the plastered walls of the refectory of the Dominican convent, Milan.
The belfry clangs with a louder peal; even Clarian's Picture, though it hath utterly perished to the eye of sense, lives vivid in a thousand memories, and, having found in the tenderness of tradition and legend an engraver whose burin is as faithful as Raphael Morghen's, has left the damp dark wall, like Leonardo's Cenacolo, to accompany all of us to our firesides."
And I am walking out upon that fuming plain as far as to the Arco della Pace, on which the bronze horses may melt any minute; or I am sweltering through the city's noonday streets, in search of Sant' Ambrogio, or the Cenacolo of Da Vinci, or what know I? Coming back to our hotel, "Alla Bella Venezia," and greeted on entering by the immense fresco which covers one whole side of the court, it appeared to my friend and me no wonder that Garibaldi should look so longingly from the prow of a gondola toward the airy towers and balloon-like domes that swim above the unattainable lagoons of Venice, where the Austrian then lorded it in coolness and quietness, while hot, red-shirted Italy was shut out upon the dusty plains and stony hills.
The feeling of the cenacolo blent here with feelings of Ruth's cornfields, and the white square houses with their flat roofs enforced the illusion. Here we slept in the middle of a contadino colony. Some of the folk had made way for us; and by the wheezing, coughing, and snoring of several sorts and ages in the chamber next me, I imagine they must have endured considerable crowding.
Here he gazed with admiration on the Cenacolo of Leonardo, that master of whose genius he had heard so much, and expressed his ardent wish to transfer the famous wall-painting to France, a sentiment which can hardly have gratified the Dominican friars or the Italian princes in his train. The painter was not present on this occasion.
And for such reconstruction memory furnishes me with more detailed guidance than is generally at the disposal of restorers; the pictures which it has preserved perhaps the last surviving in the world to-day, and soon to follow the rest into oblivion of what Combray looked like in my childhood's days; pictures which, simply because it was the old Combray that traced their outlines upon my mind before it vanished, are as moving if I may compare a humble landscape with those glorious works, reproductions of which my grandmother was so fond of bestowing on me as those old engravings of the 'Cenacolo, or that painting by Gentile Bellini, in which one sees, in a state in which they no longer exist, the masterpiece of Leonardo and the portico of Saint Mark's.
Often during the summer heats, Matteo Bandello, then a young novice of the Order, saw the Florentine master at noonday, "when the sun was in the sign of the Lion," leave the Corte Vecchia, where he was finishing his great horse, and, hurrying through the streets to the Grazie, mount the scaffold, brush in hand, and put a few touches to some of the figures in the Cenacolo, after which he would hurry away as quickly as he came.
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