Leonardo’s Last Supper: A Vision by Peter Greenaway
Park Avenue Amory
Dec. 2, 2010-Jan. 6, 2011
Peter Greenaway's "Vision" of Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper at the Park Avenue Armory is packing in the holiday crowds. Young and old are thronging to this promised facsimile of the great Renaissance masterwork, enhanced by a lavish multi-media spectacle of film and music. It is certainly convenient to have the Last Supper beamed to Park Avenue where it can be better appreciated by its many American admirers; Greenaway's stated goal is to make the generation who believe painting started with Jackson Pollock connect with the old masters in a new and vibrant way. Any project that pries students away from their PDAs and into an old-master themed exhibition has to be a good thing, and Greenaway is successful--the close to hour long presentation held not only our adult attention but also the interest of our attendant eight and nine year olds, who were charmed by the opening montage of great Italian art, sumptuous cityscapes and grand music. Eventually the swirling imagery focused on Leonardo and we were shepherded over and through projections of the Last Supper into a space dedicated to it.
This area focuses on a sort of apse that recreates the main wall of the refectory of Sta. Maria Della Grazie in Milan, which has been graced by Leonardo's monumental fresco since 1489. Additional screens to the side and around the entrance display fanciful, animated microscopic-level tours of the fresco's pigmentation, bits of which periodically flake off the surface and dance like snowflakes in patterns that are beautiful until you realize they represent the ongoing decay of the original. Down the center of the space stretches an installation of the table itself; when dormant it is pure white, like a plaster cast, but periodically it pulses and glows with psychedelic colors. The table makes the experience "interactive," that totem of the digital age. The fifteenth-century monks of Sta. Maria might have been content to contemplate the miracle of the Last Supper while consuming their own earthly food on a lower level. By contrast, we get a seat at the table—we do not merely witness but also participate in the Last Supper. Judy Chicago's Dinner Party has come full circle.
Like the table, the Last Supper up on the wall throbs and morphs between two and three dimensions—the figures periodically appear sculptural, as if they are intruding into our space. Some of the lighting effects suggest the passage of time, thus invoking a fourth dimension. White lines trace the outlines of the figures so you can admire the construction of the composition; hands and feet are highlighted in isolation so you can appreciate their peculiar grace; the entire image is bleached into a grisaille so you will momentarily not be distracted by color from its purity. A re-imagining of the lost feet of Christ, cut away from the original when a new door was installed in the seventeenth century, periodically reappear, somewhat brighter than the rest. Through the miracle of modern technology this ancient act of vandalism has been healed. Music loosely based on classical Italian opera or chorale but clearly modern plays loudly throughout.
After about twenty minutes of visual gymnastics, the piece de resistance arrives: the promised fully restored, scale facsimile of the Last Supper appears and stays put on the end wall, enshrined by a pastiche of Leonardo's handwriting. But the glowing blue, grossly oversized script overwhelms the Last Supper and takes on a life of its own--this iconic handwriting, this unmistakable mark of genius that we all recognize even though none of us can read it is in a way a much clearer sign to this modern audience than anything in the fresco itself.
At this point, the disconnect between the fifteenth century and the twenty-first becomes awkward. The space in the Park Avenue Armory is clearly supposed to be sacred ground—but sacred to what precisely? To the miracle of the Last Supper? To Leonardo himself? It is certainly not a temple to Christ, who is at best marginalized in this presentation. The experience is lively and dramatic, but it is also hectic, shifting and reduces the work of art to the sum of its parts, while the original achieves transcendence by being in its whole so very much more. The problem is that the actual Last Supper is a profoundly static and silent religious picture, utterly dependent on the monumental dominance of its spiritual center for its effect. Leonardo’s genius was his ability to create a remarkable variety of human pose and emotion swirling around Christ and still sublimate it all to Him.
The Last Supper at the Park Avenue Armory does not seem to have a spiritual center as Leonardo would have understood it. Perhaps that vision has little relevance for New York City in 2010. Instead, Greenaway’s work has at its core the wonders of technology, which is ironic given that the ruinous condition of the original was caused by a failure of technology. All those dancing fragments of perilously detached pigment were not the result of World War II bombs or carbon emissions as we might assume, however. No, the mischief goes straight back to Leonardo himself, who wanted to develop a new painting technique that would fuse the permanence of fresco with the flexibility and luminous effects of oil. The result was to be a magically life like, glowing surface--the likes of which had never been seen before. Sadly, Leonardo's technology did not match his vision. The pigments would not adhere to the wall and within decades the Last Supper was little more than a ghost, which successive generations have dutifully tried to at least preserve, even if they cannot revive it.
Greenaway's presentation is our contribution to this now centuries-long process, defined by our computer-generated abilities to reproduce with relentless mechanical precision what we have decided are Leonardo's "true" intentions. It may be that this triumph of technology, which succeeds where the artist failed, does have in it a kernel of what Leonardo attempted more than five centuries ago. But before we fall into the trap of assuming our technology can correct the errors of history, we should recall that Leonardo’s failure and the subsequent elusive, changeling quality of the Last Supper has been an integral part of its appeal. Greenaway's presentation is heavily colored by the methods and fetishes of the present day, as it must--and should--be. But it raises an interesting issue as at some point, Leonardo's magnificent ruin may vanish altogether, leaving only the facsimile in its stead and this work is in the final analysis a contemporary piece.
Along these lines, if you do bring young people to this show, be prepared for some puzzled disappointment should you ever take them to Milan. Leonardo’s Last Supper will inevitably seem so much paler and quieter, perhaps in a word old, than the vibrant, animated original they connected with so easily at the Park Avenue Armory.
