The Last Supper (Leonardo)

Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper on the end wall of the refectory, the monks' dining hall, at the Dominican convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. Painted in the later 1490s, it catches the apostles reacting in waves of alarm around a calm Christ. Leonardo skipped true fresco for an experimental technique on the dry plaster, and the paint had begun to flake soon after he finished. A restoration of more than twenty years was completed in 1999. Seen in the room it was made for, where the monks once ate beneath it, the scale of the scene is something no reproduction gets across.