Santa Maria delle Grazie & The Last Supper by da Vinci Historical Timeline

The church and the painting were commissioned by the same man for the same reason, within a few years of each other, and then outlived his rule by five centuries. Almost everything a visitor finds odd here — why the building changes style halfway along, why the most famous painting in Milan is a ruin, why entry is rationed — comes from one of the dates below.

Chronology

1. 1463 The Dominicans begin building, to Guiniforte Solari’s design. His long Gothic nave in Lombard brick is what a visitor still walks into from Corso Magenta, and it sets the modest scale the east end then abandons.
2. 1492 Ludovico Sforza takes over the project and has Donato Bramante rebuild the east end as a domed tribune, intending it as the burial church of his dynasty. The dome visible from the street belongs to this second, much grander plan.
3. 1495 Leonardo begins the Last Supper on the refectory’s north wall. Giovanni Donato da Montorfano paints a Crucifixion on the south wall the same year — the two face each other still, and comparing them is the single most useful thing to do in the room.
4. 1498 Leonardo finishes. The painting is admired immediately and copied repeatedly, which is why versions of it exist in better condition than the original.
5. 1499 The French take Milan and Ludovico loses the duchy. The mausoleum is never used as one, which is why Bramante’s tribune stands over no Sforza tombs.
6. 1556 Vasari sees the painting and describes it as already reduced to a blur. The deterioration is not a modern problem: it began within twenty years of the paint going on.
7. 1652 A doorway is cut through the bottom of the wall to connect the refectory to the kitchens, removing Christ’s feet. The blocked arch is still visible at the centre of the lower edge.
8. 1796 Napoleonic troops occupy the convent and use the refectory as a store and stable. This is the period that does the most physical damage after the paint’s own failure.
9. 1943 On the night of 15 August, Allied bombing destroys the refectory’s roof and east wall. The Last Supper survives because it had been sandbagged and scaffolded; for months afterwards it stands exposed to the weather behind a tarpaulin.
10. 1980 The church and convent are inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
11. 1999 A restoration begun in 1978 under Pinin Brambilla Barcilon ends, having stripped centuries of overpaint back to what original material remained. The sealed, climate-controlled access regime a visitor passes through today dates from this work, not from the painting’s age.

• Official website
• Wikipedia