The Last Supper (Cenacolo Vinciano)
Museo Statale, Managed By The Pinacoteca Di Brera Since December 2024; UNESCO World Heritage Site (Church And Dominican Convent Of Santa Maria Delle Grazie With The Last Supper, 1980) · Milan, Lombardy
Leonardo's mural of the instant Christ says that one of the twelve will betray him, painted between about 1495 and 1498 across the end wall of the room where the Dominicans of Santa Maria delle Grazie ate their meals. He refused true fresco, which has to be finished wet and fast, and worked in tempera and oil on dry plaster so that he could go back and change things, which is why it began flaking within twenty years of being finished. An Allied bomb took the roof off the refectory in August 1943 and the wall survived behind sandbags. A restoration running from 1978 to 1999 stripped away five centuries of repainting and left something faint, patchy and unmistakably his. Forty people at a time are let in for fifteen minutes through air-controlled doors, which is the whole problem: around a million and a half ticket requests a year chase roughly half a million places, and each block of dates sells out within days of going on sale.
Piazza Santa Maria delle Grazie 2, Milan, Lombardy, 20123, Italy
Tuesday to Sunday 08:15-19:00, last admission 18:45, ticket office 08:00-18:45. Closed every Monday, 1 January and 25 December; open on 1 May. Check-in is 30 minutes before your booked slot. Occasional evening openings are announced on the museum's own news page.
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