This is an article written for the Italian newspaper La Republica on the occasion of the projection of an elucidating light programme onto the original surface of the da Vinci painting of The Last Supper in the refectory of Santa Maria del Grazia in Milan.
There was considerable opposition to this project in some art circles in Italy on account of fears of deteriorating the original fragile painting by the projection of light, by excessive peopling of the refectory space, and on account of academic prejudices arising out of a perceived assault on the orthodoxy of standard art historical practices.
In the event, the prejudices were overcome and the projection went ahead with great success and delight. It is the second event in a series of nine investigative dialogues to be held between the languages of painting and cinema that started in 2006 with Rembrandt’s The Nightwatch in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and will finish with Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment in the Vatican, Rome, in 2012, via, amongst other paintings, Veronese’s Marriage at Cana in the Louvre, Paris, Velasquez’s Las Meninas in the Prado, Madrid, and Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sophia, Madrid.
Peter Greenaway, Milan, June 2008
The business of seeing and looking is curious. Just because you have eyes does not mean that you can see. We all have to learn to see. We have all watched a baby lying on his back staring fascinated apparently at nothing or at very little, a space of light on a ceiling, a conjunction of simple shapes where ceiling meets a wall. We have tried to follow his eye line and wondered what it is he is actually staring at with such intense concentration, repeatedly returning to examine and make sense of what he is looking at, at things that to us seem extremely minimal and ephemeral. These early stages of looking are often physiological, intensely retinal, grappling with the muscles and the lenses of the eye, discovering how they can be used and to what end, and when the baby moves his head and slightly changes his point of view, we can often see him start and stare with a newer surprise and a greater sense of discovery. If we are going to be successful at manoeuvring on Earth, we need to understand with our two eyes, our bifocal vision, how to understand and appreciate space, how not to fall downstairs, how to negotiate a corner, how to distinguish light from dark, texture from a plain surface, one colour from another. In a sense this education never ceases, though it is surprising how very quickly we gather in an ability to visually comprehend our surroundings.
We can talk about these things, give these experiences names and explanations, we can in effect discuss them as a grammar of seeing, two dimensions against three, geometric and aerial and false perspective, colour-coding, true and false representation, visual exaggeration. We can get even cleverer and start talking in technically visual terms; we can discuss and explain anamorphosis, entasis, chiaroscuro, sfumato. To make an analogy, we can in effect manoeuvre in speech communication very effectively without knowing consciously about grammar. Understanding what a gerund or a past infinitive or the dative case is, is not essential when ordering the groceries and it is not essential, though it is very fascinating, to know that when we stare with admiration at a tree on a hill, that our bifocal vision is offering our brain extraordinary sensations of light against dark, flat against solid, gradations of highlights down to glooms, minute shifts of colour concentration.
This sort of examination of our environment is the stuff of the really professional lookers and watchers and see-ers and these people for at least eight thousand years have been painters. Until the invention of photography, and then the whole plethora of visual artists that have followed on the invention of photography, these people, the painters, were responsible for training our eyes to see and to look, and of course along with their newer cousins with all their mechanical and photographic toys, they still are. We underestimate their contribution to our understanding of the world. We are always seeing the world though their eyes. We have been trained by them to see the world. It has been said that your grandmother (without in any way underestimating her good intentions and bright insights) knows practically nothing about Picasso, but Picasso, you can be certain, knows everything about your grandmother.
These painters are the grammarians of seeing and looking, although there again, although Della Francesca and Poussin and Seurat and Paul Klee might know and understand the minutiae of what they were doing and be able to talk about it eruditely, many painters would not find it necessary to elucidate such things intellectually, but would have learnt them nonetheless by intense concentration and endless observation. It has often been said that they best way to visually understand an object is to draw it. And we owe these painters an enormous debt. They have taught us how to see and to look, and our cities and architecture, our objects and artifacts, and our man-manicured landscapes have been arranged and constructed according to what they have taught us. To understand what they have taught us is important and in the huge burgeoning of contemporary interest in painting is evidence that we are starting to understand the significance of what their contribution has been, and still is, all about.
The sophistications of the laptop generation which is now practically everyone in the world aged between 13 and 30 and who have access to electricity, are profound and intense. They have rapidly become excessively familiar with today’s tools of communication. And they expect the world – and I believe quite rightly – to respond to their sophistications. What they see and experience in the commercial marketplace which teaches them what to appreciate, value and buy and imitate and consume, sets them up with interpretive languages which they are going to use everywhere on every occasion. If we are going to wish to educate these people to a greater comprehension of what we believe to be valuable, then we are going to have to use the sophisticated tools they know and use and expect and can understand.
There have been a series of profound visual works in the world in the last two thousand years, benchmark works that have expanded and developed and enlarged our vision of ourselves. Da Vinci’s The Last Supper is undoubtedly one of these profound works. A benchmark painting invariably makes a leap forward and embraces and consolidates an idea or series of ideas in encapsulated economic substantial form. Life is amorphous, often unshaped, multidirectional, full of ephemeralities and inconsequences, discontinuities, dead-ends, cul-de-sacs and long stretches of tedium and repetition and reprising. It is the very nature of life. A successful artwork takes this stuff of life and gives it shape, drops out the irrelevancies, sieves away the inconsequences, invents systems and economies to make an overview and recapitulation of what is essential.
Leonardo has a number of strategies in The Last Supper, some old and familiar, some new, and he uses them all with great skill to make a presentation, an exhibition, an image of steadiness and harmony, an image designed for contemplation. What he puts in, we must take out. What he engineers we must fathom. What he builds and constructs we must comprehend. To do this we must use, as all artists and their communicators have always done, the technological tools and comprehension of our contemporary times. Painters as various as Uccello and Leonardo used the new geometrical aids and navigational and astronomical technology of their age, Durer and Canaletto used the optical tools of their age, Vermeer used the camera obscuras of the 1660s, the Pre-Raphaelites used the newly discovered colour-dyes, the French Impressionists used photographic tools, the Italian futurists used the cinematic tools.
That is our intention here. We aim to utilise the technological tools of our age, the tools that the laptop user is familiar with, to elucidate the visual world of our heritage of which Leonardo’s Last Supper most certainly is part. We use these tools to emphasise, explain, demonstrate, underline, suggest and explore what Leonardo was doing, show his intention with the dance of hands, the turning and twisting of the profiles, show how he posited these thirteen figures in a given architectural space, show how the lines of perspective in two dimension are carried on in three dimensions, show how his symbolic Christian use of the grouping of threes gives metaphor to the unity of the painting, God the Father, God the son, God the Holy Ghost, a visual litany of Christian mythology based on something much much older which also suggests the triangular nature of stasis and harmony and equality; show how he used his vocabulary of different comprehensions first for the table and then for the figures, then for the architecture, bringing them all into alignment; demonstrate how the outline and the silhouette is used for dramatic effect, even hinting his apparent prophetic construction of cosmographies. This painting is no mere rendering of surface, no mere recording of visual ephemeralities; it is not a Polaroid photograph picking up visual anecdotes by accident, it is not a frozen frame, it is a fully rational and very careful construction, a thing made, a thing extremely well-wrought, well manufactured, well and intelligently engineered in all its parts, in all its substances.
In the end it would seem to be perverse not to do these things, not to use the new tools and their concomitant characteristics and the philosophies that are constructed around them because of their appearance on the human landscape of comprehension: it would be a dereliction of opportunity not to use our best abilities and greatest intelligences and most sophisticated tools to acknowledge his best abilities and great intelligences. The sceptical critics, reluctant to let contemporary sensibilities tackle Leonardo’s insights, because they believe the preserve is theirs to enumerate with old tools and out-dated curiosities, are satisfied with too little. They want a dead monument, subscribed by academia, to be made untouchable, the book of understanding closed, because they think they have closed it. They mis-use, mis-understand, and mis-apprehend the heritage. Leonardo would be the first to make them a caricature of fusty misinformation.
Let us exchange intelligences, spiritual, intellectual, emotional. To acknowledge in a dialogue from us to him, we can offer intellectual exchange with our tools to his tools. To say in effect we understand and respect and admire without constraint this extraordinary thing you did. How you made this great thing that sings to us, resounds with us, believer, unbeliever, Christian, non-Christian agnostic, atheist, that makes us proud and confident that such things can be made, comprehended, understood. We are capable of this. This is no mere Son et Lumière cheap and vulgar exposition of externals, exploited for a five-minute wonder, it is to be a dialogue to be held with pride that we can be so civilised and exchange such significances. Despite all inequalities, mediocrities, inadequacies, injustices – hey! this is us. Civilisation can do this. This is what we can do. Through you, we can do this! We can make this thing. Make, mark and view this thing together.
In the world at large there is a fascinating revolution taking place. Some talk of it as a seismic shift in understanding. For eight thousand years it can be said that the information gatekeepers of civilisation have been the text-masters. These word practitioners, the advocates, the orators, the speakers, the word-smiths, the word engineers, have created our politics, our holy books, our laws, codified our thinking, fashioned our vocabularies. Now post the digital revolution, these guys are going to have to move over and make way for the image-masters, the gatekeepers of the visual. This presents us with a problem because our visual education in the world is undernourished, impoverished, and not prioritised in our education systems. We have to seriously get going and really do something about this state of affairs. In the end it will always be true that the image always has the last word - indeed the written word is an image. The word is an ineffectual insubstantial temporary tool of historical and geographical limitation when placed alongside the image. We must transform our visual illiteracy.