About the year 1496, Leonardo began his immortal work in the refectory, The "Last Supper." Here, where daily the sweet and broken-hearted wife came to remain for hours in meditation and prayer before the tomb of the Duchess Bianca, from which she sometimes had to be removed by force, Leonardo came daily to his masterpiece. Sometimes he would go to his work at daybreak, and never think of descending from his scaffolding to eat or drink till night, so completely absorbed was he in his work. "At other times," says Bandello, "he would remain three or four days without touching it, only coming for an hour or two, and remaining with crossed arms contemplating his figures, as if criticising them himself. I have also seen him at midday, when the sun in the zenith causes all the streets of Milan to be deserted, set out in all haste from the citadel, where he was modelling his colossal horse, and, without seeking the shade, take the shortest road to the convent, where he would add a few strokes to one of his heads, and then return immediately." Leonardo made a cartoon of the whole picture, and separate studies of each figure. Ten of these are now in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. He was long absorbed in his head of Christ. He used to say that his hand trembled whenever he attempted to paint it. At last, in despair, he asked counsel of a friend, Bernardo Zenale, who comforted him by saying, "Oh, Leonardo, the error into which thou hast fallen is one from which only the Divine Being himself can deliver thee; for it is not in thy power nor in that of any one else to give greater divinity and beauty to any figures than thou hast done to these of James the Greater and the Less; therefore, be of good cheer, and leave the Christ imperfect, for thou wilt never be able to accomplish the Christ after such apostles." Leonardo finished the work in about three years. Beatrice, as might have been expected from such an ill-assorted union, died of sorrow in five years after her marriage. Lodovico, as has been often the case before and since in the world's history, realized too late the wrong he had done, and now strove to remedy it by causing a hundred masses a day to be said for her soul, shutting himself up in remorse for two weeks in a chamber hung with black, only coming forth to do penance at the sanctuaries where his lovely and neglected wife had worshipped. He now wished to make her last resting-place, Santa Maria delle Grazie, as beautiful as possible, and hastened Leonardo at his work on the "Last Supper" that he might see it completed, meantime raising a magnificent tomb to the memory of his neglected Beatrice.