The convent, now long converted to secular purposes, was, like the church, the object of Lodovico Sforza’s generosity. Leonardo da Vinci was commissioned by him to decorate the refectory with paintings, and there the Florentine artist, working slowly through many years, produced his Last Supper. The work was probably begun soon after 1483, and apparently not finished till 1498. The fate that befell it within a few years is one of the greatest tragedies in the history of art. Owing to his experimental use of oil, instead of the usual method of wall-painting, it was already quite ruined—_rovinata tutta_—when Lomazzo wrote his treatise on painting, sixty years later, and as early as 1536 it was, by Vasari’s testimony, only a blur. The repeated restorations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have almost obliterated the faint remaining traces of the master’s handiwork. The Dominicans wantonly contributed to the destruction of their priceless possession by cutting a door into their kitchen through the lower part of the central group, and Napoleon’s troops, stabled in the hall in 1796, gave it a final battering. The refectory stands beside the church. As one enters, the ghost of the great picture appears at the upper end of the long melancholy chamber. It seems at first sight as if nothing of the real work were left. _Cosa bella mortal passa_, Leonardo has said himself, and he, least of all, seems to have cared to give immortality to the beauty which he created. _E non d’arte_, he adds. And soon we perceive that this too is true here. For the deep and elemental significance of the painter’s conception lives still in its largeness and entirety, expressed in the great lines of the composition, in the distribution of light and shade, in the disposition of the figures. Our eyes are carried up by every line of the composition, every action of the subordinate figures, and left alone with the Christ. He sits upright, His hands spread out upon the table, His head against the space of light framed by the large middle window of the long chamber. On either side, but a little apart, so that no other head intrudes on this central space of light, are ranged the Twelve, in groups of three. The words have been uttered—_One of you shall betray me_—and a tempest of surprise and questioning agitates them. Peter, half rising, grasps the shoulder of John, who still sleeps on. Judas draws fiercely away, clutching the moneybag. Beyond this group, Andrew, James the Less, and Bartholomew, variously show distress and wonder. On the other side, James the Elder spreads his hands in horror; Thomas lifts his forefinger; Philip, risen, leans forward in earnest protest. Matthew, Thaddeus and Simon, beyond, comment eagerly on His words. But their agitation cannot touch that central stillness; it serves only to deepen the spiritual silence in which He sits solitary. He has eaten and drunk with them, but they have not understood. Love