The Last Supper, to which the book on sale from May 3 with the “Corriere della Sera” is dedicated, is the icon but also the great “sick man” of the art. In five centuries, the choice which led Leonardo to paint the wall like it had not to be done has transformed it into a test of the science of conservation. In the fifth centenary of the death of the author, the doctors are there to keep it alive through sophisticated machines, although already in 1556 Vasari, had written that it was “a huge dazzled stain” and in the eighteenth century the traveller Jonathan Richardson that it no longer existed. The cover of the first volume of the series “The genius of Leonardo”
The story of the Upper Room is made largely of reconstruction and removals of what had been reconstructed. Today we go on with technologies that are capable of diminishing the fine dust that every visitor introduces in the refectory: a glass cage will be built, which will pump 10 thousand cubic meters of clean air per hour (today they are 3.500) to allow more admissions per day (currently they are 1.320). The Upper Room would get a million visitors per year, but it can only accommodate 400 thousand.
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