L'ultima cena di Leonardo-Leonardo's Last Supper

Since 2006, iconoclastic British filmmaker Peter Greenaway has been engaged in a project to reinvigorate some of the most iconic paintings in the history of art in an attempt to get people to look at them again in a new way. Using audio and projectors, Greenaway barrages the selected paintings with imagery, cinema, poetry and special effects. Of his 2006 intervention with Rembrandt's The Nightwatch (1642), the filmmaker recalls, "We burned it, flooded it and covered it in blood, but if you go there today you will find it completely untouched." This volume is published concurrently with Greenaway's performance of Leonardo's Last Supper (2008) in the Refectory of the Santa Maria delle Grazie friary, where Leonardo da Vinci painted his famous masterpiece. This multi-media event will take place on the occasion of the 2008 Milan Furniture Fair. Da Vinci expert Martin Kemp, Professor of Art History at Oxford University, observes, "Greenaway has a terrific understanding of how painters work, which is not true of every filmmaker. There's no need to be stuffy about these things. If Leonardo had been around he would have been into moving images. You get the sense that he wanted his paintings to move."