Pietro Annigoni: Preparations for "The Last Supper"

Studies for Pietro Annigoni's "Last Supper"

"Now I was going to concentrate on a sacred fresco, a huge "Last Supper" that I was going to paint for love alone in the church of a village called Ponte Buggianese. I resolved that I would devote myself entirely to this work for which I had already been preparing for a year. 

I have been asked if I do not think it was arrogant to attempt a subject for which Leonardo da Vinci is popularly believed to have provided the perfect composition (thereby, it is implied, making any later artists' essays irrelevant) and if I did not find it hard to get away from that 'perfect composition.' Leaving aside the fact that, personally, I prefer Tintoretto's 'Last Supper' in San Rocco, Venice, to Leonardo's, I think it is almost as absurd to suggest that Leonardo had the last word on the Last Supper as it would be to say that in his 'Mona Lisa' he had the last word on the human face, and that therefore no other artist should paint one.

I read and re-read the Gospels, trying to feel in my ordinary human way something of the absolute loneliness that Christ must have felt at that terrible moment. Finally, I had the idea of isolating the Christ figure, and suddenly the whole thing became my own. It symbolized the difficulty even the Church has in getting near to Christ, and the impossibility for human beings to be Christlike, especially in our time. After months of thinking about and concentrating upon that idea, the form taken by my composition followed instinctively.

For every day spent in the actual painting of a fresco, many times as many days have usually been spent in planning and preparation. The nature of fresco makes it absolutely essential that the artist knows in advance exactly what he is going to paint each day, so he will work from full-size, detailed studies that he can follow without faltering. Once the paint is applied no alterations, apart from minimal retouching, can be made. Before he can begin painting, the wall itself has to be prepared by a mason and plasterer. Upon this rough surface the artist then draws a bold outline of the principal masses of his composition.

Next he decides how much of the fresco he will be able to paint each day and marks these areas on his working drawing. And each day, a few hours before he starts painting, his plasterer prepares the appropriate area, covering it with a very smooth-surfaced layer of plaster. At the end of those few hours the plaster will be firm, and, after it has been given a coat of white-wash, the artist or his assistant traces on to it the appropriate part of the design. This is usually done by making perforations all along the main lines of a full-size drawing, fixing the drawing over the newly plastered area and dusting the lines with a loose-woven cotton bag containing charcoal dust or fine chalk power, thus leaving a dotted-line drawing on the plaster."

To be continued 

(Excerpted from "Pietro Annigoni: An Artist's Life" by Pietro Annigoni, 1977.)