Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 04/06/2026 16:46:00

A late fifteenth-century Dominican church and convent in central Milan, Santa Maria delle Grazie is best known as the home of Leonardo da Vinci Last Supper, painted on the wall of the convent refectory between 1495 and 1498. The combined site of church and refectory has been inscribed since 1980 on the UNESCO World Heritage list and is one of the most important Renaissance buildings in Lombardy. The church was begun in 1463 by the Dominicans to designs by the architect Guiniforte Solari, with a Gothic nave divided by tall clustered piers and side chapels. After Ludovico Sforza, duke of Milan, chose the building as the future dynastic mausoleum of his house in 1490, the choir of the church was rebuilt in a far more ambitious early Renaissance style to designs that have been attributed, with some confidence, to Donato Bramante. The Bramante choir, completed in the 1490s, is a complete contrast to the Gothic nave of Solari. A great hemispherical dome rises above a square crossing, with semicircular apses on three sides and a deep cylindrical tribune at the rear. The interior of the dome, with its three rings of decorative oculi and its bright whitewashed walls, is one of the most refined early Renaissance interiors in Italy. The refectory of the attached convent, a large rectangular room originally used as the dining hall of the Dominican community, was decorated by Leonardo da Vinci between 1495 and 1498 with a mural of the Last Supper. The painting fills the entire end wall of the refectory and depicts the moment Christ announces that one of the apostles will betray him, with the twelve figures reacting in a wave of horror and disbelief. Leonardo experimental technique, painting on dry plaster with a mixture of oil and tempera rather than in true fresco on wet plaster, allowed for finer detail but proved fatally unstable. The painting began to deteriorate within twenty years of its completion and has been the subject of more than half a dozen major restorations, the most recent of which, completed in 1999, removed centuries of overpainting to reveal the surviving original layers. The combined site is administered by the Italian state, with the church entered free from the front and the refectory and Last Supper visited by timed entry from a separate door on the side. Tickets for the refectory sell out months in advance, particularly in peak season, and visitors are admitted in small groups of around thirty at a time for a fifteen-minute viewing, after which the climate-controlled doors close behind them and the next group enters.