When visiting the refectory of the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, few people can take their eyes off the masterpiece of Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper. Yet the Crucifixion displayed on the opposite wall is worth attentive observation.
Its author is Giovanni Donato da Montorfano, who worked back to back with Leonardo in 1495. While the genius from Vinci was experimenting with colours, painting on the dry wall rather than on a wet plaster and therefore condemning his work to precocious deterioration, Montorfano diligently used the fresco technique. That is why his Crucifixion is so bright and vivid still today, while Leonardo's Last Supper started to flake only a few years after its completion.
The different resistance to time of the two techniques is dramatically evident in the portraits of Ludovico il Moro, his wife Beatrice and their sons Massimiliano and Francesco, which Leonardo painted a secco, that is working on a dry surface, on Montorfano's work. Time has reduced the four figures, who are kneeling down in the bottom corners of the Crucifixion, to ghostly witnesses to the death of Jesus.
The scene depicted by Montorfano is incredibly crowded and detailed. At the foot of the three crosses, groups of people react differently to the tragedy which is going on: dominican friars and nuns (who actually commissioned both works for the refectory of the Convent) barely daring to look; three women holding grief-stricken Maria, the only figure in the scene clad in light blue; John the Apostle watching soldiers who throw dice for Jesus' clothing.
On the background, the high walls of Jerusalem - a clear homage to Bramante, and on the foreground the crosses, tall and thin, inaccessible to human reach.
At the center of the composition, at the foot of the middle cross, Mary Magdalene is passionately clinging to the wood as if it was Jesus himself, her red hair loosely spread on her shoulders.
Her human, earthly love so evident in her desperate gesture, will strike a chord with all visitors.
A good reason to spend some of the 15 minutes allowed inside the refectory to pay homage to Montorfano's masterpiece.