Latest Reviews

Photo - Luciano Romano

To the edifying sounds of Italian opera, in a blaze of high-tech lighting, Da Vinci’s second most famous painting is instantly transformed. While marveling how does he do that?, a slow and subtle something is stirring within you and you find yourself deeply moved.

Forward-looking artist and filmmaker, Peter Greenaway, has brought a perfect, three dimensional clone of The Last Supper to North Melbourne. Which is to say, the interior of Arts House has been transformed into an approximate recreation of the actual refectory at Milan with a life-size, highly accurate reproduction of Da Vinci’s mural sitting high on one wall of the space, opposite the projected image of a Crucifixion fresco, as per The Last Supper’s actual setting. At the show’s opening on Saturday morning Greenaway described it as educational entertainment, a stylistic reproduction born out of temerity and arrogance using postproduction cinema techniques. This, he said, is art for the laptop generation, applying techniques and tricks of this age, but used with a certain “intellectual credibility”.

Greenaway described the show as a celebration of the image but also of the event of the supper itself. It’s more than that besides: it’s also a celebration of the evolution of art. Greenaway is keen to bring some of the world’s most celebrated artworks to the generations who believe “there is no cinema before Tarantino and no painting before Pollock”. Patronising as that is for those who know better, fortunately the show itself has a lot more depth than the didacticism that comment would suggest.

There are moments in this show where your eyes well up with tears and you’re not even sure why: Christ’s feet, cut out of the original fresco in 1652 to make room for a doorway, are suddenly revealed right in front of you; the use of cutting-edge computer graphics and video projection bring the painting into crystal focus and suddenly Christ and the 12 disciples are three-dimensional holograms in halos of light. Typical of Greenaway, though, is a delight in games and visual tricks: the work unfolds projected onto two opposite walls of the room, forcing the audience to choose what to see when, or else be caught in a constant tennis-match swiveling of eyes back and forth.

This show brings together ancient and modern art with a spiritual reverence that is unexpected. As you are drawn into the landscape of the painting itself, seeing each microscopic fleck on the surface, you appreciate the wealth of techniques employed over 500 years by artists to create images that move us so. And, just as impressively, Greenaway pulls off the almost impossible trick of taking an artwork so well known (especially in these post Dan Brown times) that it has become mute and flattened of meaning, and allowing it to speak new things to us.


Peter Greenaway
Leonardo’s Last Supper

Venue: Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall | 521 Queensberry Street, North Melbourne
Dates: Sat 10 Oct – Sun 8 Nov, Tues – Sun 10am – 8pm (last showing at 7.30pm)
Showings every half hour - 20min no interval
– the last showing on Sat 10 Oct is at 4.30pm
Tickets: Full $10, Child (14 and under) $5
Bookings: Ticketmaster 1300 136 166 or www.melbournefestival.com.au
Tickets will be available at the door unless a show is selling out