Last Supper Leonardo Da Vinci
For five centuries Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper has stood majestically still on the walls of a Milanese friary, the only disturbance the slow flaking of its priceless paint.

Now Peter Greenaway, the iconoclastic British film-maker, has been granted permission to wheel in projectors and bring to life the hidden stories he sees in the masterpiece.

Greenaway, 65, announced yesterday that he is planning to use dramatic lighting, projections and recordings of actors’ voices to transform the depiction of the moment Christ announced that one apostle would betray him into something close to a film.

Unsurprisingly for a film director who served up a dead man at a different kind of dinner party in his 1989 film The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Greenaway is courting fresh controversy when his project goes on show in April and May. He plans to project on to the refectory walls “raw and heavy” images of Christ’s genitalia and naked crucifixion, taken from Da Vinci’s other works.

It will be “an act of some significance that some people might regard as blasphemous,” he said at the launch in London yesterday.

The project is part of an attempt by Greenaway to animate the world’s greatest paintings. His targets include Picasso’s Guernica, Monet’s Waterlilies in Madrid and a Jackson Pollock in New York. He has even asked the Vatican if he can bring the series to a climax by projecting on to Michaelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel.

The project, which has returned Greenaway to his earlier career as a painter, started in his adopted home town of Amsterdam where in 2006 he animated Rembrandt’s The Nightwatch. It opens with a cock crowing at dawn. Light plays across figures and the voices of men are heard. There are explosions, infernos and rain before night comes and the show ends with the midnight bell.

“We burned it, flooded it and covered it in blood,” he recalled. “But if you go there today you will find it completely untouched.

“I just want to get people to look again at art. Most people are visually under-educated and after the age of 11 schoolchildren are encouraged to concentrate on texts while visual arts are regarded as simply decorative and entertaining.” Guardian.co.uk

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