Something for everyone ... Peter Greenaway and the Last Supper. Photograph: Luciano Romano
Leonardo da Vinci is credited with inventing the parachute, aeroplane and a code intelligible only to Dan Brown, but could he also have invented the cinema? Peter Greenaway apparently thinks so, having staged a one-off cinematic sound and light show around the painting of The Last Supper in the old refectory of the monastery of the Santa Maria della Grazie in Milan.
Peter Greenaway is celebrated for making films that feel like paintings, so it is appropriate that he loves a painting that feels like a film. There is something undeniably cinematic about The Last Supper. Its dimensions, for instance: it appears to have been painted in Cinemascope. Even the experience of visiting the painting is cinema-like: you have to book ahead and buy tickets for a particular showing. After being admitted to the refectory through doors that recall those to the captain's bridge on the USS Enterprise, you then stand around and watch the painting with an audience of 15 other people.
The Last Supper forms a small part of my 2002 novel, White Mice. My young protagonist, Jamie, visits the painting hoping to grab a few minutes peace from the madness of the Milanese fashion industry, and especially his reprobate model sister and the nutsoid designer who employs them both. Jamie's anxiety levels are already high, and only grow higher as he joins a party of Italian-Americans in front of da Vinci's painting.
I inserted the passage because Jamie's experiences reflected my own. The painting is so famous that when I saw it, I was hoping for an illuminating experience but anxious that I would be disappointed - too dim or too distracted by other tourists to "get" it. I need not have worried. As Jamie, my narrator says, "it is so full of ideas and narrative that it is impossible to take in. My eyes have to travel backwards and forwards simply in order to read it and, as I do, the drama of Christ's betrayal seeps through. I don't actually speak to the others, but by the time I step back to ask myself what I really think, I know that the painting has got under their skin, just as it has got under mine ... The anxiety was there, but rather than bottle it up we left it crackling and sparkling until it turned into something else. Beauty out of anxiety: is that a transcendental experience?"
What is cinematic about the Last Supper is that it is both all-enveloping and narrative-driven. As Greenaway has realised, you have to watch it in order to be able to see it - and by the time you have finished watching it, you will have found a genuine connection to the painting. This makes it peculiarly democratic: it works for everyone, and works best in a crowd.
