Signorelli, with his usual originality, chose the moment when Christ broke bread and gave it to His disciples. In that rare picture at Cortona, we see not the betrayed chief but the founder of a new religion.
The Cenacolo alone will not enable the student to understand Lionardo. He must give his attention to the master's sketch books, those studies in chalk, in tempera, on thin canvas and paper, prepared for the stylus or the pen, which Vasari calls the final triumphs of designing, and of which, in spite of the loss of many of his books, the surviving specimens are very numerous. Some are easily accessible in Gerli, Chamberlaine, and the autotype reproductions. It is possible that a sympathetic student may get closer to the all-embracing and all-daring genius of the magician through these drawings than if he had before him an elaborate work in fresco or in oils. They express the many-sided, mobile, curious, and subtle genius of the man in its entirety.
"Raffaello, che era la gentilezza stessa ... restavano vinti dalla cortesia e dall' arte sua, ma più dal genio della sua buona natura; la quale era si piena di gentilezza e si colma di carità, che egli si vedeva che fino agli animali l'onoravano, non che gli uomini."—Vasari, vol. viii. pp. 6, 60.
See above, p. [223].