The copy of the "Last Supper" (Plate V.) by Marco d'Oggiono, now in the Diploma Gallery at Burlington House, was made shortly after the original painting was completed. It gives but a faint echo of that sublime work "in which the ideal and the real were blended in perfect unity." This copy was long in the possession of the Carthusians in their Convent at Pavia, and, on the suppression of that Order and the sale of their effects in 1793, passed into the possession of a grocer at Milan. It was subsequently purchased for £600 by the Royal Academy on the advice of Sir Thomas Lawrence, who left no stone unturned to acquire also the original studies for the heads of the Apostles. Some of these in red and black chalk are now preserved in the Royal Library at Windsor, where there are in all 145 drawings by Leonardo.
Several other old copies of the fresco exist, notably the one in the Louvre. Francis I. wished to remove the whole wall of the Refectory to Paris, but he was persuaded that that would be impossible; the Constable de Montmorency then had a copy made for the Chapel of the Château d'Ecouen, whence it ultimately passed to the Louvre.
The singularly beautiful "Head of Christ" (Plate VI.), now in the Brera Gallery at Milan, is the original study for the head of the principal figure in the fresco painting of the "Last Supper." In spite of decay and restoration it expresses "the most elevated seriousness together with Divine Gentleness, pain on account of the faithlessness of His disciples, a full presentiment of His own death, and resignation to the will of His Father."
[THE COURT OF MILAN]
Ludovico, to whom Leonardo was now court-painter, had married Beatrice d'Este, in 1491, when she was only fifteen years of age. The young Duchess, who at one time owned as many as eighty-four splendid gowns, refused to wear a certain dress of woven gold, which her husband had given her, if Cecilia Gallerani, the Sappho of her day, continued to wear a very similar one, which presumably had been given to her by Ludovico. Having discarded Cecilia, who, as her tastes did not lie in the direction of the Convent, was married in 1491 to Count Ludovico Bergamini, the Duke in 1496 became enamoured of Lucrezia Crivelli, a lady-in-waiting to the Duchess Beatrice.
Leonardo, as court painter, perhaps painted a portrait, now lost, of Lucrezia, whose features are more likely to be preserved to us in the portrait by Ambrogio da Predis, now in the Collection of the Earl of Roden, than in the quite unauthenticated portrait (Plate VII.), now in the Louvre (No. 1600).
On January 2, 1497, Beatrice spent three hours in prayer in the church of St. Maria delle Grazie, and the same night gave birth to a stillborn child. In a few hours she passed away, and from that moment Ludovico was a changed man. He went daily to see her tomb, and was quite overcome with grief.
In April 1498, Isabella d'Este, Beatrice's elder, more beautiful, and more graceful sister, "at the sound of whose name all the muses rise and do reverence" wrote to Cecilia Gallerani, or Bergamini, asking her to lend her the portrait which Leonardo had painted of her some fifteen years earlier, as she wished to compare it with a picture by Giovanni Bellini. Cecilia graciously lent the picture—now presumably lost—adding her regret that it no longer resembled her.