Giampietrino
1490–1560 · Duchy of Milan · Renaissance, Lombard school
The story
Almost everything we know about how Leonardo's Last Supper actually looked, before the wall in Milan began to crumble, comes down to a young man who watched him paint it. Giovanni Pietro Rizzoli, known simply as Giampietrino, joined Leonardo's Milanese workshop around the mid-1490s, while the master was still at work on the refectory wall of Santa Maria delle Grazie.
Around 1515 to 1520, when the original was already flaking away, Giampietrino made a full-size copy in oil. It preserves details the fresco has since lost entirely, down to the salt cellar spilling near Judas and the food on the table, and restorers of the Milan original still use it as their most reliable record. The Royal Academy in London bought it in 1821 for 600 guineas, the most it had ever paid for anything.
On his own, Giampietrino painted soft, sensuous saints and mythological women in the Lombard manner he learned at Leonardo's elbow, works that turn up today across European collections, often long mistaken for the master's own.
