“ If Leonardo was alive now he wouldn’t just be interested in film-making, he would be handling high-definition cameras and would be right up against the cutting edge experimenting with holograms. He would be fascinated by the post-digital age. I am sure that he would support entirely what we are doing, which isn’t true of a series of academics who believe that this painting belongs to them and not to the world at large. This painting belongs to the laptop generation as much as it does to academia and we want to demonstrate that.
— Peter Greenaway, on his one-off light and sound projection on Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper in Milan. I don’t always love everything Greenaway does, but I do admire his relentless imagination. It’s interesting that he says the painting “belongs to the laptop generation” but I don’t think one can fully appreciate it, or Greenaway’s re-imagining of it, on video. It is something to be experienced in person, on the real painting, not a representation of it, much as the endless reproductions of it have rendered da Vinci’s masterpiece so mundane.