Leonardo the slacker, and the creation of the Last Supper

On May 28, 1999, in Milan, Italy, after 22 years of restoration work, Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper" was put back on display. From the introduction to the article:

"Leonardo da Vinci was a genius of delay, a master of the unfinished.

Brilliant ideas swirled around him like snowflakes in a flurry and melted almost as quickly. Frustrated patrons tried in vain to get him to complete commissions, but the perfectionist wouldn’t be hurried. Unfinished work seemed to be a Leonardo specialty, and as the last decade of the 15th century dawned, he had frustratingly little to show for the prodigious talent he had displayed in his youth. “Tell me if anything was ever done,” he lamented in a notebook.

With that track record, an observer might have been dubious about the commission that came Leonardo’s way late in 1494 or early in 1495: to paint a mural of the Last Supper of Jesus and his apostles on the north wall of the refectory at the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan.

Ross King, an English novelist and historian, tells the story, in “Leonardo and the Last Supper,” of the improbable creation of one of art’s greatest masterpieces. With a fiction writer’s feel for character, King depicts a supremely ingenious, enigmatic, stubbornly independent, and underachieving Leonardo, and, with a nonfiction writer’s skill, he sets the sketch against a richly described background of a society in creative and often violent ferment."