ART

‘Last Supper’ Debate: A French art historian charged Friday that Italian restorers have stripped away so much from Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” that they’ve turned his masterpiece into a ghostly image more like a modern painting. Scholar Jacques Franck, who recently forced Paris’ Louvre museum to abandon plans to restore Da Vinci’s “Virgin and Child With St. Anne,” said the team restoring the “Last Supper” mural in a Milan church had stripped away all the repaints added since Da Vinci completed the work in 1497, taking no account of their crucial role in preserving the original. “In the 1970s, you could still understand that the mural once had so much relief that you felt you could touch the bread on the table,” said Franck, whose findings will be published next month in the American journal Achademia Leonardi Vinci. “Today you walk in and search for the work. It’s a ghost. . . . Leonardo’s art is only a distant memory.” The famous painting has been attacked by humidity over the years, and repaints, glue and plaster have been slapped on to stop it from crumbling away. Restorer Pinin Brambilla Barcilon, who has been working on the “Last Supper” at the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie since 1979, declined to comment on Franck’s charges.