Some damage is in the doing. Some is in the watching. I can’t tell which is worse.

The Last Supper was repaired unsuccessfully six times before the final twenty-one-year restoration — one that left it more like the original than not.

Part of the reason it needed repair at all was because da Vinci didn’t paint it properly in the first place. He used an experimental technique — oil and tempera on dry plaster instead of wet — trying to extend the working time. Fresco didn’t suit him. It dried too fast. He needed space to make mistakes.

But the paint didn’t bind and it started deteriorating almost immediately. By the time anyone tried to fix it, the surface was already in crisis. Every attempt made it worse. Overpainting, retouching, flaking, fading. One of the world’s most revered works reduced to guesswork.

There’s something tragic not in the fragility, but the fact that the flaw was there from the beginning. Baked into the foundation. Born out of da Vinci’s own limitations — his need to control time, to delay finality.

Sometimes I wonder if it would’ve lasted longer if it had just been done the ordinary way.

Sometimes I wonder if it would’ve mattered at all.

Maybe the thing that made it what it was — the inventiveness, the slowness, the refusal to follow the rules — is the same thing that doomed it. And maybe that’s not a failure, but just the cost of making something that couldn’t have existed otherwise.

The traditional method might have held, but it also wouldn’t have been his.

Is the beauty in what was first created — even if it couldn’t last? Or is it in the version that’s been carefully rebuilt to look like nothing ever went wrong? Can it be both?

There’s something unsettling about the idea that the more flawless the repair, the more convincing the illusion. That if it’s done well enough, no one will ask what was lost. Or what was changed to make it whole again.

The Last Supper we see today was restored slowly, carefully, over decades. But before that, it was painted over. Interpreted. Misread. Layered with well-intentioned guesses that only pushed the original further out of reach. That part stays with me. The idea that repair can sometimes go wrong. That the damage we try to undo might not even be the original damage.

But I also think the point of restoration isn’t to make something look untouched — maybe it’s to keep it from disappearing. Not about pretending the damage never happened, but making sure it doesn’t keep spreading.

Some parts of the painting were unrecoverable. They left those blank. Muted. Honest. The restored image is whole, but not perfect. And honestly, I think it’s more beautiful because of that — because you can still see where it broke.

Where people got it wrong.

And where it survived anyway.