No other painting has been admired as much and as enduringly by Nabokov as Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper and references and allusions to this painting, or its painter, are numerous. His attachment to Leonardo's masterpiece dates from an early age. In 1918 he composed a poem entitled, ‘The Last Supper’:

The leaning apostles clearly indicate that Nabokov had been thinking of Leonardo's Last Supper. Pictures of the same subject by, for example, Fra Angelico, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and Perugino, painted in the same century as Leonardo’s, show the disciples invariably in an erect and separate position. The poem was set to music by his cousin Nicolas in the same year as it was composed, and turned into a tableau vivant.

In his first novel, Mary, the very first reference to the pictorial arts concerns ‘a lithograph of the Last Supper’, which decorates a wall of the dining room at a Russian pension in Berlin. (Mary 6). In The Defence, the protagonist Luzhin is taken by his wife to the museum where his attention is directed to ‘two dogs domestically looking for crumbs beneath the narrow, poorly spread table of “The Last Supper”’ (Def 191). In Bend Sinister ‘a mezzotint of the Da Vinci miracle’ (BS 23) adorns Krug's flat, and, again, ‘Leonardo's Last Supper’ is recalled in Pale Fire, as someone is ‘spreading out his palms’ like one of the apostles (PF 268). (See colour illustration 14.)

Leonardo is referred to in Pnin as well as in Ada (Pnin 41, 98; Ada 488). In 1942 Nabokov lectured on Leonardo to Italian students.4 Indirect allusions to the Last Supper abound as well. In Ada ‘a dozen elderly townsmen’ walked in a forest near the spot where Ada celebrated her birthday by having a picnic. They sat down for a modest Italian lunch, the victuals for which they unwrapped with ‘sad apostolic hands’. On Van's demand they move away somewhat from the picnic party: ‘a most melancholy and meaningful picture – but meaning what, what?’ (Ada 268-269)