Visitors to a particular New York location just off Park Avenue near 66th Street may have trouble telling that they are not in a monastery in Milan, looking at a sight everyone knows and few have actually seen: a magisterial painting of 13 robed men seated oddly on one side of a long dinner table.

Even many experts might not be able to distinguish the mural in front of them from the real one, Leonardo’s “Last Supper.”

In fact, the venue is the Park Avenue Armory. In its vast drill hall until January 6, Peter Greenaway, the provocative British filmmaker, is presenting the painting-cinema- lecture-installation extravaganza he calls “Leonardo’s Last Supper: A Vision by Peter Greenaway.” The three-year-old project is born of his desire to revive a visual literacy he believes modern eyes have lost when looking at paintings. It enlists props, lights, advanced digital projectors, towering screens, recorded music, voice-overs, a precise copy of the painting and practically every other theatrical aid imaginable to bring a masterpiece of Western art to life.

The first such exhibition by Mr. Greenaway, in 2006 , involved projections onto the canvas of the real “Night Watch,” Rembrandt’s masterpiece at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where Mr. Greenaway, 68, lives . The idea took off, and since then has involved the real “Last Supper;” an exhibition with a replica of Veronese’s “Wedding at Cana” in Venice; and two more “Last Supper” shows, in Milan and Melbourne, using the replica of “The Last Supper” that was recently shipped from Spain to New York in six panels.

Inside the armory drill hall, workers from Change Performing Arts, a Milanese theatrical production company, built a life-size re-creation of the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, where “The Last Supper” was completed by Leonardo in 1498.

The copy was made in about five weeks, by a company called Factum Arte, based in Madrid and London, a pioneer in the use of high-resolution photography and threedimensional scanning to recreate paintings and sculpture precisely. The replica was “painted” by an inkjet printer that slowly covered panels of plaster with paint that mimics the original but is designed to last much longer. (Leonardo’s tempera mixture on dry plaster proved disastrously fragile.)

Mr. Greenaway said his interest in creating these shows grew not only out of his own early training as a painter but from his waning interest in cinema, whose death he has been proclaiming for more than a decade . What began to obsess him was the idea of seeing what advanced movie technology could do if harnessed to its two-dimensional forefather, Western painting. “So if I complain that cinema is bad, then I’ve got to try to put something back in its place,” he said.

Of the paintings he has volunteered for this mission so far, and those on his wish list ? among them, “Guernica” by Picasso, a major Jackson Pollock drip painting at the Museum of Modern Art, and the Sistine ceiling ? he said: “We don’t turn them into films. They’re not animated works of art. They’re not cartoons. But we can change the color, and we can change the contrast, and we can change the chiaroscuro, and by inference we can make these paintings cinematic in a curious way.”

Recently, as the lights were being adjusted on his “Last Supper,” he worried that the whole thing was dragging a bit. “It’s also my responsibility here to introduce notions of legitimate entertainment,” he said.

But Adam Lowe, Factum Arte’s founder and the creator of the “Last Supper” replica, said, “If he were here today, I think Leonardo would be the happiest man in the world.”


By RANDY KENNEDY