The religious order that occupied the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie when The Last Supper was painted was the Dominican Order.
Santa Maria delle Grazie was founded as a Dominican church and convent in Milan. Leonardo da Vinci’s mural was commissioned in the 1490s by Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, as part of renovations that were intended to make the church a Sforza family mausoleum. The painting was placed on the refectory’s end wall, where the Dominican friars would have taken their communal meals.
The setting explains why a Last Supper scene was an especially appropriate subject: refectories commonly displayed religious meal imagery. The painting is often casually called a fresco, but Leonardo used an experimental tempera-based technique on a dry wall rather than traditional wet-plaster fresco. That choice allowed revisions but contributed to the mural’s early deterioration.
The order is sometimes confused with the Jesuits, founded later in the sixteenth century, or with the Franciscans and Benedictines. Santa Maria delle Grazie remains associated with both the Dominican convent and Leonardo’s celebrated mural.