Bringing Giorgio Vasari's "The Last Supper" Back to Life More than most Renaissance artists, Giorgio Vasari knew the perilous existence of human creations. In "The Lives of the Artists," the chronicle of the great quattrocento painters and sculptors for which he is best known, he describes how a stone bench, hurled off a parapet by an anti-Medici mob in Florence in 1527, "chanced, as Fortune would have it," to land on Michelangelo's "David," breaking one of its arms into three pieces. In 1966, as fortune would also have it, one of Vasari's most imposing works met an even worse fate. The Arno overflowed its banks, flooding Florence, and Vasari's "The Last Supper," hanging in the museum of the Church of Santa Croce only a few blocks from the river, was among the many masterworks in its path. This panoramic scene, almost 21 feet long and 8 feet tall, remained submerged in muddy, oily water for at least a dozen hours, and when it was finally rescued, its poplar panels were as damp as sponges, the paint atop them peeling off. For more than four decades, the painting sat out of view, and almost totally unviewable, covered in what looked like a pie crust of protective paper to shield its fragile surface. Some considered the painting, completed in 1546, beyond saving. But in a conservation lab a few blocks away from where the work was damaged, it is now slowly coming back to life, inch by inch. As part of an initiative by the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, one of Italy's most renowned restoration labs, and the Getty Trust in Los Angeles, whose foundation has committed more than $2 million to help train replacements for an aging generation of panel-painting conservators, the painting's five panels were recently rejoined for the first time since before the flood. The damage to the work was grave. "One of my colleagues called it desperate, and I think that was right," said Deborah Marrow, the director of the Getty Foundation. It was scary to look at. But the painting has now revealed itself after four years of toil to be remarkably intact in many places. Cecilia Frosinini, a conservator on the project, said in a recent interview that the paint loss is estimated at 20 to 30 percent. But showing a reporter close-ups of the painting's surface recently using FaceTime with her iPhone, Ms. Frosinini pointed to many of the work's most dramatic passages - the faces of Jesus and of St. John, and the figure of Judas looming large and dramatic in the foreground in a kind of pink doublet - that had survived the disaster and the intervening years quite well. "We were amazed, really amazed because we had expected something much worse," she said. The back of the panels, despite being pocked with tiny wormholes and with modern wood patches in places, remains mostly original, with one of the innovative cross-supports Vasari designed still in place. "If the effort to restore this painting had been made years ago," Ms. Frosinini said, the paint would have separated from the wood, which would probably not have survived. But with technological advances to repair the wood, "we can now perform a kind of miracle, the possibility to restore it in a more accurate way," she said. From the 12th century until canvas became more common in the late 15th century, wood panel was used by most artists for portable paintings. The "Mona Lisa" is on panel, as is Van Eyck's altarpiece, for example, but wood can be a conservation nightmare, highly susceptible to humidity and temperature changes. On the Vasari, the conservators used animal glue, as Renaissance artists did for repairs, and wood supports to allow the painting to continue to shift depending on temperature and humidity. "The wood never really dies," Ms. Frosinini said. It continues to move. Vasari painted the piece in his studio on joinable and transportable panels because its commissioners, the nuns of the Florentine convent of Le Murate, did not want a male artist and his assistants working in their cloister for as long as two years. In recent weeks, as conservators have prepared to turn fully to the surface of "The Last Supper," they received a better-known panel painting to work on, Leonardo's unfinished "The Adoration of the Magi" from the Uffizi; it will undergo treatment next year for problems that are minor in comparison with those of the Vasari. Carrying her phone quickly behind the Leonardo, Ms. Frosinini showed yet another painting in for a cleaning, a work on canvas that will probably never be displayed so close to its two Renaissance roommates again: Jackson Pollock's 1947 "Alchemy," one of his earliest poured paintings, from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. But for now, the focus is on finishing the Vasari. Two longtime Italian panel-painting experts, Ciro Castelli and Mauro Parri, came out of retirement to help with the project and to train younger conservators during the process. (Mr. Castelli's career as a conservator got its start in Florence months after the 1966 flood, and he helped to work on many of the most water-damaged pieces at the time. "Few of them were as bad as the Vasari," he said.) One discovery the conservators have made on the painting's surface is a previously unknown inscription near the bottom saying that the piece was restored long before, in 1594, just 20 years after Vasari's death. There is also evidence on the painting of damage from two previous floods, making its survival all the more remarkable. A 2010 grant from the Getty Foundation of more than $400,000 to restore the painting is now coming to an end, and conservators are looking for another sponsor to help them finish the work. "I hope other people will support this," Ms. Marrow said. This is a big project, and it should have partners. Ms. Frosinini said the goal was to complete the painting's rebirth by 2016. "It will be the 50th anniversary of the flood," she said. The river has tried to get this painting, and it would be very nice to say, 50 years later, that it did not succeed. An earlier version of this article misidentified the organization that committed more than $2 million to train panel-painting conservators. It is the Getty Trust, not the J. Paul Getty Museum. The Getty Museum is one of the constituent programs of the Getty Trust.