Five climate crisis activists who glued themselves to the frame of a copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper in London have said they believe the painter would “100% agree” with their actions, after they were convicted today of criminal damage.
The members of the Just Stop Oil group were each ordered to pay £486 by a judge who described the case as an unusual one in that the evidence of every witness was credible and said he recognised the defendants “believe entirely” in their cause.
Jessica Agar, 22, Simon Bramwell, 50, Caspar Hughes, 51, Lucy Porter, 47 and Tristan Strange, 40, were charged with causing £180 of criminal damage to the artwork’s frame during the protest at the Royal Academy of Arts in Piccadilly on 5 July 2022.
They were also accused of causing £539.40 of damage to a nearby sofa, on which glue was found, and to a wall, City of London magistrates court heard on Tuesday.
In his judgment on Wednesday, district judge William Nelson said that CCTV showed that the defendants were far away from the sofa and had not damaged the furniture, where a police “de-bonding” team had placed some of their equipment.
However, he found all five guilty of damaging the wall and the frame, though he said that they did not “intend” to cause the damage, adding: “All defendants gave very clear evidence that the primary purpose of their endeavour was to attract the attention of major media outputs to give the widest audience their message.”
The judge described the case as one that was not “simply trivial criminal damage”, telling the court: “Damage to the frame of a master work such as this where the gallery had to shut for a day and rope off the site is not the same as, say, damaging in a very minor way the outside of a house during the course of a protest in a street, or even perhaps minor scratches or damage to a vehicle.”
The RA’s copy of the work was officially valued at £1.4m in 2014 and then at £3.6m before the trial, the court had been told by Martha Marriott, a registrar at the institution.
It is attributed to two of Leonardo’s pupils – Giampietrino and Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio – and is believed to be the most accurate record of the original.
Speaking on behalf of the five activists outside the court, Bramwell said: “I am confident in the fact that if Leonardo da Vinci was looking down on us, he would 100% agree with what we’ve done. He was quoted as saying that Nature never breaks her own laws.”
The order was comprised of a fine, court costs and compensation.
Bramwell, a co-founder of the Extinction Rebellion group, added: “Once again the law is failing the people of Britain and the people of the planet. In this case we did what we had to do according to our consciences and the hard science. We have to take the knocks along with that. The law is not going to change overnight. The judge was fair, within his remit, and yet we also need the judges to start taking some serious bloody risks.
“We need them to start realising the laws that we have at the moment in this country are hostage to private capital, big oil and ultimately are not protecting everybody.”
