Whatever its actual provenance, Longinus took the spear back with him to his native village, which some say was Zöbingen, in Germany. From there, through little-known circumstances that even historians seem to have ignored, it ended up in the hands of men like Charlemagne and Frederick Barbarossa.3 The lance’s occult power secured Charlemagne almost half a century of victories in battle and stimulated his clairvoyant abilities, enabling him to find the tomb of the apostle James in Spain. With such a glorious history, the spear was treasured for centuries among the most valued royal objects of the Frankish kings: Charlemagne’s sword, an orb of gold dating from the twelfth century, and the crown of Charlemagne, originally made of iron, into which was mounted one of the nails from Christ’s crucifixion. These objects would certainly have played a role in Charles V’s coronation in Aachen in 1520.
But Titian didn’t paint this until 1548,” I objected.
“That’s right. Which is how we know the artist never set eyes on the actual lance. In all likelihood, once the coronation was over, it was returned to safekeeping in Nuremberg. But it is my considered opinion that Charles gave explicit instructions to Titian to include it in the portrait. And to show him gripping it very firmly, of course.”
“Very firmly? Why is that important?”
“Well, according to legend, Charlemagne was returning home from one of his campaigns in Saxony when he was thrown by his horse. A celestial sign—a comet—had startled him. The precious talisman—the lance—fell to the ground, and at that very moment, on a beam in the cathedral at Aachen, the word ‘Princeps’ was mysteriously erased from the inscription ‘Karolus Princeps.’ It was a terrible and unmistakable portent. Charlemagne died soon after.
“Something quite similar happened to Barbarossa years later after he dropped the lance while crossing a river in Turkey, then the Ottoman Empire. So I imagine that the heir to both of these figures would take care to be shown holding the lance quite firmly, exactly as you see in the portrait.”
I frowned. “So the painting was his own idea? The emperor’s?”
Fovel seemed to relish my question. His eyes sparkled, and he took his time answering, enjoying my attention. “We-e-ell, now that’s a very interesting question, Javier. In that winter of 1548, Titian was summoned to Augsburg to receive the commission to paint a portrait of Charles. Titian was over seventy, and many people worried for his health, but the fact was that the emperor’s state was even worse. He’d defeated the German Protestant armies at Mühlberg, sure, but how much longer could he live?
“We know that Charles tried several times to engage John Dee, the illustrious English magician I mentioned before, as his personal astrologer. Dee was also a renowned expert on talismans, and Charles needed to know how long the stars said he had left on this earth. In those days Dee was traveling from court to court, seeking his fortune, and yet it’s generally thought that the two never met, though we can’t be sure. Six years later, in London, Dee would cast a horoscope for Charles’s son Philip II. Perhaps Dee or one of his admirers—like Juan de Herrera, who would later manage the building of El Escorial for Philip II—reminded Charles how being shown in a portrait with such a powerful symbol could secure him a longer life.”
My mind, once again, was spinning. “Doctor, I’m amazed at how you’ve managed to connect everything again!”
“The thing is, Javier, it’s not me who’s doing the connecting. These connections are there to be seen if you can look at history in a particular way.”
I stood there for a moment turning Fovel’s words over in my head. I’d almost forgotten that I had come here this time because of Mister X, who had warned me of terrible consequences should I continue to seek out these lessons from the man who was standing right beside me!
But why was that? Up until now, everything that Fovel had taught me had been nothing short of fascinating. He was instructing me in a novel way of looking at our past, that paid more attention to the state of mind and beliefs of its protagonists than just to battles and documents, which can be manipulated later. What harm could there be in such a lesson, and why was my attention to this strand of history apparently so irritating to Mister X?
I decided to set aside that disturbing thought as well as I possibly could. Excited by Fovel’s latest revelations, I had another question for him. I had resolved to avoid looking at my watch for the rest of the time I was in the museum.
“Tell me, Doctor, do you know of any other paintings that show talismans of power like this one?”
“Of course! There’s one that you will really like, which was painted after Charles’s death, during the time of Philip II. Believe me, this one is quite an intellectual challenge. Another one. Are you ready to see it?”
* * *
I. The Master is referring to Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim (1486–1535), cabalist, necromancer, and intellectual, who, in his youth, was in service to both Maximilian I and Charles V. Later in his career he would write an influential treatise describing his conviction that everything in the universe was connected through subtle forces that either attracted or repelled power and wealth. He titled this work De Occulta Philosophia libri III (Three Books of Occult Philosophy).
II. The pilum was a lance similar to the javelin, typical of Roman legionaries.
11
* * *
THE PRADO’S HOLY GRAIL
Fovel and I retraced our steps, passing once again in front of The Glory, and continued down the rotunda stairway to the first floor hallway. Our destination, Fovel told me, was a small, vaulted, cream-colored gallery nearby, which housed another of the principal works in the arcanon: Juan de Juanes’s version of The Last Supper.
“Welcome to the ‘Gallery of the Grail’!” Fovel announced as we entered, his voice booming uncharacteristically around the enclosed space, which was at that moment empty.
Fovel positioned me directly in front of the painting by Juanes. It took me a moment to adjust to it, for while it was beautifully detailed, with vivid colors and luminous figures, after the colossal equestrian portrait we had just seen, this one looked almost ridiculously small.
“Take a good look,” began Fovel. “Like most of the pieces in this gallery, this was painted for the Church of St. Stephen in Valencia. In fact, it was placed over the tabernacle, where they would store the consecrated bread and wine after Mass. Juanes painted it during the reign of Philip II, and it depicts Jesus surrounded by the twelve apostles as he institutes the sacrament of the Eucharist. Obviously the composition calls to mind Leonardo’s enormous Last Supper, painted six decades earlier in Milan. Juanes had seen the copy of it that hangs in Valencia Cathedral, though there are some notable differences between the two. In this version, all of the apostles have a halo above their heads inscribed with their name, except for Judas Iscariot. There is bread and wine on the table, and the platter is empty. The sacred host shines in the hands of the Messiah and most important, the Grail sits at the center of the entire composition.”
“Why do you say ‘most important’?”
“Because, Javier, the chalice that Juanes painted actually exists. It’s a cup made of agate, encrusted with gold, emeralds and pearls, which since the Middle Ages has been in Valencia Cathedral, and which many believe to be the actual Holy Grail that Christ used at the Last Supper.”
“That’s kind of far-fetched,” I remarked.
“Don’t be too sure,” Fovel replied. “Of all the holy grails today in Europe that claim to be the real one—and there are quite a few1—this is the only one with a possible ring of authenticity to it.”
“You believe in the Holy Grail?” I asked.
“It’s not just a question of faith. Some respected archeologists have examined it, and verified at least that it is indeed an opulent stone cup most likely made in a workshop in the Middle East, perhaps Egypt or Palestine, and they can date it back to the first century before Christ.2 In those days vessels like that were considered extremely valuable, and it’s easy to
imagine a rich Jew of the time like Joseph of Arimathea having an item like that among his finest possessions.”
“Yes, but even assuming that’s true, it doesn’t mean that this is the exact cup that was used at the Last Supper,” I objected. “That’s a big leap. And anyway, what’s it doing in Valencia? Shouldn’t an object like that be in Israel?”
Juan de Juanes, The Last Supper (1562). The Prado Museum, Madrid.
Of course Fovel was ready for me. “Well, Javier, there’s an answer to that, and it’s quite interesting.”
“I’m all ears,” I said.
“Very well. The chalice that Juanes painted was in Rome for almost three centuries, before it ever arrived in Spain. Of course, to accept that you have to suppose that after the crucifixion, St. Peter took the cup with him back to what was then the capital of the empire, and that once there, it was passed down through the leaders of the Christian faith like a kind of papal chalice. To me, this makes much more sense than the idea that so many medieval French and Saxon writers from the twelfth century would have us believe, that immediately upon the Messiah’s death, Joseph of Arimathea took the cup to Britain. That’s an absurd notion! Why would someone like him travel to such a remote and unimportant place as the British Isles were in those days? And how is it that there is not one single shred of documentary evidence to support that idea?”
“But still, there were a lot of pretty improbable journeys in the beginnings of Christianity, like the apostle St. James traveling to Spain, for example. Myths like that.”
“I am not talking about any myth!” Fovel’s voice resounded through the gallery. “It has been established that there was a papal chalice in Rome that was passed down from pope to pope during the first centuries of our age.”
“Well then, how did it come to be in Spain?”
“I’ll explain. I’m sure you’re aware that several of the Roman emperors persecuted Christians quite harshly?”
I nodded.
“Well, between the years 257 and 260, the empire under Valerian launched a new campaign of systematic murder and looting of Christians. They also searched the tombs of sect members for valuables. And here comes the interesting part. At that time, the guardian of the papal chalice was Pope Sixtus II. Before he was beheaded, he entrusted what was probably the church’s only treasure to his administrator Lorenzo, a young deacon from Huesca, in Hispania, who couldn’t think of a better hiding place for it than with his distant relatives. He sent the cup to its hiding place in the care of some legionaries from the hills around his native village who had been converted to the faith.”
“Is there any proof of that?”
The Master’s eyes shone. “There is, indeed! In fact, much more proof than for the complete fabrication about the Holy Grail of Arthur and Merlin, which didn’t appear until a thousand years later, or that Joseph of Arimathea took it to Britain! There’s more, too. Just days after packing the chalice off to Spain, Lorenzo was tortured to death on a red-hot iron grill over a slow fire. This was in the year 258. Eighty years later, on the very spot in Rome where he was buried, Pope Damasus I had the Basilica of St. Lawrence outside the Walls built. In the original fourth-century church there was a fresco showing a cup in a frame with two handles being handed to a kneeling soldier by St. Lawrence. Sadly, the image was destroyed in the allied bombings of Rome during World War II, but the fresco has plenty of historical documentation.”
“And that’s the same cup as this one?” I asked, pointing to the painting by Juanes. “You’re positive?”
“That’s not all,” replied Fovel, completely ignoring my question. “Today, in that very same tomb of St. Lawrence, or Lorenzo, you can also find the bones of St. Stephen! Now tell me, do you remember which church in Valencia Juanes painted this Last Supper for? You can look at the card, but I’m happy to repeat—it was the church of St. Stephen! And these other panels by Juanes all around us here, do you know what they are supposed to represent? The life of St. Stephen! All of these panels, including the Last Supper, originally were joined to form one great tableau. This is not coincidence. I believe that Juanes knew all about the relic he was painting and where it came from.”
“Okay, hold on,” I said. “Let’s assume for a moment that he did know all that, and that he painted for this altarpiece all these scenes of St. Stephen and this precious object that his . . . tombmate sent to Spain. But we still haven’t established how the papal cup got to Valencia.”
Fovel didn’t hesitate. “That’s quite simple to explain. In 712, one year after the Moslem invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, the bishop of Huesca had the relic taken to be hid in various places in the Pyrenees, to ensure that it would not be profaned. Its first hiding place was in a cave in Yebra; later, he had it moved to the monastery at San Pedro de Siresa. Eventually, it was moved again to a place near Santa María de Sasabe. Finally, it was taken to the monastery at San Juan de la Peña, where it remained for two and a half centuries. At each of those stops along the way, a church was built and dedicated to St. Peter, to commemorate the first pope to officiate with the papal chalice.
“Then in 1410, upon the death of Martin, king of Aragon—‘Martin the Humane’—as the last Cathars were being slaughtered by the Templars, the cup traveled to Zaragoza and thereafter to Valencia, where it remains to this day. And don’t imagine the church itself has any doubts about this—John Paul II actually said Mass using this chalice.3 None of this is made up, Javier. There are documents verifying every step that this relic has taken though history, something that you cannot say for the Shroud of Turin, for example.”
“That brings us back to this painting,” I said, “in which Juan de Juanes immortalized the chalice in the sixteenth century.”
Juan de Juanes, Christ with the Eucharist (ca. 1545–1550). The Prado Museum, Madrid. Exposed.
Juan de Juanes, Christ with the Eucharist (ca. 1545–1550). The Prado Museum, Madrid. Not exposed.
Juan de Juanes, Christ with the Eucharist (ca. 1560–1570). The Fine Arts Museum, Valencia.
Holy Grail (first century BCE). Cathedral, Valencia.
“But we are still left with an unsolved mystery,” added Fovel with one of his mischievous grins. “Long before he painted The Last Supper, Juan de Juanes was already well known for his splendid series of portraits of Christ with the Eucharist. These rich devotional images, which were made on gold leaf, show Jesus holding up the sacrament in his right hand, while his left hand holds the chalice, very much like this one here.”
Fovel indicated one of these hanging near us in the gallery. “This was the first one of this series, from about 1545—he would have been only about twenty—and the Grail he paints here is just an ordinary cup.”
I took a closer look at it.
“Then, for whatever reason, he painted several more versions in which he replaced the plain cup with the ‘real’ agate chalice. You get the impression that Juanes was obsessed with this image. It’s as if someone had told him that the actual cup used at the last supper was in Valencia, not far from Fuente la Higuera, his home village, and also made him go see the relics of the Holy Face that were so venerated in Alicante and Valencia, and pushed him to keep copying that face compulsively.”4
“Strange! So you’re saying that Juan de Juanes became a kind of self-made expert on relics, especially the Grail?”
“Yes,” replied Fovel, “though he didn’t become an expert overnight. It took years. There are two of his paintings of Christ in the Museo de Bellas Artes in Valencia, which they refer to as the ‘blond one’ and the ‘dark one’ because of their different hair color, and the Grail he paints in these is still rough, as if he’d painted it from memory, or a description. But in the later versions, like the ones celebrated in Valencia Cathedral, which he would have painted between 1570 and 1579, the chalice is beautifully detailed.”
“So he had a chance to study it.”
“Or he held it in his hands! What we do know for certain is that Juanes was considered as l
earned as he was pious. Some believe that he even traveled to Italy to familiarize himself with the magnificent work of Leonardo and Raphael, which he assimilated like few others of the time. It would have been around that time that he decided to change his name from Vicente Juan Masip, which was very close to his father’s name, Vicente Masip, who was also a painter. He settled on the more Latinized Juan de Juanes, the name with which he earned his fame.”
“Did he leave anything he might have written about the Grail?”
“Not that we know of. I’ve studied his life as much as the scant documentation allows, and the main thing worth mentioning is that, like Raphael Sanzio, Juanes had an unusual approach to painting.”
“In what way?”
“Well, I’ve just given you a clue,” he flashed me a malicious smile. “Some came to call him the ‘Second Raphael,’ which I don’t think was just because of the similarity of their styles. The thing is, before beginning a painting, Juanes would spend days in fasting and prayer, preparing his soul. He would tremble before starting any piece of work that he considered sacred, and on the day that he was to begin a painting, he went to early Mass and took communion. It’s little surprise, then, that some critics have said that his work—particularly the paintings of Christ—‘are of a beauty so divine that they belie a human provenance.’5 Or that these paintings ‘look as if they had not so much been painted with the hand as with the spirit,’6 since it could be said that the Lord guided his hand, and the most beauteous of men chose [Juanes] to paint him, much as Alexander chose Apelles of Kos.’ ”7
The Master of the Prado Page 14
