Leonardo and the Last Supper

by Ross King

  Their eager devotion earned the Dominicans their punning nickname, the Domini canes: the Hounds of the Lord. It was a nickname they embraced. Fresco decorations in their churches, such as in Santa Maria Novella in Florence, sometimes featured packs of black-and-white-spotted dogs. The dogs were an allusion not only to their punning nickname and two-tone habit, but also to the legend of Dominic’s mother, who supposedly dreamed, while pregnant, of giving birth to a black-and-white hound bearing a torch in its mouth. “When the dog came forth from the womb,” The Golden Legend reported, “he set fire to the whole fabric of the world.”14

  The Dominicans did indeed set the world alight, serving as the church’s intellectual luminaries. “The bow is first bent in study,” stated a Dominican maxim, “and then it sends the arrow in preaching.” This emphasis on teaching and learning meant the Dominicans came to occupy the great theological chairs at the universities in Paris, Oxford, and Bologna. By the fifteenth century, two Dominicans had been elected pope, while many others became famous throughout Europe as preachers and writers. The Dominicans also produced the greatest scientist of the Middle Ages, the German bishop Albertus Magnus, known as Doctor Universalis in honor of his extraordinary breadth of knowledge. The greatest Dominican of them all, after Dominic himself, was the Angelic Doctor, Thomas Aquinas, author of the Summa theologiae, a treatise that ambitiously encompasses, in 1.5 million words, “the things which belong to the Christian religion.”15

  Aquinas did not, apparently, look particularly ascetic, since he was tall and fat and enjoyed a good dinner. Dominic, on the other hand, had been exceptionally abstemious. The Golden Legend reports that he always gave his body “less than it desired,” and that while pursuing his studies in Spain he went for ten years without a glass of wine.16 Following his example, the Dominicans devoted themselves to lives of prayer, study, and preaching. The life of a Dominican was a severe and exacting one even by the standards of the Middle Ages. They took vows of obedience, chastity, and poverty, and raised their money by begging. From the middle of September until Easter, and on all Fridays throughout the year, they ate only one meal a day. Their clothing was made from scratchy wool, their beds were hard, and they slept in communal rooms. When they traveled, they walked rather than rode, often barefoot, and without carrying money. In order to become one with the sufferings of Christ, they flagellated themselves: one of Fra Angelico’s frescoes in the Dominican convent of San Marco in Florence shows a kneeling Dominic dutifully scourging himself before an image of the crucified Christ.

  The Dominicans were the most vocal of the religious orders, often preaching to large audiences in the open air of the city. For most hours of the day, however, the friars observed a strict silence, the better to concentrate on their thoughts and studies. Even meals were eaten in silence. The prior of Santa Maria delle Grazie after 1495, Vincenzo Bandello, wrote a work, Declarationes super diversos passus constitutionum, which described the ritual according to which the friars took their communal meals. At the prescribed hour, they made their way to the refectory, which was known as the cenacolo (from the Latin cenaculum, the room in which the Romans dined). First they stopped in a small adjacent room where they washed their hands—the only part of their bodies they ever cleaned (it was believed that bathing relaxed the body and therefore stimulated lust). Then they waited in silence on benches before filing into the cenacolo itself, which at Santa Maria delle Grazie was a lengthy, narrow dining hall perpendicular to the church, 116 feet long by 29 feet wide, its perimeter lined with tables. It was an austere and gloomy place, its only windows high overhead on the west wall. The friars would kneel to pray before a crucifix on the far wall before taking their places on the outside of the tables, facing inward. At the back, beneath the crucifix, sat the prior.

  After prayers for the blessing of the table, the servers would arrive with food from the monastery kitchen. The fare was of such a humble quality that priors were urged to avoid the temptation to dine outside the monastery, where no doubt they would have enjoyed a better table. Painters working for friars often complained of the appalling diet. Paolo Uccello supposedly fled from a church where he was working after he was given nothing to eat but cheese. Davide Ghirlandaio once dumped soup over a friar and bludgeoned him with a stick of bread to protest the poor quality of the meals provided for him and his brother. Certainly meat was off the menu. Dominic, following the Rule of Saint Benedict, had abstained from flesh, which, like baths, awakened concupiscence: Aquinas explained that pleasurable foods such as meat “stimulate our sexual appetites” and produce a “greater surplus for seminal matter.”17

  The punishment for breaking silence without permission was missing the next meal, though if the prior desired some conversation over dinner he might give one or two friars license to speak. More usually, as the friars ate their meal they listened to one of their number—the person known as the lector in mensa, or reader of the table—read aloud from the Bible or another religious text such as The Golden Legend, which had been composed by a Dominican. And since the middle of the fourteenth century, friars in some monasteries (and nuns in some convents) could enjoy another stimulus to contemplation as they ate their silent meal. Frescoes were often painted on the refectory walls, and the subject matter—unsurprisingly, given the location—was usually food. Painters sometimes showed Abraham preparing food for the angels (a scene from Genesis 18) or the miracle of the loaves and fishes. The most common scene, though, was the Last Supper, so much so that Last Supper paintings came to be known as cenacoli, a reference to the location where they were painted. Monks and nuns therefore had the opportunity, as they broke bread together, to identify with the apostles supping at the table in their own dining room in Jerusalem.

  Lodovico Sforza had in mind just such a painting for the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie. And so into the midst of the Dominican friars—this band of devout, studious, and abstemious men—came Leonardo da Vinci.

  The exact date that Leonardo received his commission to paint a Last Supper in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie is not known. Since the archives of the convent were destroyed, crucial details about the commission have been lost. The most logical scenario is that it was given to him either at the end of 1494 or the very beginning of 1495, in the wake of the lost opportunity to cast the bronze horse. It is not known for certain that Lodovico Sforza rather than the Dominican friars originally engaged Leonardo. However, with his personal interest in the monastery—where, in a show of piety and humility, he dined every Tuesday and Saturday—Lodovico seems the more likely candidate. A few years later, referring to the commission, he made explicit reference to agreements signed by Leonardo.

  These agreements were undoubtedly the lost contract. A patron never entrusted an artist to execute a work without first coming to a legal agreement covering such things as the subject matter, the price, the materials, and the deadline. Lodovico would hardly have engaged Leonardo, a dilatory and even unreliable worker whose career was strewn with abandoned projects, without a contract to offer guarantees and concentrate his mind on the task at hand. However, as the men in the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception had discovered to their cost, not even the most ironclad legal document could keep a painter like Leonardo from improvising or procrastinating.

  A commission to paint a wall was not the most obvious assignment for Leonardo. In fact, he was an odd choice for the job. His letter of introduction to Lodovico had stressed in great detail his supposed expertise in military engineering. It concluded with the vague and almost casual remark that he could “carry out...in painting whatever may be done, and as well as any other.”18 Bluff and bluster aside, Leonardo truly was, even by 1482, a painter who, properly motivated or inspired, could do as well as any other when it came to portraits or altarpieces. His Virgin of the Rocks, painted in the years after he wrote the letter, loudly proclaimed his astonishing talents.

  Yet Leonardo did have a particular limitation when it came to painting. His teacher,
Verrocchio, had been a master of many accomplishments, able to work in marble, brass, bronze, and copper. However, Verrocchio’s experience of painting was confined to working with tempera on wooden panels—and even his work in this area was sparing. Most altarpieces and portraits were still done in tempera. The panel was constructed from a series of glued-together planks, often poplar wood, that were then coated with layers of glue size and a gypsum-based primer. The tempera (from the Latin temperare, to mix) was made by blending powdered pigments with a liquid binder, usually egg yolk. In order to keep the paint wet longer, artists sometimes added honey or the juice from the fig tree, and the viscosity of the paint could be lessened with the addition of vinegar, beer, or wine.

  Paintings done on the walls of chapels or refectories were generally done not in tempera but in the special technique known as fresco. Despite his versatility, Verrocchio never painted in fresco and therefore, presumably, never passed along its secrets to Leonardo. Nor had Leonardo ever worked in fresco. Patrons commissioning frescoes during Leonardo’s time in Florence in the 1470s and early 1480s had turned to painters such as Sandro Botticelli and Domenico Ghirlandaio. The latter was an especially enthusiastic and prolific frescoist. A report prepared by an agent for Lodovico Sforza, who tried to hire Ghirlandaio to paint at the Certosa di Pavia, declared that he was “a good master on panels and even more so on walls... He is an expeditious man and one who gets through much work.”19

  The word “expeditious” could not be used to describe Leonardo. His lack of experience in fresco—as well as, perhaps, a reputation for not finishing what he started—may have been a factor in his absence from the team of young painters sent to Rome by Lorenzo de’ Medici in the summer of 1481 to fresco the walls of the newly constructed Sistine Chapel. The members of this team, which included Botticelli and Ghirlandaio, had far more experience in fresco than Leonardo.

  Fresco was renowned as the most difficult painting technique to master. Vasari claimed most painters could become adept in tempera or oil, but only a select few mastered fresco, which was, he declared, “the most manly, most certain, most resolute and durable of all the other methods.”20 The word “fresco” comes from the Italian affresco, whose root, fresco, means “fresh”: an allusion to the fact that the frescoist, rather than mixing his pigments with binders, ground them in water and added them to wet plaster, which absorbed them as it dried, uniting with them chemically and thereby sealing them in a vitreous layer on the wall’s surface.

  The technique was ingenious and, as Vasari pointed out, durable. However, it presented many logistical difficulties, not least because the frescoist often worked on a large scale, sometimes high up in a building and in an awkward location. Also, the frescoist had only a very limited number of hours to apply his paints to his daily patch of fresh plaster before it dried, which forced him to work quickly. Finally, he was restricted in his range of colors, able to use only those pigments that could withstand the alkalinity of the plaster. Many of the brightest blues and greens—ultramarine, azurite, malachite—could be added only if they were mixed with binders and then applied to the plaster after it dried. This supplementary technique, known as painting a secco, had the disadvantage that tempera added to dry plaster was much less durable than water-based pigments added to a wet surface. Most patrons therefore preferred artists to avoid painting a secco. Filippino Lippi’s contract with the banker Filippo Strozzi for a fresco cycle in the Strozzi Chapel in Santa Maria Novella, begun in 1487, had stipulated, for example, that the artist work exclusively in fresco.

  Not only did Leonardo have no experience in the exacting technique of fresco, but he also had never worked on such a large painting. After abandoning several altarpieces unfinished, he was suddenly charged with covering the north wall of the refectory with a painting fifteen feet high by almost twenty-nine feet wide.

  Painting the wall of the refectory was a major commission, especially because (as seems to be the case) it came from the duke. Yet it seems possible that Leonardo balked at this commission. His fragmentary letter of frustration to Lodovico—in which the staccato phrases included “things assigned,” “not my art,” and “if any other commission”—may well have concerned this new assignment at Santa Maria delle Grazie. Although he complained in the letter about his expenses and a lack of payment, his protests were actually less about the equestrian monument (“Of the horse I will say nothing”) than about some other matter that distressed him. In another fragmentary letter, written to Lodovico a short time later, Leonardo complained of being compelled to do lesser jobs for the duke rather than another commission, evidently more important, presumably the equestrian monument. “It vexes me greatly,” he wrote, “that having to earn my living has forced me to interrupt the work and to attend to small matters, instead of following up the work which your Lordship entrusted to me.”21

  Was decorating the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie one of the “small matters” Leonardo found himself obliged to execute in lieu of either the bronze horse or another commission? His disappointment at forfeiting the bronze horse would have been compounded by the fact that he was suddenly given a project for which he lacked the necessary specialist expertise. On top of that, the mural commission was a poor replacement. It is unclear where Lodovico intended the equestrian monument to stand, but it would certainly have been placed in a highly prominent location, possibly the piazza in front of the Castello: somewhere, in any case, where everyone in Milan (and everyone who visited Milan) would see it. But with that project withdrawn, Leonardo was presented with the task of decorating a tucked-away room where a band of friars ate their dinner.

  If Leonardo’s angry letters represented attempts to avoid the mural project, they were unsuccessful. He must soon have realized that keeping favor with the devious Il Moro meant acquiescing to his wishes. He probably also recognized that the mural represented an opportunity to exercise his talents in painting on a grander scale than ever before.

  The year 1494—the “most unhappy year for Italy”—ended with King Charles VIII and his French troops inside the gates of Rome. Charles had stayed for eleven happy days in Florence, occupying the Medici palace and making a series of architectural modifications, adding various passageways so he could slip discreetly away to visit his latest mistress. After leaving Florence, he had moved south to Siena and then Viterbo. From there he turned his attentions to Rome, issuing a proclamation in the middle of November stating that he merely wished for free passage through Roman territory. But he was “every day becoming more insolent,” according to Guicciardini, “as a result of successes much greater than he had ever dared to hope.”22 Even the king’s allies were chastened by his effortless triumphs, with both Lodovico Sforza and the Venetian Senate fearing French ambitions in Italy would not be satisfied with the conquest of Naples.

  Rome and its surrounding territories, known as the Papal States, were ruled by the pope, who was not only a spiritual leader but also a secular ruler with powers of taxation and legislation over a million people. Charles made strong hints that he would depose the reigning pope, Alexander VI, a worldly man with a well-earned reputation for corruption and dissipation, should His Holiness not accommodate his requests for the keys to castles and the crown of Naples. As the French began their march on Rome, Alexander began suffering fainting fits. He had originally declared for Naples in the conflict, stating that he was bound to Alfonso “by the closest ties of blood and friendship” and vowing to defend him against the invaders.23 But now he vacillated between defiantly resisting the French—he claimed he would rather die than become the slave of the French monarch—and then meekly pondering whether he should seek terms. He remained undecided as French troops entered Roman territory and began overrunning one town after another. They even captured his fleeing mistress, Giulia Farnese, on the road outside Rome.

  In Rome itself, the people, anxious for the pope to appease the French, were in a state of terror and rebellion. Rome was threatened with starvation as t
he French fleet, blockading the Tiber, prevented the provisioning of the city. The privations were especially hard on the priests, who, according to a cynical Venetian observer, were “accustomed to every delicacy.”24 The pope, closeted in the Vatican with his Spanish bodyguards, began preparing to flee the city, even packing up his bed linen and dinner service. Finally, “observing this young prince advance so briskly” (as one of Charles’s ambassadors wrote), the pope decided to open the gates of Rome.25

  Charles originally planned to enter Rome on the first of January, but when his astrologer informed him that a more favorable conjunction of the planets would occur one day earlier, he rode through Rome’s northern gate, the Porta del Popolo, on the last day of 1494. It took six hours for the French soldiers, along with Swiss and German mercenaries, to stream through the gate behind him. They were followed over the cobbles and through the puddles by thirty-six bronze cannons: a deadly reminder of what awaited the Romans should they try to resist.

  The barbarians were within the gates of Rome. “In all the memory of man,” lamented an envoy from Mantua, “the Church has never been in such evil plight.”26