Leonardo and the Last Supper

by Ross King

  CHAPTER 4

  Dinner in Jerusalem

  Leonardo would have known the story of the Last Supper from various painted versions of it in Florence. He would also have known it from the Bible, a copy of which appeared in a list of books in his possession that he made in the mid-1490s. Intriguingly, this was probably the copy that he bought, according to another of his memoranda, in late 1494 or early 1495, at exactly the time when he was starting his work in Santa Maria delle Grazie. His Bible was almost certainly the well-known and widely available Italian translation, Niccolò di Malermi’s Biblia volgare historiata, first published in Venice in 1471 and available in ten editions (complete with hundreds of woodcut illustrations) by the early 1490s. Leonardo appears to have acquired this Bible with the express purpose of making a study of the Gospel accounts of the Last Supper.1

  Leonardo could have read in his new Bible four individual versions of the Last Supper, including two eyewitness accounts. The authors of the four Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—each provided his own narrative. As with other episodes in the life of Christ, there are strong parallels in the first three accounts, whose works are known as the synoptic Gospels. They include many of the same events, often told in the same order and with similar phrasing—resemblances that lead scholars to believe they were composed interdependently. Although differences exist between and among the authors of the synoptic Gospels on specific details of the Last Supper, Matthew, Mark, and Luke are more in accord with one another than they are with John, whose Gospel offers considerably more information on various points. There are no real contradictions, only a difference in emphasis, levels of detail, and the orders of certain events.

  The two eyewitnesses who wrote accounts of the Last Supper were Matthew and John. Matthew’s was consistently regarded as the earliest of the four Gospels, hence its position at the beginning of the New Testament. Matthew was one of the select group of followers known as the apostles: the twelve men whom Christ, after climbing a mountain in Syria, called to a special mission to preach with him. “And he gave them power to heal sicknesses,” reports the Gospel of Mark, “and to cast out devils” (Mark 3:15). The apostles were present during Christ’s triumphant entrance into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey, and they were not only participants in the Last Supper but also witnesses to both the Resurrection and, forty days later, the Ascension, when Christ rose through a cloud into heaven. Christ’s last words to his apostles were an injunction: “But you shall receive the power of the Holy Ghost coming upon you, and you shall be witnesses unto me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and Samaria, and even to the uttermost part of the earth” (Acts 1:8). Writing the Gospels was part of this mission of witnessing to the wider world.

  In the synoptic Gospels, accounts of the Last Supper begin immediately after Judas goes to the high priest and strikes the deal to betray Christ, whose powers the priests and the Pharisees resent and fear.2 Matthew alone enumerates Judas’s fee as thirty pieces of silver, with Mark and Luke merely noting that the high priest and his cronies agreed to give him an unspecified sum. John, on the other hand, makes no mention of a financial motive. Instead, he provides Judas with quite another reason for betraying Christ.

  Passover is approaching: the festival in which the Jews ritually slaughter and eat a male lamb to commemorate their deliverance from the avenging angel and their liberation from captivity in Egypt. The apostles ask Christ where they should prepare for the feast. According to Matthew, Christ instructs them to locate “a certain man” in the street in Jerusalem and say to him: “The master says, My time is near at hand.” Mark and Luke add the detail that this stranger can be recognized because he will be carrying a pitcher of water. “Follow him,” Mark reports Christ as telling them. “And wherever he shall go in, say to the master of the house, The master says, Where is my refectory, where I may eat the pasch with my disciples? And he will show you a large dining room furnished.”

  When evening falls, Christ sups with his apostles inside this large dining room. The supper takes place either on the feast of the Passover or, in John’s account, during preparations for it (he makes clear that the meal is prior to the actual festival). In any case, the Crucifixion that follows is symbolically linked—especially in Luke and John—to the slaughter of lambs for the feast. This striking parallel emphasizes how the lamb sacrificed by the Jews to save their firstborn from the Egyptians prefigured the “Lamb of God” who redeemed the world through his own sacrifice.

  In their wonderfully lapidary styles, the synoptic Gospels describe what happens during the meal, albeit with varying orders of events. Matthew reports that while they are eating Christ says, “Amen I say to you that one of you is about to betray me.” The apostles, deeply troubled by the announcement, ask, “Is it I, Lord?” To which Christ responds, “He that dips his hand with me in the dish, he shall betray me.” When Judas inquires if Christ is referring to him, Jesus calmly replies, “You have said it.”

  Following swiftly on the heels of this revelation comes the institution of the Eucharist. “Take and eat,” Christ tells them as he breaks the bread. “This is my body.” Taking the chalice, he gives thanks and says: “Drink all of this. For this is my blood of the new testament, which shall be shed for many unto remission of sins.” Matthew includes the charming detail that the meal ends with Christ and the apostles singing a hymn together.

  Mark follows Matthew very closely, likewise placing the announcement of the betrayal immediately before the institution of the Eucharist. Luke, on the other hand, reverses the order of the two events. In his version, Christ breaks the bread and shares the wine before making the announcement of the betrayal. The communion appears to be under way, in fact, when Christ startles them with his dramatic declaration. “This is the chalice, the new testament in my blood, which shall be shed for you,” he tells them before immediately adding, “But yet behold: the hand of him that betrays me is with me on the table.” The apostles then begin to “inquire among themselves” who could do such a thing. However, in Luke’s account the apostles are actually more concerned with something else, because there is suddenly “a strife amongst them” about who is the greatest. Luke provides no description of Judas dipping his hand in the same dish as Christ, and in fact during the meal Judas is never identified as the traitor, though Luke has earlier noted his treacherous dealings with the priests and magistrates.

  John’s account of the events is somewhat different from the preceding Gospels. His was the last of the Gospels to be written down. The fourth-century historian Eusebius claimed that Mark and Luke had already composed their Gospels when John, who had been proclaiming his Gospel orally, decided to supplement their accounts with more details about Christ’s early ministry.3 His account of the Last Supper is likewise more detailed, though in his version the supper itself—which is clearly not the Passover meal—is finished very quickly. When the meal is over, Christ rises from the table, girds himself with a towel, and (despite the protests of Peter) shows his humility by washing the feet of the apostles: an episode not mentioned in the other Gospels. His washing of their feet provides the occasion for his first (metaphorical) announcement of the betrayal: “You are not all clean,” he says meaningfully. He then suggests that they ought in the future to wash one another’s feet, before making his point once again: “He that eats bread with me shall lift up his heel against me.” Soon afterward, troubled in spirit, Christ suddenly makes his point more frankly and unambiguously: “Amen, amen, I say to you, one of you shall betray me.”

  These words echo those of the other Gospels, but John adds some of the most brilliantly dramatic passages in the entire Bible. As in the other Gospels, there is initially some confusion, consternation, and self-scrutiny as the men turn to one another, “doubting of whom he spoke.” John then provides further information about the responses. Leaning on Christ’s bosom is “one of his disciples, whom Jesus loved.” Modesty forbids John from identifying this beloved disciple, who is mentioned several more
times in the chapters that follow, but it is John himself who becomes known through these references as the “beloved disciple.” “For this same St. John the Evangelist is he whom Jesus specially loved,” explained St. Augustine, “inasmuch as he lay on His Breast at supper.”4

  The bewildered apostles demand clarification. Typically, it is Peter—blunt spoken and bighearted—who asks John, still leaning on Christ’s breast: “Who is it of whom he speaks?” John asks on behalf of the others: “Lord, who is it?” Christ offers the same reply as in the first two Gospels: “He it is to whom I shall reach bread dipped”—whereupon he dips the bread into the dish and hands the sop to Judas.

  At this point John introduces an element entirely absent from the first two Gospels and only alluded to in passing by Luke. Before describing the Last Supper, Luke mentions how, as the high priest and the scribes debated how they might put Jesus to death, “Satan entered into Judas,” who then approached them with his promise to deliver Christ into their hands. John’s account is more elaborate. Unlike the others, he does not mention that Judas has already been involved in treacherous dealings with the high priest. If he has not made his traitorous bargain, then Judas must be as baffled as the others by the accusation of betrayal and then—even more—by the presentation to him of the dipped bread. John has firmly made the point that Judas is a bad sort, claiming in the previous chapter that he is a thief who has been filching from the communal purse with which Christ entrusted him. Even more obviously, John shadows forth the betrayal when he describes how Christ, a full year earlier, addressed his newly selected apostles with the words: “Have not I chosen you twelve? And one of you is a devil.” Lest there be any doubt about the culprit, John hastily adds, “Now he meant Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon, for this same was about to betray him.” There is certainly a strong foreshadowing of coming events, but no mention by John, at the time of the Last Supper, of any perfidious dealings with Christ’s enemies.

  A notable difference between John’s version of the Last Supper and that given in the synoptic Gospels is that John makes no mention of the institution of the Eucharist. Elsewhere, however, his Gospel abounds in reflections on the Eucharist. He explicitly mentions, in his account of the Passover feast one year earlier, the prospect of salvation through the body and blood of Christ. Following the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand, Christ tells the grateful multitude that he is “the bread of life” and that anyone who “eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him” (6:48, 56). This statement causes shock and consternation, with even Christ’s closest adherents finding the proposition difficult: “This saying is hard,” they candidly admit. Indeed, as John reports, many of his disciples “walked no more with him.” One of the disciples who deserted him was, apparently, Mark, which explains why he was not present at the Last Supper a year later.

  In John’s account, Christ does not distribute the “bread of life” at the Last Supper. Instead, he offers only the single piece of dipped bread, which Judas then eats. Judas’s act of consuming the bread received from Christ’s hand turns the scene into an unholy counterpart to the Communion because, as John says, “after the morsel, Satan entered into him.” Christ then addresses Judas directly: “That which you do, do quickly.” Confusion reigns once again. This injunction puzzles the other apostles as much as his earlier statement about the betrayal, with some of them mistakenly thinking Christ has just charged Judas, as holder of the communal purse, with the task of buying things necessary for the upcoming Passover feast.

  Judas, however, now knows exactly what Christ means, and what he must do, and he quickly disappears into the night. He will reappear several hours and five chapters later, with a band of soldiers and servants from the high priest and the Pharisees armed with “lanterns and torches and weapons.” The stage is set for the next dramatic act.

  Leonardo would have seen a number of representations of the Last Supper in and around Florence. Artists throughout Europe had been visualizing this biblical episode for more than a thousand years. One of the oldest surviving examples is a mosaic from the basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, done in the first half of the fifth century as part of a cycle showing scenes from the life of Christ. Over the ensuing centuries, the Last Supper was depicted in illuminated manuscripts, carved in ivory and stone, woven into tapestries, and at the cathedral in Chartres in the middle of the twelfth century it appeared in a beautiful stained-glass window.

  The vast majority of these representations followed the Gospel of St. John inasmuch as they showed the tender vignette absent from the synoptics: John reclining on Christ’s bosom. However, much artistic license was enjoyed. The scenes sometimes told as much about contemporary dining habits as they did about the Bible. Byzantine scenes, such as that in Ravenna, often conjured up a luxurious banquet with aristocratic-looking figures reclining on a sigma, a horseshoe-shaped couch, and leaning their elbows on bolsters (this was the way the Romans ate: dining chairs were a later invention). A Last Supper at Naumburg Cathedral, carved from stone in about 1260, showed the other end of the social spectrum: what looks like a group of uncouth and guzzling peasants.

  Mosaic of the Last Supper in the basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna

  Scenes of the Last Supper became ever more plentiful and conspicuous in fourteenth-century Italy, especially in the newly rediscovered medium of fresco. It was usually included as part of a Passion Cycle or scenes illustrating the life of Christ, but by the middle of the fourteenth century the episode was sometimes removed from this context and given a new prominence in a particular location: the refectories of convents and monasteries. Thus the nuns or friars would have sat at a table directly beneath a fresco of the apostles at their own table in Jerusalem. Last Suppers henceforth became common in—but by no means limited to—the refectories of monasteries.

  One of the finest examples of a Last Supper in a refectory setting came in the middle of the fifteenth century. A community of cloistered nuns, the Benedictine sisters in the convent of Sant’Apollonia in Florence, commissioned Andrea del Castagno, sometimes known (because of his series of paintings of conspirators executed by the Medici) as Andreino degli Impiccati, or Little Andrea of the Hanged Men. He created in the nuns’ refectory a near-perfect illusion of three-dimensional space, a boxlike extension of the refectory that allowed the nuns—in what was becoming a familiar opportunity—to eat their meals in the realistic presence of Christ and the apostles. In Castagno’s version, the scene is a pacific one. John leans sleepily against Christ while the other apostles talk calmly among themselves or sit alone with their thoughts. The apostle who sits third from the left stares contemplatively into space, while the one second from the right even has a book propped open on the table.

  Leonardo probably never saw Castagno’s Last Supper. Its location in a convent of enclosed nuns meant that for four hundred years, until the dissolution of Sant’Apollonia in the 1860s, very few people outside this small religious community ever set eyes on it (and it was fortunate to survive the convent’s stint at the end of the nineteenth century as a storage facility for the Italian military). However, Leonardo would certainly have seen several others in Florence, including another Last Supper (now lost) that Castagno painted in the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. Domenico Ghirlandaio—that “expeditious man” who completed so much work—painted two Last Suppers during Leonardo’s final years in Florence, one in 1480 for the Umiliati monks at the Church of the Ognissanti, and another two years later in the guest refectory in San Marco. These, too, were scenes of calm discussion and, in the case of one or two of the apostles, impassive daydreaming. Ghirlandaio gave his figures slightly more interaction movement than Castagno, especially in the Ognissanti fresco, where several heads lean intently forward and Peter purposefully grips his knife. Like so many other artists, he showed John leaning on the bosom of Christ, an indication that like them he was following the account given in John’s Gospel.

  There was a good rea
son why Castagno and Ghirlandaio, among others, interpreted the Last Supper—which the Gospels reveal to have been a mise-en-scène of agitation and puzzled astonishment—as a scene of tranquil reflection. Convents and monasteries were places of silence. The importance of silence was stressed in the cloister of San Marco, where the first image that greeted friars and visitors alike was Fra Angelico’s fresco of Peter of Verona with his finger to his lips. Silence was preserved in the cloisters, the church, and the dormitory. To keep the friars on their toes, each convent had an officer, the circator, whose job was to move quietly among the brothers “at odd and unexpected moments” to see if they were growing slack.5

  The Last Supper by Domenico Ghirlandaio

  The nuns enclosed in Sant’Apollonia inhabited this same world of silence and meditation, and the refectory where Castagno did his work was meant to be a still and quiet room. The rules observed by Benedictines stressed that meals in the refectory were to be taken in silence but for the voice of the person reading the sacred text: “During meals,” wrote Saint Benedict, “there should be complete silence disturbed by no whispering, nor should anyone’s voice be heard except the reader’s.”6 Castagno probably showed a book-reading apostle (who wears a notably cross expression) as a reflection of the nun who would have been reading aloud to the other sisters. His quiet and pensive dinner table promoted the way the enclosed nuns of Sant’Apollonia were expected to behave both in the refectory and in their strictly cloistered lives more generally.

  A Last Supper was never an easy proposition, even on spacious refectory walls. The artist had somehow to fit around a table thirteen separate figures through whom he would illustrate either the moment when Christ instituted the Eucharist or announced, to general incomprehension, that one of the number would betray him. Painters like Castagno and Ghirlandaio had created compelling scenes through a subtle choreography of hands and expressions, ones that duplicated the hushed and reflective mood prevailing in the refectories.