Leonardo and the Last Supper

by Ross King

  Leonardo, however, probably saw in these delicate gestures and gently furrowed brows few tokens of the exuberant life that he himself hoped to capture in his own art. He also would have glimpsed little of the drama that he would have read about in the Bible’s version of these events. The story is, after all, extraordinarily emotive. Thirteen men sit down to dinner to observe a solemn feast: a charismatic leader and his band of brothers, carefully selected and endowed with special powers. They are gathered in the middle of an occupied city whose authorities are plotting against them, waiting for their moment to strike. And in their midst, breaking bread with them, sits a traitor.

  This was not a scene to which tapestries or stained-glass windows could do justice, or one that might provoke quiet and unruffled contemplation. Something else was called for.

  Perhaps no one in history ever drew so much as Leonardo, or felt such a compelling need to record on paper everything he saw. His unrelenting activity was described by one source who claimed that whenever Leonardo went for a walk he tucked into his belt a little sketchbook in whose pages he could register “the faces, manners, clothes and bodily movement” of the people he saw around him.7 Close observation of people going about their daily business—and then capturing their features and postures as accurately and realistically as possible—was essential to Leonardo’s art. In one of his notes he urged would-be painters to “go about, and constantly, as you go, observe, note and consider the circumstances and behaviour of men in talking, quarrelling or laughing or fighting together.”8

  The sight of an artist studying and sketching his fellow citizens in the marketplace or public square would have been quite unusual. Artists normally found models for their paintings in their own workshops, simply arranging their apprentices in the desired poses. Alternatively, they took postures and facial expressions from sculptures, from previous paintings, or from model books that helpfully provided details of how the body moved and looked in various poses. Leonardo, however, considered it an “extreme defect” for a painter to copy the poses or faces used by another artist.9 He therefore took his studies out of doors and into the open air, where he could observe how real people moved and interacted.

  For many years Leonardo had lived in a city—Florence—whose exuberant street life allowed him ample opportunity to witness this kind of stimulating activity. One of his contemporaries called Florence the “theatre of the world.”10 Florentines gathered to socialize in the streets and piazzas, and on bridges such as the Ponte Vecchio. Songs and skits were performed in the open air during the Carnival, and in the piazzas teams of men, twenty-seven per side, played games of calcio, a violent and primitive version of football. Florence’s marketplace was a hive of activity. The poet Antonio Pucci described it as a world in itself, a place of spice merchants, butchers, moneylenders, ragmen, gamblers, and beggars. Also on the scene were female vendors “who quarrel all day long...swearing badly / and calling one another whores.”11 The other women to be seen in Florence’s streets were the whores themselves, who were required by law to wear long gloves, high-heeled slippers, bells on their heads, and a yellow ribbon.

  One particular aspect of Florentine city life that seems to have intrigued Leonardo was the phenomenon known as the sersaccenti delle pancacce (know-it-alls of the benches).12 These were the men from all walks of life who sat and gossiped on the many stone benches lining Florence’s streets, piazzas, and even the base of Giotto’s campanile and the facades of the great palazzos. One of the most prominent locations was the ringhiera, a stone platform (from which we get the word “harangue”) that was added to the Palazzo Vecchio in 1323 so the city fathers could address the populace. The discussions by the know-it-alls occupying these benches were sometimes impressively learned. The scholar and diplomat Giannozzo Manetti supposedly learned to speak Latin merely by eavesdropping on particularly erudite conversations, while men sitting on the benches in front of the Palazzo Spini once appealed to Leonardo for help explicating a passage of Dante. For the most part, though, the conversation was less edifying. A song from 1433 began: “Who wants to hear lies or little stories, come to listen to those who stay all day long on the benches.” Another writer lamented that the people on the benches were repositories of “envy and suspicion, enemies of all good.”13

  Leonardo was intrigued by the pictorial possibilities of Florence’s gossiping bench sitters. He must have walked through the streets, notebook in hand, watching the gestures and expressions of these men as they went about their “talking, quarrelling or laughing or fighting together.” He was fascinated with the interplay between and among people, such as when one person spoke and others listened: something he could have witnessed whenever speeches or announcements were made from the ringhiera. One of his memoranda considered how to depict a scene where one man addresses a group. “If the matter in hand be to set forth an argument,” he wrote, “let the speaker, with the fingers of the right hand hold one finger of the left hand, having the two smaller ones closed; and his face alert, and turned towards the people with mouth a little open, to look as though he spoke.” As for the audience, they should be “silent and attentive, all looking at the orator’s face with gestures of admiration,” with the older men depicted “sitting with their fingers clasped holding their weary knees” or else, with legs crossed, supporting their chins in their hands.14

  Leonardo’s sketches of men in public conversation in Florence

  Leonardo reproduced these dynamics of speaking and listening in some of his sketches. In about 1480, around the time he began his The Adoration of the Magi, he made a small sketch of three figures seated on a bench. The trio’s postures are interesting. The man in the center, a penseroso, cups his chin in his right hand and his right elbow in his left hand, while two seated figures on either side lean close as if in commiseration; the man on the right puts a comforting arm around his downcast friend.15 Similar drawings followed as he produced a series showing seated men in animated conversation striking casual and artless poses. Some of these might have been done as studies for his Adoration of the Magi, since all date from the early 1480s. Leonardo certainly planned a hubbub of movement and incident for his painting. His unfinished work shows an energetic jumble of figures tightly grouped in a horseshoe around the Virgin and Child: kneeling, clutching, contorting, and gesticulating as they press forward for a view.

  As Leonardo made one of his sketches, another scene took shape in his mind. On the reverse of one of his drawings for figures in the Adoration he sketched several groups of figures, most seated and either listening or holding forth in conversation. Although some of these figures, too, may have been destined for the Adoration, Leonardo’s imagination took him elsewhere. On the lower right-hand side of the page he loosely sketched five men sitting together on a bench. The man in the middle holds passionately forth, grasping the hand of one companion while thrusting a finger at another. His friends either listen intently, attempt to interrupt, or—in the case of the figure to his left—dreamily ignore him.

  The scene is one Leonardo could easily have witnessed on the benches around Florence. But the act of drawing these seated figures in lively interaction appears to have sparked something in his mind. The lower left of the page features a lone figure, bearded and seated at a table, who is drawn to the same scale as the bench sitters. As he turns to his left he points to (or reaches for) a dish that sits in front of him. He is unmistakably a Christ figure, and the dish is unmistakably the one in which—as numerous other artists had shown before—Christ dips the sop he will give to Judas, identifying him as the betrayer. Leonardo’s animated bench sitters clearly reminded him of the apostles in a Last Supper.

  By the early 1480s Leonardo therefore began examining—in no more than a few deft flicks of his quill pen—how he might show Christ and his apostles gathered around the table at the moment Christ announces the impending betrayal. His interest in the spirited exchanges meant the subject had a natural appeal to him, and the brio he gives their movemen
ts and expressions suggests that he wished to surpass the versions he had seen in Florence.

  Leonardo’s sketch of five men seated on a bench

  Nothing indicates that Leonardo was commissioned to paint a Last Supper in Florence in the early 1480s. His sketch was merely a prototype—impulsive and possibly soon forgotten. A dozen years would pass before the opportunity came to transform his vivacious bench sitters into something new and extraordinary.

  One indication of how Leonardo began thinking about composing his Last Supper for Santa Maria delle Grazie is found in the pages of a small notebook begun in the early 1490s. Almost uniquely for the time, he sometimes planned his paintings (or works he hoped to paint) not only by means of sketches but also through meticulous descriptions of what a particular scene could or should look like. Often the scenes described are ones of tumult—battles, storms, floods, and fires—that go beyond sets of instructions to would-be painter and become horrifying visions of mankind’s helplessness before the lethal energies of a chaotic nature. However, his primary concern was always the realistic depiction, based on actual observation, of gesture and expression.

  For example, his prescription for a battle scene involved arrows and cannonballs flying through the air and soldiers “in the agonies of death” rolling their eyes and grinding their teeth, with his dedication to persuasive verisimilitude extending to instruction on how the nostrils of the defeated troops must be depicted.16 A passage on how to paint a flood resembles the screenplay for a disaster movie: mountains topple into valleys, water foams over farmland carrying a detritus of boats and bedsteads, and terrified people cluster on hilltops and fight with animals (including lions) for the few spots of dry land. He imagines many people committing suicide to escape the horror of the waves: “Some flung themselves from lofty rocks, others strangled themselves with their own hands, others seized their own children and violently slew them at a blow. Some wounded and killed themselves with their own weapons.”17

  Leonardo’s small notebook provided equally detailed directions for how to make a scene such as a Last Supper convincing. On one page he offered a blow-by-blow account of the individual reactions at a dinner table to a speaker (not identified in the text with Christ). The page has no accompanying drawings that might specifically identify it as a description of a Last Supper, and the gestures of eleven rather than twelve men are described. Nonetheless, the context is self-evident:

  One who was drinking and has left the glass in its position and turned his head towards the speaker. Another, twisting the fingers of his hands together, turns with stern brows to his companion. Another with his hands spread open shows the palms, and shrugs his shoulders up his ears, making a mouth of astonishment. Another speaks into his neighbour’s ear and he, as he listens to him, turns towards him to lend an ear, while he holds a knife in one hand, and in the other the loaf half cut through by the knife. Another who has turned, holding a knife in his hand, upsets with his hand a glass on the table. Another lays his hand on the table and is looking. Another blows his mouthful. Another leans forward to see the speaker shading his eyes with his hand. Another draws back behind the one who leans forward, and sees the speaker between the wall and the man who is leaning.18

  Painting for Leonardo was all about capturing the small and telling details of the kind he recorded, according to legend, in the sketchbook at his belt—in particular, facial expressions and bodily movements. In his treatise on painting he claimed that the artist had “two principal things to paint: that is, man and the intention of his mind. The first is easy; the second difficult, because it has to be represented by gestures and movements of the parts of the body.”19 This passage shows how he smoothly translated his observations into the context of a Last Supper. He outlined the distinctive reactions of these participants in terms of both their physical actions (lifting or upsetting a glass, holding a knife, recoiling backward, or leaning forward) and their facial expressions (furrowed brows, shaded eyes, and the bocca della maraviglia, or mouth of astonishment). He froze the moment in time so the spectator would see the dinner guests in midgesture, with the loaf of bread “half cut through” and the drinking glass still at the lips. The effect, as he planned it here, would impress itself on the viewer through actions and expressions ranging across a whole gamut of emotions, such as anger, amazement, and bewilderment—all communicated to the viewer through a language of gesture.

  This dinner table scene would not be a solemn and meditative tableau such as that frescoed by Castagno for the nuns of Sant’Apollonia. Instead, it would capture all of the drama and excitement of the Gospel verses on the Last Supper.

  CHAPTER 5

  Leonardo’s Court

  Soon after receiving his commission for the mural in Santa Maria delle Grazie, Leonardo would have begun work in his studio, making a series of sketches. His studio—in which the clay model of the giant horse still loomed—was appropriately grand for a pictor et ingeniarius ducalis. In his notes Leonardo advised painters to have a small rather than a large studio: “Small rooms or dwellings discipline the mind, large ones weaken it.”1 There was often a gap, however, between what Leonardo wrote and what he did. Rather than a small studio, he occupied spacious rooms in a castle.

  Leonardo’s studio and living quarters were found in the Corte dell’Arengo, which was sometimes known as the Corte Vecchia, or “old court.” It had been home to the Visconti rulers of Milan before—toward the end of the fourteenth century—they moved across the city to their massive new fortress, the Castello di Porta Giovia. The Corte dell’Arengo stood in the very heart of Milan, immediately south of the half-built cathedral, onto whose piazza its gates opened. It was a medieval castle, complete with towers, courtyards, and moats. After the Viscontis decamped, it fell into a state of dilapidation until in the 1450s the architect Filarete “restored it to health” (as he boasted) “without which restoration it would soon have ended its days.”2 Francesco Sforza moved his court into the renovated palace, and at his command the walls were frescoed with portraits of ancient heroes and heroines. Following Francesco’s death in 1466, his son Galeazzo Maria took possession, hosting sumptuous banquets and pageants there before, like the Viscontis before him, moving his court to the Castello di Porta Giovia. Lodovico, too, preferred the grand fortress of the Castello (which in time would come to be known as the Castello Sforzesco). The Corte dell’Arengo was therefore surplus to ducal requirements, and Leonardo, needing a large space in which to work on his equestrian monument, was given rooms there in the late 1480s or early 1490s. “La mia fabrica,” he called it: my factory.3 Here, possibly in one of the courtyards or the great hall itself, he raised his twenty-four-foot-high clay model.

  The Corte was both lavish and commodious. Yet it must have been a gloomy place through whose corridors stalked the ghosts of the mad, tragic Visconti tribe, such as Luchino, poisoned by his third wife in 1349, or Bernabò, poisoned by his nephew in 1385, or even Francesco’s wife, Bianca Maria, poisoned (according to gossip) by Galeazzo Maria in 1468. Adding to the bleak air of ill omen was the fact that the Corte had been for extended periods the quarters of the usurped Giangaleazzo and his angry, anguished wife, Isabella. Theirs had not been a happy home. “There is no news here,” one Milanese courtier wrote to an envoy in Mantua in 1492, “saving that the Duke of Milan has beaten his wife.”4

  Leonardo would have ushered inside the forbidding walls of the Corte dell’Arengo a much livelier spirit. When not promoting the virtues of a small studio, his writings celebrate the painter’s atelier as a place of culture and refinement. His notes for a projected treatise on painting describe a “well-dressed painter”—probably an idealized version of himself—who adorns himself with “such garments as he pleases” as he works away at his art. “His dwelling is full of fine paintings, and is clean and often filled with music, or the sound of different beautiful books being read, which are often heard with great pleasure.”5 A lover of books and music, Leonardo may well have stocked his studio with
readers and musicians, and he himself probably played the lyre and sang. Vasari claimed that Leonardo employed “singers and musicians or jesters” as he worked on the Mona Lisa: hence, he claims, her famous smile, which is one of contented amusement.6

  In his advice to young painters, Leonardo extolled of the benefits of living an isolated life. The painter or draftsmen, he insisted, needed to be solitary: “While you are alone you are entirely your own master, and if you have one companion you are but half your own.”7 However, Leonardo was far from solitary in his quarters in the Corte dell’Arengo, since he always had a team of assistants living and working with him, much in the same way that he and his fellow apprentices had lived and worked with Verrocchio. One of his memoranda remarked that he had six mouths to feed, and this number generally accords with other of his memos that faithfully document the comings and goings of various assistants.8 Leonardo would certainly have needed a large team to help him with the casting of the bronze equestrian monument.

  Leonardo’s helpers paid a monthly rent and performed household tasks in return for their studies and general upkeep. One of his helpers at this time was a “Maestro Tommaso,” who in November 1493 made candlesticks for him and paid nine months’ rent.9 Tommaso was probably the Florentine known as Zoroastro, the son of a gardener named Giovanni Masini. The eccentric Tommaso claimed, however, to be the illegitimate son of Bernardo Rucellai, one of Florence’s richest men and the brother-in-law of Lorenzo de’ Medici. Tommaso knew Leonardo in Florence and evidently followed him to Milan. His dabbling in the occult arts brought him the nickname Zoroastro, while a costume he decorated with nuts (probably for one of Leonardo’s theatrical performances) earned him a less exalted moniker: Il Gallozzolo (The Gall-Nut). Tommaso also worked as a fortune-teller, hence yet another of his nicknames, Indovino (Diviner). Leonardo had nothing but scorn for the arts of alchemists and necromancers, whom he called “false interpreters of nature” whose sole purpose was to deceive. He can have had little sympathy with Zoroastro’s pursuits, and he put him to work making candlesticks, grinding colors and doing the household accounts.10