Leonardo and the Last Supper

by Ross King

  Leonardo also used various other media for his drawings: chalk, pen and ink, lead point, and charcoal. Characteristically, he experimented with various drawing techniques. He advised wetting the tip of the stylus with spittle, and his notes record that he tried treating his paper with such things as powdered gall nuts, candle soot, and the herb calves’ foot.45

  How Leonardo developed his pictorial ideas through countless drawings can be seen in the case of his Adoration of the Magi, for which he produced numerous sketches in the early 1480s, both of individual figures and others gathered in groups. Many of his drawings for this work were done with a stylus but then, in a technique rare in Florentine workshops, touched up with a pen: that is, with a goose quill dipped in ink.46 Working rapidly on small leafs of paper, he created a series of drawings exploring possible poses for Joseph, Mary, the Christ Child, and the Three Kings. He probably had models (such as his apprentices) strike a variety of postures for him in his studio, or else he quickly dashed off likenesses of Florence’s most animated bench sitters. The figures in his sketches clasp their hands, kneel on the floor, tilt their heads, shade their eyes, cross their arms or ankles, and jackknife their bodies. Leonardo once wrote that there were “18 actions of man,” which included running, reposing, standing, sitting, kneeling, lying down, and “carrying or being carried”—and he seemed determined to fit all eighteen into his Adoration.47

  Leonardo’s sketch for The Adoration of the Magi

  These sketches for the Adoration culminated in a remarkable metal point sketch over which Leonardo traced with a pen and in places—in order to embellish the work still further—gave a wash of ink. Though done on a piece of paper only six and a half inches high by a little less than eight inches wide, the sketch imagines in the Bethlehem manger an entire frenetic world. The Holy Family and the Three Kings are nowhere to be seen. Instead, Leonardo devoted himself to the creation of a frenzied background: spectral figures scrambling up staircases and hanging over archways, horses rearing and bucking, and even a seated dromedary surveying the action. These squirming figures are contained within a grid of perspective lines that explode outward from an off-center focal point at the nose of one of the rearing horses.

  Leonardo proceeded in exactly the same way as he began designing his mural at Santa Maria delle Grazie. One of his earliest drawings for the project was done on a sheet of paper roughly eight inches by ten inches. The flurry of pen strokes at the top of the page shows very little detail, merely conjuring a line of ghostly figures in cursory outline—but the figures are recognizably Christ and the apostles seated at a long table. Leonardo’s take on the subject in this primo pensiero was fairly conventional, since he followed painters like Castagno and Ghirlandaio in placing Judas on the near side of the table, opposite the others. Also like Castagno and Ghirlandaio—and like virtually all other artists tackling a Last Supper—he placed John asleep in the bosom of Christ.

  Leonardo’s sketch for The Last Supper

  This positioning indicates that Leonardo, like so many of his predecessors, was at that point following the Gospel of St. John rather than the synoptics. To the right and lower on the sheet, he sketched on a slightly larger scale a detail of the central motif of Christ, John, Judas, and one other apostle, exploring how Judas would reach across the table to take the sop of bread from Christ. This gesture by which Christ announces his betrayer, given in three of the four Gospels, is a common feature of Last Suppers, evident from Giotto and Duccio through Castagno and Ghirlandaio. At this point, then, Leonardo was thinking along traditional lines, but his vision would gradually change as he worked and reworked his composition.

  Leonardo’s drawings survive in a far greater profusion than those of any other artist of his age. Even so, fewer than a dozen studies for The Last Supper survive from the scores he must have created during the winter of 1494–95. Unquestionably the finest—and one of the finest of all Leonardo’s drawings—is a head and shoulders sketch of one of the apostles, St. James the Greater.

  St. James the Greater (so-called to distinguish him from another apostle named James, known as St. James the Lesser) was the brother of St. John. Leonardo’s study for him was sketched on a sheet of paper roughly ten inches high by six and a half inches wide. It shows the apostle, a young man, in three-quarters profile: a much harder portrait to execute than one full face or in half turn. Leonardo had done three-quarters profiles before, such as the kneeling angel in Verrocchio’s Baptism of Christ, the angel in The Virgin of the Rocks, and the portrait of Lodovico’s mistress, Cecilia Gallerani. The science of perspective and the study of anatomy had given artists the confidence and ability to depict faces and bodies from a variety of different angles, and therefore to provide both the illusion of movement and a striking individuality in their sitters. The three-quarters view made a change from the profile portrait, the most typical type of portrait painted during the fifteenth century. Inspired partly by the images of emperors on Roman medallions, the profile portrait was not intended to be an illustration of an individual’s unique facial characteristics so much as a depiction of the subject in a specific social or political role.48 On the other hand, a face turned in three-quarters profile, exposing the facial contours at an apparently more casual and fortuitous angle, was conducive to a more distinctive and revealing portrait.

  Leonardo complicated the pose of his apostle by tipping the head a few degrees forward so that St. James is slightly foreshortened from above. He looks downward with his lips parted in a startled rictus and his deepsocketed eyes—the features to which Leonardo gave the most attention—riveted by something directly in front of him. His left hand with its bent wrist, barely visible, suggests the model has his hand on the neck of a musical instrument. This pose suggests, in turn, that the model was a musician, possibly someone to whom Leonardo (so accomplished on the lyre) gave music lessons. Leonardo clearly concentrated on capturing the facial expression, and yet this expression is difficult to read. Is the young apostle saying something? Or gasping in astonishment? Is he attracted or repelled by what he sees? The ambiguity of movement and expression in this sketch will run in a persistent susurration throughout Leonardo’s painting.

  St. James the Greater is another of the young men “with fine flowing hair” that Leonardo delighted in drawing and painting. Yet the crown of St. James’s head is denoted by only a few wavy lines, and indeed the drawing is not completed in any way. However deft and striking, it cannot be included among the beautiful and detailed drawings that Vasari extolled as “unrivalled for the perfection of their finish.” It was simply one of many stages by which Leonardo gradually defined the pose and expression of one of the apostles—but it is a virtuoso performance nonetheless.

  Leonardo’s study of St. James the Greater

  That Leonardo did not highly esteem this drawing—and that later, more finished drawings of St. James undoubtedly existed but have, alas, long since been lost—is suggested by the fact that he reused the paper: he sketched an architectural design for a castle in its lower left-hand corner. Leonardo was loath to waste, often filling his sheets of paper, front and back, with numerous unrelated drawings done months or even years apart. On the reverse of one sheet of paper covered with architectural diagrams he wrote himself a list: cap, scissors, soup plate, silk shoelaces.49 The back of another sheet, a large one measuring twelve and a half by seventeen and a half inches, teems with a broad range of diagrams and ideas: everything from engineering plans and geometrical diagrams to the leaves of an arum lily and a doodled lock of curly hair. All these drawings—and there are more than fifteen separate (and sometimes overlapping) images on the reverse—testify to both Leonardo’s diversity of interests and his frugality with his stationery supplies.50

  Leonardo’s study of St. James the Greater was done in the distinctive medium of red chalk. The extreme scarcity of his drawings for his Last Supper makes generalizations difficult, but surviving drawings seem to indicate that by the early 1490s he had partially aban
doned metal point in favor of chalk. According to one source, he also used pastels to make drawings of the heads of both Christ and the apostles, but none of these has survived.51 Metal point had the disadvantage of being an inflexible and ultimately rather inexpressive medium, since pressure on the stylus did not vary the intensity of the color or the breadth of the line. Chalk and pastels were different. Black chalk, made from shale found in northern Italy, was used in drawings by the time of Leonardo’s apprenticeship. However, it was still such a new medium that one fifteenth-century artists’ handbook could give it no name, identifying it only as “a certain black stone which comes from Piedmont.”52

  Leonardo used black chalk in a few surviving studies for The Last Supper, but he seems to have favored—and even pioneered—the use of red chalk. Made from clay mixed with iron oxide and hematite, red chalk had been used by the ancient Romans for their wall paintings. Leonardo was, however, the first artist of the Italian Renaissance known to have used it. He exploited its distinctive properties—its blood-red color, perfect for flesh tones, and its hardness, ideal for sketching fine details—to create many remarkable drawings of everything from the human figure to mountain ranges to the wreaths of smoke rising over burning buildings in Milan. It was his medium of choice as he worked on the equestrian monument: his hopes and plans for the bronze horse were recorded in a diminutive, ruddy script.

  Leonardo’s drawing of St. James the Greater reveals, like all of his sketches, a characteristic feature. Artists created areas of shadow in their drawings or engravings by making repeated parallel strokes, either perpendicular or oblique: the technique known as hatching. Leonardo’s style of hatching was distinctive because, contrary to most artists, who drew their parallel lines from the lower left to the upper right, ////, Leonardo executed his from the lower right to upper left, \\.

  The reason for this individual style was simple: Leonardo was left-handed. As a mancino, or southpaw, it was easier and more natural for him to draw these backward-leaning hatch marks than to follow the more conventional method. The individuality created by his left-handedness extended, famously, to his handwriting, since he often (though not always) wrote in reverse, from right to left. A friend who knew him well attested that he both drew and wrote left-handed, and that his script “could not be read except with a mirror or by holding the back of the sheet against the light. As I understand, and can say, this is the practice of our Leonardo da Vinci, lantern of painting, who is left-handed.”53 This reversed handwriting gives him the most famous and distinctive calligraphy in history. Who else can be recognized so immediately from his handwriting? This idiosyncratic style reinforces the image of Leonardo as eccentric and unique: someone who inverted the accepted rules and conventions in order to pursue his own individual path.

  Contrary to popular misconception, Leonardo’s looking glass script was not a code. A less foolproof code is difficult to imagine, since all one needed to do to crack it (as Leonardo’s friend pointed out) was to hold the paper up to a mirror. Moreover, Leonardo had no wish to conceal his writings from the world, because he hoped to publish them. For example, his notes for his treatise on painting, though written entirely in reverse, were clearly meant for dissemination to the wider world. The earliest known sample of his handwriting—the inscription on his 1473 sketch of the Arno Valley—reveals him writing in reverse even as a young man. There is no reason why he should have wished to encrypt this particular inscription, which merely records the date on which he made his sketch. Rather, as a mancino, a right-to-left movement across the page came more naturally to him than a movement in the opposite direction. It also no doubt helped him avoid the hazard of all southpaws: smearing wet ink.

  Art historians over the years have pondered why Leonardo should have written and drawn with his left hand. The nineteenth-century translator and editor of Leonardo’s notebooks speculated that he was a mancino because he lost the use of his right hand in either an accident or a fight, an opinion cautiously supported by A. E. Popham, an English expert on Leonardo’s drawings. Popham believed Leonardo may have been deprived of the use of his right hand in an unspecified childhood accident.54 A more creative theory was offered by Marie Bonaparte, the great-grandniece of Napoleon and the woman to whom Sigmund Freud, treating her for an inability to achieve orgasm, uttered the immortal question: “What does a woman want?” For Madame Bonaparte, the reason for Leonardo’s left-handedness was only too obvious: as a child he had refrained from masturbation, leading to left-handedness and an extreme disgust of sexuality.55

  Leonardo undoubtedly wrote left-handed not because of either a hand-mangling childhood adventure or an extreme disgust of sexuality. There seems little reason to doubt that he was simply born left-handed, like roughly 10 percent of the population today. The percentage was probably even lower in Leonardo’s day—making him even more unique—since parents were taught to free the child’s right hand first from the swaddling clothes in hopes that the child would begin using and strengthening the right rather than the left hand.56 Leonardo’s parents either declined to follow this practice or the training had no effect. By contrast, Michelangelo and his friend Sebastiano del Piombo, though naturally left-handed, learned to write and draw with the right hand, possibly at the behest of a schoolmaster or parent.

  Another mancino whose schoolmaster did not demand this kind of compliance, Raffaello da Montelupo, testified that the sight of someone writing with his left hand tended to draw a crowd. A sculptor and architect who worked with Michelangelo, Raffaello claimed that “many were astonished” when they saw him write with his paper tipped at a ninety-degree angle and his left hand at work with a pen. Once, when he signed a legal document, the dumbfounded notary summoned ten colleagues to witness the amazing performance.57 Leonardo’s left-handedness, as well as his facility in writing backward, no doubt added to his own mystique as someone who worked differently from everyone else, at an angle to the rest of the world.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Holy League

  King Charles VIII entered Naples in February 1495, four months and nineteen days after setting forth from Asti. His triumph, achieved with a scarcely believable facility, was virtually complete. As a French statesman accompanying the king noted, the invasion of Italy “was performed with so much ease, and so little resistance, that our soldiers scarce ever put on their armour during the whole expedition.”1

  Charles had left Rome in the middle of January, after a two-week occupation during which he did some sightseeing among the ruins and attended a Mass at St. Peter’s. Casting about on his arrival for a comfortable abode, he had settled on the Vatican—“a very fine house,” he enthused, “as well furnished and adorned as any palace or castle I have ever seen.”2 He was given an audience with the pope, who, after much bickering over protocol, cautiously emerged from his hiding place in the Castel Sant’Angelo to receive the French king’s somewhat restrained obeisance. A comical scene ensued in which, as the audience concluded, the pope refused to replace his biretta until the king first donned his own hat.3 Charles then lingered briefly in the Eternal City, making vague and unconvincing noises about reforming the church. In Milan, Lodovico Sforza was unimpressed: “His Most Christian Majesty,” he acidly remarked, “had better begin by reforming himself.”4 Finally, Charles set off to claim his new throne in Naples.

  King Alfonso had once predicted that his sins would bring down misfortunes on his head. Those misfortunes had now arrived. As fortress after fortress fell to the French, he was seized with such fear and panic that during the night he cried out that he could hear the approach of the enemy, and that even the stones and trees shouted, “France, France.”5 The shade of his father appeared to him, prophesying disaster. He was also visited by the ghosts of his murdered political enemies. Abdicating in favor of his son Ferdinand II, he loaded five galleys with manuscripts, tapestries, and casks of wine, and fled to a monastery in Sicily. Twenty-five-year-old Ferdinand put up a brief show of defiance before abandoning Naple
s and escaping to the island of Ischia. On 22 February, Charles entered the city as a liberator and conquering hero. He immediately made himself popular with the people of Naples by slashing taxes and allowing the continuation of slavery.

  Lodovico Sforza’s original objective—that of ridding himself of the threat from King Alfonso—had been spectacularly met. But the duke found alarming the ease and speed of the French conquest of the Italian peninsula. Equally troubling was the fact that French troops still occupied Pisa, Siena, and various fortresses in both Tuscany and the Papal States, and that they seemed in no hurry to depart. Most disturbing of all, Charles’s cousin, Louis of Orléans, would-be claimant to the Duchy of Milan, was biding his time at Asti, a mere sixty miles southwest of Milan.

  Within a week of Charles’s arrival in Naples, Lodovico began laying plans for evicting from Italy the invaders that he himself had invited. “Naples is lost,” he wrote to the Venetian Senate, “and the French king has been joyfully welcomed by the people. I am ready to do whatever the Republic desires. But there is no time to waste; we must act at once.”6 The Venetians, hitherto neutral, were prepared to listen to Lodovico’s entreaties. As Guicciardini wrote, after seeing Charles’s army proceed “like a thunderbolt” through Italy, they, too, “began to consider the misfortunes of others as dangers to themselves.”7

  Charles had earlier pledged himself to launch a crusade against the Turks after conquering Naples. However, once in his new kingdom he began to think better of an arduous overseas adventure. He and his soldiers preferred to remain in the fleshpots of Naples, “giving themselves over to pleasure.”8 By then a strange and debilitating new disease had announced itself: one that the French soldiers called the “Neapolitan disease” and that the Neapolitans called the “French disease.” Guicciardini graphically described the horrors of the boils, ulcers, and intense pains in the joints and nerves. “This disease killed many men and women of all ages,” he wrote, “and many became terribly deformed and were rendered useless, suffering from almost continuous torments.”9