Leonardo and the Last Supper

by Ross King

  Leonardo may have wished to commemorate Bramante on the wall of Santa Maria delle Grazie for one reason in particular. While Leonardo had no prior experience in fresco or wall painting, Bramante actually began his career as a painter. One of his many specialties in Milan was frescoing the fronts of palaces and villas. He also frescoed a series of philosophers, known as Men at Arms, for the Casa Panigarola in Milan, and between 1490 and 1493 he had created for Lodovico a fresco in the Castello known as Argus.

  Given his extensive experience, Bramante may well have offered Leonardo assistance or advice as he began work on his own mural project. At the very least he could have helped Leonardo with the design and construction of the scaffold, the same task that a dozen years later he was assigned by Pope Julius II when Michelangelo began work in the Sistine Chapel. Vasari’s description of the scaffold that Leonardo built for himself a few years later in Florence—with a scissor mechanism that allowed its platform to be raised or lowered—was probably inspired by Bramante, who designed drawbridges. One of Leonardo’s notes, accompanied by a diagram of crisscrossed poles, reads, “The structure of the drawbridge shown me by Donnino.”19

  Raphael later included Bramante’s portrait in two separate frescoes in the Vatican Apartments, most famously as Euclid in The School of Athens. Around the same time, Michelangelo portrayed him as the prophet Joel on the vault of the Sistine ceiling, and his pupil Bramantino, in a tapestry made for the castle in Milan, showed him carousing at a feast: a tribute, no doubt, to his reputation for good living.20 Even more reliably, his likeness was also depicted in profile on a medallion struck by Caradosso in about 1505. Executed some ten to twelve years later, these portraits show him to have been handsome and balding, with unruly curls and slightly aquiline features.

  Michelangelo’s painting of the prophet Joel on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel

  Leonardo’s study for the apostle Bartholomew

  If Leonardo did depict Bramante as one of the apostles, the most obvious choice, based on the evidence of these likenesses, is Bartholomew, the apostle standing at the far left. Leonardo’s red chalk study for Bartholomew shows a good-looking man on whose windswept curls male-pattern baldness is in the process of taking its toll. He has a strong brow, a pronounced nose, an intense, intelligent expression, and a jaw set in steely determination. The model is clearly a man in middle age: Bramante turned fifty in 1494. In the mural, Bartholomew’s hair is restored and he wears a beard, details that slightly obscure his likeness to Bramante. However, this figure who leans forward with his hands on the table, vigorous and alert, must still have been recognizable to Milanese courtiers as the famous architect.

  Another model Leonardo apparently used in The Last Supper was—in the venerable tradition of Florentine workshops—himself. In the days of his apprenticeship there was a proverb attributed to Cosimo de’ Medici: “Ogni pittore dipinge sé” (Every painter paints himself).21 The phrase became a kind of truism for Leonardo. “I have known some who in all their figures,” he wrote, “seem to have portrayed themselves from life, and in these figures are seen the motions and manners of their creator.”22

  The Caradosso medal (reversed) featuring Donato Bramante’s profile

  Certainly many painters sneaked their self-portraits into their works as a kind of signature. The swart, handsome features of Domenico Ghirlandaio and the podgy face of Pietro Perugino can be seen peering out from the crowd scenes in various of their frescoes. Some Florentine painters, such as Filippo Lippi and Sandro Botticelli, seem to have repeatedly painted themselves into their works, lending their facial features and head shapes to various of their figures (the evidence suggests that Lippi had a round face and prominent ears). These self-portraits were not necessarily the consequence of narcissism, unconscious or otherwise; they may simply have resulted from the sheer convenience of the artist looking into a mirror and enlisting himself as a model.23

  Leonardo believed such a practice was to be avoided, stressing that painters should try to avoid producing in their work faces “which have some resemblance to your own.”24 Ironically, however, he was accused of filling his own works with self-portraits. In the 1490s, a poet attached to the Sforza court, Gasparo Visconti, lampooned an unnamed artist in a work called “Against a Bad Painter.” He complained that this painter’s favorite subject was himself because he “holds firmly in his mind his own image, / And when he paints others, it often happens / That he paints none other than himself.” According to Visconti, this artist tended to reproduce not only his own face—“however handsome it may be”—but also his own “actions and ways.”25

  Leonardo is usually understood as the target of Visconti’s attack. However, it is difficult to know exactly what paintings or self-portraits the poet was referring to—though there are at least two candidates for Leonardo self-portraits in The Last Supper. Certain faces do recur in Leonardo’s paintings and, even more so, in his drawings. Two in particular are memorable. The first is an angelic youth with curly hair and an androgynous face, the second a more virile figure, a fierce-looking older man with a hooked nose and jutting chin. It is hard to distinguish Leonardo—who was in his midforties when Visconti’s verses were written—in either of these distinctive types.

  Visconti wrote his verses around the time Leonardo was working on The Last Supper. If he was indeed thinking of Leonardo, his objections must have arisen from what he saw as the painter’s excessive self-portraiture in the mural—the fact, presumably, that Leonardo used himself as the model for various of the apostles, even down to having them imitate, with their gestures, his own “actions and ways.”

  Visconti was a friend of Bramante and also, no doubt, of Leonardo: the poem’s tone is one of good-natured ribbing rather than vehement critique, and Leonardo even owned a copy of Visconti’s sonnets. Visconti had the advantage—denied to us today—of knowing exactly what Leonardo looked and acted like. Leonardo’s actual physical appearance is yet another of his enigmas. We have few clues as to what Leonardo looked like at the time of The Last Supper. Details about his taste for purple capes and pink hats may be gleaned from his clothing inventories. A handwritten list dating from a decade after The Last Supper indicates that by his midfifties, at the latest, he wore glasses and, in bed, a nightcap.26 But of his facial features and general appearance—beyond the comments on his physical beauty given by various early biographers (none of whom ever actually saw or met him)—we have virtually nothing.

  Leonardo is known to have executed at least one self-portrait: a Florentine poet claimed to have seen one done in charcoal, but the work has long since vanished.27 The only figure in one of his paintings with any credibility as a self-portrait is the figure in the lower right-hand corner of his Adoration of the Magi: a handsome, brooding man set apart from the fray who averts his attention from the kneeling Magi and the Christ Child to look at something beyond the bounds of the picture. But since the altarpiece was never finished the features remain frustratingly obscure.

  Lack of knowledge about Leonardo’s physical appearance has not deterred art historians from putting forward various candidates for self-portraits. Leonardo spotting has become a popular pastime, and his features have been identified in everything from his famous Vitruvian Man drawing (done in the late 1480s) to a needle-nosed character who looks out with a lazy-eyed stare from beneath the lines of mirror script on a page of his Codex on the Flight of Birds.28 However, some thirty years would pass after the Adoration self-portrait before Leonardo definitively reappeared, this time in a red chalk drawing by one of his assistants, probably Francesco Melzi. Sketched in about 1515, it shows Leonardo in profile: a regal, classically handsome figure in middle age, with a Greek nose and wavy, flowing hair, slightly receding, and a long beard. This is surely the portrait that inspired later writers, such as Vasari and the Anonimo Gaddiano, to enthuse over Leonardo’s grace and beauty.

  A possible self-portrait of Leonardo on a page of his Codex on the Flight of Birds

  The mo
st famous of all Leonardo portraits is the supposed self-portrait of an old man in red chalk, beneath which some unknown person later inscribed in black, now barely legible: “Ritratto di se stesso assai vecchio” (Portrait of himself in fairly old age). The cataracts of hair and beard feature again, though Leonardo—if it is indeed him—now appears beetle browed, bald on top, and considerably older. Only discovered in 1840, the drawing was widely accepted in the nineteenth century (and still is by many today) as Leonardo’s self-portrait. However, it is now believed to date from the 1490s, from around the time, in fact, that Leonardo painted The Last Supper. If this dating is accurate, the drawing cannot possibly be a self-portrait, since it shows a man in his sixties or seventies, certainly not one in his forties.29

  Supposed self-portrait of Leonardo as an older man, in red chalk

  Whether an actual self-portrait or not, this drawing served to kill off the image of the painter prevalent in the sixteenth century: that of an athletic, fun-loving, and strikingly attractive man with long eyelashes and a taste for pink tights. It fostered instead a picture of Leonardo as a gray-bearded magus: serious, studious, and scientific. It was a Leonardo made safe for the steam age.

  By the beginning of 1496, Leonardo was, typically for him, at work on several other projects besides The Last Supper. Some were initiated by Lodovico, while others were the result of Leonardo’s more personal enthusiasms.

  Although Leonardo longed for military commissions, Lodovico still regarded him first and foremost as an interior decorator and stage designer. Sometime in 1495, as work at Santa Maria delle Grazie commenced, the duke engaged him to paint the ceilings of several camerini, or “little rooms,” in the Castello. The commission was probably mooted more than a year earlier, since the ripped-up letter to Lodovico had urged the duke to “remember the commission to paint the rooms.” These rooms were part of a covered bridge, the Ponticella, recently constructed by Bramante to span the moat and provide a quiet retreat for Lodovico and Beatrice. Leonardo probably began painting the vaults at the end of 1495, since in November of that year, according to a document, the ceilings had been given their base color and were ready for decoration.30

  At virtually the same time, Leonardo received another commission from Lodovico. He spent the end of 1495 and the first weeks of 1496 preparing the stage set and costumes for yet another theatrical, a five-act comedy by Baldassare Taccone on the theme of Jupiter and Danaë. The play was performed at the end of January in the palace of Lodovico’s cousin Gianfrancesco Sanseverino, one of Galeazzo’s eleven brothers. Leonardo once again engineered spectacular visual and aural effects, making a star rise above the stage “with such sounds,” as Taccone’s stage directions stipulated, “that it seems as if the palace would collapse.” Aerial displays featured prominently, with Mercury flying down from Mount Olympus by means of a rope and pulley. There was also a role for an annunziatore, or heavenly messenger, who presumably performed similar aerial acrobatics.31

  Much as he must have enjoyed designing these spectaculars, Leonardo was also working on a project that was undoubtedly of more interest to him. Mercury twirling above the heads of the audience is a reminder of his long-standing interest in flight. He was fascinated by the possibility of humans passing into and through different elements such as water or air. Soon after arriving in Milan he began designing a boat that could travel underwater—in effect, a submarine. It was no doubt inspired by (and even based on) a similar vessel designed by a pupil of Bramante named Cesare Cesariano, who claimed to have made a boat that made subaqueous voyages in the moat beside Milan’s castle and in Lake Como.32

  Most of all, though, Leonardo studied the mechanics of flight. He made close studies of how birds and insects flew, trying to determine how humans might harness technology to take flight themselves. As a young man, he spent much time on riverbanks and beside ditches, watching moths, dragonflies, and bats. Sometime in the early 1480s he drew a dragonfly, writing on the margin of the page: “To see four-winged flight, go around the ditches and you will see the black net-wings.”33 Another dragonfly appeared in his notebooks a few years later, when he was living in Milan. The sheet of paper included sketches of a bat, a flying fish, and what appears to be a butterfly or moth. He was particularly intrigued by the flying fish. As he pointed out with a note of wonder, the flying fish was able to flit through both water and air.34

  Leonardo soon began putting his observations to practical ends. Inspired by the dragonfly, he designed a bizarre contraption that would have required a pilot rapidly and repeatedly to squat like a human piston while at the same time frantically cranking a windlass connected to four paddle-like wings.35 Another early design represented an attempt to refine a giant flapping wing. His inspiration this time was the bat, which he believed offered the best model. “Remember that your flying machine must imitate no other than the bat,” he wrote in a note to himself, “because the web is what by its union gives the armor, or strength to the wings.”36

  Sometime in the late 1480s, Leonardo drew a diagram for yet another device, a helical contraption that applied to aeronautics the principle of the Archimedean screw. Variations on this rotating helix had been used for over a thousand years to pump water, and Leonardo was familiar with it from his hydraulic projects. Transferring its principles to flight, he imagined a machine that would achieve liftoff by boring its way through the air. His drawing shows a central mast rising from a platform and encircled by spiraling sails, which he stipulated should be made from linen sized with starch. The motive power is unclear, though this rotating spiral could never in his wildest aeronautical dreams have been manned. The sails may have been rotated by the wind, rather like the vanes of a windmill, until the machine rose miraculously skyward. Its rotary motion has often led it to be described (inaccurately) as the prototype for the helicopter.37

  Leonardo’s drawing of a helical contraption

  A year or two later, Leonardo drew another diagram of a flying machine. This time he envisioned a pilot strapped prone to a board and operating foot pedals that flapped a pair of overhead wings by means of a system of pulleys. His inspiration for the design of these wings was, as his notes make clear, raptors such as the kite. He even referred to this flying machine as the uccello, or bird, and notes and drawings on the reverse of the sheet outlined details of a wing made from cane and starched silk, to which feathers would be glued. He included the observation that the test flight should be conducted over a lake to reduce the risks of a fall, and that the pilot should be equipped with a wineskin to use as an emergency flotation device. However, it is difficult to imagine the furiously pedaling pilot ever achieving liftoff, let alone plunging Icarus-like from the sky.38

  If this uccello never reached the flight-testing stage, Leonardo’s next prototype, incredibly, appears to have done so. The flying machine on which he was working as he began his Last Supper was a more refined version of the uccello. This time he reduced the weight of the device, envisaging his pilot harnessed to a pair of articulated wings activated by foot pedals attached to a system of cables and pulleys. The pedaling motion once again consisted of the pilot rapidly bending and straightening both legs simultaneously.

  These wings seem no more promising than the previous prototype, but a page in Leonardo’s notebooks dating from the mid-1490s suggests that he and his “miraculous pilot” were planning a test flight from—terrifyingly—the roof of the Corte dell’Arengo.39

  Leonardo was not the first to have these flights of fancy. He must have known at least some of the stories of various intrepid birdmen who had tried—and inevitably failed—to fly through the air. One of the earliest known attempts at human flight was that by Abbas Ibn Firnas, a physician and poet in Moorish Spain, in 875. Launching himself into the air with a pair of wings made from a silk cape reinforced with willow wands and covered in eagle feathers, he traveled a short distance before crash-landing and breaking his back. His feat was replicated a century and a quarter later in Persia, with even more dis
astrous results, by a student named al-Jauhari, who was killed after he donned a set of wings and leaped from the roof of a mosque. Around the same time, in England, a Benedictine monk named Eilmer of Malmesbury, “mistaking fable for truth” (as a chronicler put it), tried to fly like Daedalus. He fastened wings to his hands and feet, then jumped from the top of a church tower. According to the chronicler, he flew for more than two hundred yards before losing control and crashing. He suffered two broken legs “and was lame ever after.”40

  The propulsion systems for these birdmen were simply the desperately flapping arms of the pilots. However, by the thirteenth century, mechanical wings were under investigation. The Franciscan friar Roger Bacon, a polymath known as Doctor Mirabilis, made notes on the mechanics of flight, speculating confidently on the possibilities of crank-operated flying machines. In about 1260 he maintained that “flying machines can be constructed so that a man sits in the midst of the machine revolving some engine by which artificial wings are made to beat the air like a flying bird.” He claimed that such devices “have long since been made, as well as in our own day,” including one by a “wise man” of his acquaintance, though any records of these machines have been lost.41

  One of Leonardo’s notes records his hunt for a printed edition of “Rugieri Bacho.”42 Perhaps inspired by Bacon’s description, he appears to have constructed his own mechanical flying machine in great secrecy on the roof of the Corte dell’Arengo: “Barricade the top room,” reads one of his notes, “and make a large and tall model.”43 He evidently planned to launch his prototype from the top of the castle, a place “more suitable in all respects than any other place in Italy.” The site was presumably advantageous because of its height and perhaps the air currents. But there was one disadvantage: he was concerned about workmen on the nearby cathedral (whose domed tower was being constructed) watching his machine take shape. He therefore found a sheltered spot on the roof where he believed he could work unobserved by prying eyes: “And if you stand upon the roof at the side of the tower the men at work upon the tiburio will not see you.”44