Leonardo and the Last Supper

by Ross King

  Besides occupying the center of Leonardo’s painting, Christ is spatially isolated from the apostles, all of whom are bunched together as they physically touch their neighbors or lean across one another in partial eclipses. Leonardo further highlighted Christ by placing him against a window that opens onto a landscape of clear sky and bluish contours—by giving him, in effect, a halo of sky. The effect is dazzling, even despite the paint loss, as the warm tones of Christ’s face, hair, and reddish undergarment advance while the cool blues of the landscape recede: a prime example of Leonardo’s knowledge of the push and pull of colors. For the blue mantle over Christ’s left shoulder Leonardo used ultramarine, which was, along with gold, the brightest and most expensive of all pigments. One fifteenth-century treatise on painting called it “a colour noble, beautiful, and perfect beyond all other colours.” A single ounce could cost as much as eight ducats, more than the annual rent paid on a house by a poor worker in Florence. So expensive was ultramarine (the only known supply came from Afghanistan) that unscrupulous thieves sometimes scraped it from paintings. Because of its beauty and expense, it was used to color the most prestigious and venerated parts of a painting, most notably the mantle of the Virgin Mary.14

  The colors of Christ’s reddish undergarment were equally bright and deliberately intensified. Leonardo generally laid his colors on a base coat of lead white spread across the entire wall. For this red garment, however, he covered his white primer with a carbon-based black pigment to create a dark foundation. He then added vermilion, followed by a semitransparent red lake, a pigment created by extracting the red dye from old textiles. This was a trick he knew from panel painting: adding pigments over black enhanced and deepened their color. Finally, a second layer of vermilion was added over the red lake.

  Leonardo’s portrait of Christ in The Last Supper

  Vermilion was the most brilliant of all the reds, and its appearance on the wall of Santa Maria delle Grazie would be all the more striking because it was a pigment that like ultramarine could not be used in fresco. Vermilion was made from cinnabar, a brick-red mineral the ancient Romans believed came from the blood of dragons crushed to death under the weight of elephants. Like most mineral-based pigments, it was, as Andrea Pozzo wrote, “quite incompatible with lime.”15 Indeed, the layering of five separate coats of paint, carefully manipulated to intensify their values, was something else completely unknown to fresco.

  Leonardo’s model for Christ, possibly the soldier Giovanni Conte, appears to have been a young man. Leonardo did something distinctive to his features: he gave him a beard. Jesus had a beard, of course—or so everyone believed. For many centuries, painters and sculptors had been unanimous in showing Christ with a beard. Versions of the Last Supper from Giotto to Ghirlandaio imagined Jesus, without exception, in a beard.

  Jesus had not always been depicted with facial hair. No description of his appearance is found in the Bible, beyond the unflattering prophecy of Isaiah that “there is no beauty in him, nor comeliness” (53:2). The early Christians, converted from paganism and wishing to portray the Savior in the Roman catacombs, borrowed the handy images of Apollo and Orpheus, both of whom were beardless.16 This clean-shaven, godlike Christ was not to last. By the fourth century the vital, beardless Christ had made way for one whose plain and even ugly appearance, complete with a beard and haggard features, was in keeping with both the church’s asceticism and St. Augustine’s insistence on the virility of facial hair. “The beard signifies the courageous,” he declared. “The beard distinguishes the grown men, the earnest, the active, the vigorous.”17

  Apparently authoritative sources emerged by the Middle Ages to endorse the notion of a bearded Christ. In 1384, the Byzantine emperor gave to a Genoese merchant a miraculous portrait of a bearded Christ that according to the legend had not been made by human hands. Other miraculous portraits such as the Veronica Cloth and the Shroud of Turin—pieces of fabric on which the features of Christ were supposedly imprinted—convinced the pious that they possessed actual images of Christ’s features. The former was in the Vatican, the latter in the collection of the dukes of Savoy, and both clearly depicted a man with a beard. The Holy Face on the Veil of Veronica was widely disseminated; not only was it exhibited to the faithful on principal feast days, but it was also reproduced on both the Roman ducat and the badges given to pilgrims visiting Rome.18

  People in the fifteenth century further believed they knew what Christ looked like because they possessed, besides these miraculous images, an eyewitness account of his appearance. This was the so-called Lentulus Letter, a report to the Roman Senate by Publius Lentulus, predecessor of Pontius Pilate as governor of Judea. Lentulus briefly and matter-of-factly mentioned how Christ healed the lame, raised the dead, and was hailed by his disciples as the Son of God. He then moved on to his real business, which was to offer a detailed description of this prodigy’s physical features:

  He has an impressive appearance, so that those who look on him love and fear him. His hair is the colour of a ripe hazelnut. It falls straight almost to the level of his ears; from there down it curls thickly and is rather more luxuriant, and this hangs down to his shoulders. In front his hair is parted into two, with the parting in the centre in the Nazarene manner. His forehead is wide, smooth and serene, and his face is without wrinkles or any marks. It is graced by a slightly reddish tinge, a faint colour. His nose and mouth are faultless. His beard is thick and like a young man’s first beard, of the same colour as his hair; it is not particularly long and is parted in the middle. His aspect is simple and mature. His eyes are brilliant, mobile, clear, splendid. He is terrible when he reprehends, quiet and kindly when he admonishes. He is quick in his movements but always keeps his dignity. No one ever saw him laugh, but he has been seen to weep. He is broad in the chest and upstanding; his hands and arms are fine. In speech he is serious, sparing and modest. He is the most beautiful among the children of men.19

  Publius Lentulus never existed, and the Lentulus Letter was a forgery composed in the twelfth or thirteenth century—but painters of the Middle Ages were not to know that. The scholar Lorenzo Valla denounced it as “knavishly forged” as early as 1440, but by then it had firmly fixed the image of Christ that was to survive through the fifteenth century and beyond: that of a serenely handsome man with shoulder-length, nut-brown hair, a middle parting, and a well-tended beard.20

  The Lentulus Letter is curiously anomalous in that it presented an image of a bearded Christ at a time when facial hair was strictly forbidden to the Christian clergy and increasingly scarce on the chins of laymen. In 1119, the Council of Toulouse threatened with excommunication any priest who wore a beard, and Pope Alexander III, who reigned 1159-81, allowed archdeacons to employ force to shave any beard-wearing priests. This legislation against clerical beards remained in force throughout the Middle Ages, and by the fifteenth century, in Italy at least, beards were virtually extinct on laymen as well as clergy. The great princes of Leonardo’s time, such as Lorenzo de’ Medici and Federigo da Montefeltro, were clean-shaven; so too was Lodovico Sforza and all members of the Sforza clan. Ghirlandaio’s frescoes in the Tornabuoni Chapel reveal that eminent Florentines, from wealthy bankers to humanist scholars, were unanimously clean-shaven. Ghirlandaio’s numerous self-portraits indicate that he, too, was on close terms with his barber; likewise Perugino, Botticelli, and Raphael. George Eliot is completely accurate in Romola, her novel of Renaissance Florence, when she has a barber take out a pair of clippers to deal with a bearded visitor from Greece: “Here at Florence,” the barber informs him, “we love not to see a man with his nose projecting over a cascade of hair.” Nor did they love to see facial hair in Milan or Rome. Even most Jews in fifteenth-century Italy were clean-shaven, looking so much like gentiles that in times of persecution they were obliged to differentiate themselves (as in Milan between 1452 and 1466) by means of a yellow badge; not the Star of David but rather il segno del O, a piece of yellow cloth in the shape of a circle.21
/>
  A beard for fifteenth-century Italians was a sign of exoticism and impassioned religiosity—of the foreign worlds of Islam and Eastern Christendom. However, even the great Greek scholar from Constantinople, John Agyropoulos, shaved off his beard when he arrived in Florence, an act the Florentines called his Latinizzamento, or Latinization. Among the few Italians who wore beards were the self-styled prophets and holy hermits who appeared in Italian cities in the last decades of the fifteenth century, such as the one known as “Guglielmo barbato” (bearded Guglielmo), who preached in Rome in the 1470s, “predicting,” according to a poet, “all evil at the top of his lungs.”22

  One of the few other Italians of Leonardo’s era to wear a beard was Leonardo himself, as the red chalk drawing testifies. However, this sketch postdates by some twenty years his work in Santa Maria delle Grazie, and during the 1490s there is evidence neither for nor against a beard-wearing Leonardo. The probability is that—the popular image of the bearded seer notwithstanding—he was clean-shaven throughout his years in Milan.

  Leonardo, as we have seen, purchased a Bible as he began his commission in Santa Maria delle Grazie. He seems to have taken biblical history very seriously, applying to religion the same forensic insight that he turned on every other subject that crossed his path. At one point in his notebooks he interrupts his inquiries about whether the “marine shells” (what we now know as fossils) discovered at high elevations in the mountains could have been carried from the seashore (as one theory had it) by Noah’s Flood. “Here a doubt arises, and that is: whether the deluge, which happened at the time of Noah, was universal or not.” Could forty days and forty nights of rain, he wonders, really have covered the surface of the entire earth to the height at which the shells were found? If so, where did the water go? And could cockle shells, which he calculated traveled only a few feet per day in a swift current, really have made a 250-mile journey from the Adriatic to the top of the Dolomites in only forty days? “Here, then, natural reasons are wanting,” he decides. “Hence to remove this doubt it is necessary to call in a miracle to aid us.” Not even the Bible—which he called the “supreme truth”—was spared his incessant questions and curiosity.23

  Leonardo may have conducted other researches into his subject besides reading the Gospel versions of the Last Supper. One report of his studies for The Last Supper, composed long after the fact, comes from a French curator and scholar named Aimé Guillon de Montléon. In 1811, Guillon claimed that when Leonardo painted Christ’s costume in The Last Supper he colored it crimson “in accordance with a piece of the true dress of the Saviour preserved as a relic in the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome.”24 Guillon provides no documentation, and he is almost certainly confused or mistaken. Santa Maria Maggiore possessed a relic of the Virgin’s cloak (and another of her breast milk) but not one of Christ’s coat, the tunica inconsutilis (seamless garment) woven by Mary, worn by Christ throughout his life, and diced over by the Roman soldiers beneath the cross. That particular relic was claimed by both the cathedral of Trier in Germany and the parish church of Argenteuil, outside Paris.

  Leonardo would have entertained with much skepticism these various reliquaries in Santa Maria Maggiore. He once wrote a riddle posing the question of how a thousand years after their deaths the dead could “give a livelihood to many who are living.” His answer was that friars “live by saints who have been dead a great while.”25 Guillon was correct, however, in assuming that Leonardo concerned himself with historical accuracy. On at least one occasion he showed an interest in relics, church history, and the human and historical side of his religious subject. In 1503, while living in Florence and working on several Virgin and Child paintings, he contacted one Maestro Giovanni, an official at the Franciscan basilica of Santa Croce. Leonardo’s letter no longer exists, but he evidently inquired about certain documents supposedly held at the church: letters dating from the time of the Virgin Mary. Maestro Giovanni, after consulting a Maestro Zacaria, was happy to confirm to Leonardo, courtesy of an “authentic record preserved in this church,” that St. Ignatius of Antioch wrote a letter to the Virgin and “received an answer and corollaries—he having lived at her time.”26 Leonardo had obviously heard about this cache of letters and was making inquiries about them, as if hoping that seeing letters or “corollaries” from the Virgin would help with his depiction of her.

  Although Leonardo certainly disapproved of certain ecclesiastical practices, he seems not to have entertained serious doubts about the “supreme truth” of the Bible itself. His reputation as a man devoid of religious beliefs originated with the 1550 edition of Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, which depicted him as an eccentric unbeliever prone to heretical notions. The actual story is more complicated. Nothing in Leonardo’s own writings or actions supports a charge of heresy. His dissections, for example, would not have troubled the church authorities. It is a popular misconception that opening a cadaver was prohibited by the church. Autopsies and dissections were, on the contrary, extremely common in medieval and Renaissance Italy. The first recorded autopsy in Italy took place in 1286, and over the following centuries bodies from all ranks of society were regularly dissected and studied, not just in medical schools but often as a funerary practice performed by the attending physician at the request of the family of the deceased. One of Leonardo’s contemporaries in Florence, the physician Antonio Benivieni, performed autopsies and dissections on at least 160 bodies, cutting up nuns, aristocrats, and children.27

  Nor are Leonardo’s doubts about the operations of Noah’s Flood either heretical or an anticipation, as some have argued, of modern paleontology. Stephen Jay Gould has acknowledged that many of Leonardo’s writings, such as those on fossils, “emit a wondrous whiff of modernity.” However, he goes on to show that in fact Leonardo’s observations about fossils and the Flood “could not have been more squarely Renaissance or late medieval.” Far from anticipating nineteenth-century paleontology, his writings about cockles and mountaintops are actually part of an attempt to prove the medieval idea that the body is a microcosm of the earth.28 His writings therefore correlate breathing with the ebb and flow of the sea, and compare the heartbeat to the astronomical unit of time. We are a very long way from Charles Darwin.

  Potentially more inflammatory than Leonardo’s dissections are some of his comments on astronomy. He was interested in astronomy throughout his life, at one point hoping to produce a telescope to aid his celestial observations: “Construct glasses to see the moon magnified,” reads one of his notes.29 Another of his notebooks contains the following sentence written in uncharacteristically large letters: “Il sole nó si move”—the sun does not move.30 This statement goes unexplained. It might appear to be an indication of his heliocentrism and a challenge to the geocentric view of the universe accepted by the church: the sort of heterodoxy, in other words, that got Galileo admonished by the church authorities in 1616 and then put on trial in 1633. However, the Leonardo scholar Carlo Pedretti has argued that it actually has nothing to do with astronomy but might in fact be a memo referring to a pageant or theatrical performance.31

  Elsewhere Leonardo described—again with no undue explanation—the relative positions of the sun and the earth: “The earth is not in the centre of the sun’s orbit nor at the centre of the universe.”32 Once again Pedretti is skeptical. He points out that Leonardo is actually implying that the earth is not in the center of the sun’s orbit because it is not the only planet in the solar system.33 Likewise, an expert on Leonardo’s scientific thought, Martin Kemp, believes the comment is not a statement of heliocentrism but rather is best understood in terms of his discussion of the centers of gravity of the earth and its sphere of water.34

  Leonardo’s interest in astronomy seems to have been limited to physical observations rather than mathematical calculations. Nothing in his own writings indicates that he attempted—as Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton later did—to measure the orbital motions of heavenly bodies in order to reach conclusions a
bout planetary behavior. Furthermore, his drawings in the Codex Leicester, done in about 1508, reveal that he held entirely traditional views about the structure of the universe.

  Vasari ultimately revised his story about Leonardo’s heretical leanings. Eighteen years later, in his second edition of The Lives of the Artists, he not only dropped all mention of heretical speculations but also stated that Leonardo, as he neared death, “earnestly resolved to learn about the doctrines of the Catholic faith and of the good and holy Christian religion.”35 The reason for this dramatic volte face in Vasari’s account was that in 1566 he met Francesco Melzi, and the faithful Melzi, Leonardo’s longtime companion, presumably both disabused and enlightened him.

  Melzi may have exaggerated Leonardo’s devotion. However, a leading Leonardo scholar has asserted that his Christian beliefs were “basically orthodox.”36 Indeed, Leonardo’s scientific studies, far from raising doubt and skepticism, appear to have deepened his religious beliefs. His anatomical investigations in particular were responsible for his belief in a divine maker. Sectioning cadavers prompted him to describe the human body as a “wondrous instrument invented by the consummate master,” and his anatomical writings urge us to “praise the first builder of such a machine.” No matter how marvelous the human body, “it is as nothing compared to the soul which resides in this dwelling.”37

  Leonardo did not believe that the soul could be anatomized like the corpse, nor could events such as miracles be understood through human reason. Martin Kemp has argued that for Leonardo a sharp distinction needed to be drawn between faith and reason. For Leonardo, God and the soul cannot be comprehended by reason or experiment, but that does not mean that he rejected them: he simply regarded them, Kemp argues, as “rationally indefinable.”38 God was best approached and understood, Leonardo believed, through a study and appreciation of his works. He once wrote, in a defense of painters who worked on religious holidays, that “a true understanding of all the forms found in the works of Nature...is the way to understanding the maker of so many wonderful things and the way to love so great an inventor.”39 Peering into the secrets of nature was therefore an act of worship rather than one of heresy.