Leonardo and the Last Supper

by Ross King

  Leonardo’s approach to John was unique. Although one of his earliest sketches for the composition shows John asleep beside Christ, he abandoned the pose, undoubtedly because it detracted from the figure of Christ, whom he wished to isolate and emphasize in the middle of the scene. He therefore deviated from well-established pictorial tradition, illustrating a moment in the narrative that comes a second or two later than all others: having roused himself from Christ’s breast, John leans gracefully toward Peter, his head tipped to the right, the better to hear his urgent question: “Who is it of whom he speaks?” In the copy at Ponte Capriasca the painter inscribed beneath the feet of this character the confident label: S. IOHANES—that is, St. John.

  But is this figure truly meant to represent St. John? Famously, a character in Dan Brown’s 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code sees someone else depicted: “That’s a woman!” exclaims Sophie Neveu after studying a reproduction of the painting and discerning “the hint of a bosom.” “That, my dear,” another character informs her, “is Mary Magdalene.”1

  The “beloved disciple”: the apostle John

  In Brown’s novel, Leonardo has omitted one of the apostles, presumably John, and instead painted Mary Magdalene into the mural. The painting therefore offers testimony that she was present at the Last Supper, that she and Jesus were married or in a sexual relationship, that they conceived a child together, that Jesus asked her (and not Peter) to establish his church, and that Leonardo was, by dint of his leadership of an arcane lodge, the Priory of Sion, privy to this explosive train of secrets. The novel’s claims made it a worldwide bestseller, spawned both an ABC News documentary and a feature film, and prompted the Vatican to appoint the archbishop of Genoa to refute the novel’s “shameful and unfounded errors.”2

  Claims for Mary Magdalene as the lover of Christ date from long before 2003. They were given support by the Gospel of Philip, an anthology of early Christian writings discovered in a cave with other papyrus codices near Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945. The codices were written in Coptic as much as two centuries after Christ’s death and hidden sometime afterward because as Gnostic texts they were deemed heretical, their interpretations of the Christian faith outside the orthodoxy in the process of being established by the church fathers. The Gospel of Philip makes no pretense of having been written by Philip. Its name merely comes from the fact that Philip is the only apostle mentioned in its pages. He is apparently the source for the text’s poignant fable that the wood of the cross on which Jesus was crucified came from a tree planted by his father, Joseph, because he needed wood for his trade as a carpenter.3

  The Gospel of Philip is a mishmash of biblical quotations, cryptic sayings, and bizarre musings such as the one that some people fear the Resurrection “lest they rise naked.” But its author or authors were most concerned with the institution of marriage. References to bridal chambers abound, and the text stipulates that slaves, animals, and “defiled women” should never be admitted into this place of mystery, nor should the bride ever let anyone see her as she “slips out of her bedroom.” As the text primly declares, “No one can know when the husband and the wife have intercourse with one another, except the two of them.”

  In the context of these scattered oddities, Mary Magdalene is mentioned as the “companion” of Christ. “As any Aramaic scholar will tell you,” Sophie Neveu learns, “the word companion, in those days, literally meant spouse.”4 However, the word used in the Gospel of Philip, koinonos, is actually Greek (and the rest of the text is in Coptic, not Aramaic). The word’s compass of meanings (companion, partner, associate) does not necessarily imply a sexual relationship, much less marriage. The word koinonos is used in the Bible to refer to the business partnership of Peter with his fellow fishermen John and James (Luke 5:10).

  Be that as it may, the Gospel of Philip goes on to state that Jesus “loved Mary more than the other disciples and kissed her often on her mouth”—or at least the word “mouth” is assumed by scholars and translators, but at this point (as elsewhere in the codex) there is, tantalizingly, a hole in the papyrus. The text reports that other disciples grew jealous of this intimacy, asking, “Why do you love her more than all of us?” Christ’s answer stresses her greater spiritual insight: “Why do I not love you like her? When a blind man and one who sees are both together in darkness, they are no different from one another. When the light comes, then he who sees will see the light, and he who is blind will remain in darkness.”

  The Gospel of Philip offers no more information on the dealings between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. However, Mary Magdalene was not the only recipient of a kiss from Jesus in the Gnostic Gospels or the only follower for whom greater spiritual insight was claimed. One of the other papyrus codices found at Nag Hammadi, known as The (Second) Apocalypse of James, describes how Jesus kissed his brother James as a prelude to offering him enlightenment. “And he kissed my mouth,” the text reads. “He took hold of me, saying, ‘My beloved! Behold, I shall reveal to you those things that neither the heavens nor their archons have known.’” This codex is supposedly a transcription of James’s preaching in Jerusalem, and one of his most insistent messages was his own privileged position among the disciples. “I am he who received revelation from the Pleroma of Imperishability,” he boasts. “I am he who was first summoned by him who is great, and who obeyed the Lord.” A few lines later he further stresses his unparalleled prominence: “Now again am I rich in knowledge and I have a unique understanding... That which was revealed to me was hidden from everyone.” So in this version, James—in the midst of much apostolic jockeying for position—becomes the truest follower of Christ.

  Leonardo was of course unaware of these Gnostic texts. What he could have known of Mary Magdalene came from the few times she is mentioned in the Bible. Both Matthew (27:55–61) and Mark (15:40–47) state that she was present at the Crucifixion and burial, and all four Gospels describe (with some variation) the incident when she carried the ointment to Christ’s tomb on Easter morning and witnessed the empty tomb.

  Leonardo must also have known something of Mary Magdalene from the detailed treatment she receives in The Golden Legend, a work that offered a more interesting and significant role to her than merely the recipient of Christ’s kisses. The Golden Legend was a collection of saints’ lives compiled in the thirteenth century by the Dominican archbishop of Genoa. Hugely popular among both the clergy and the laity, it was second only to the Bible in terms of its readership. It describes a Mary Magdalene who enjoys a very close relationship with Christ and plays an important part in his apostolic mission. The book’s author, Jacobus de Voragine, followed the example of Pope Gregory the Great (540–604) in creating a compelling character by combining the Mary Magdalene described (with extreme brevity) in the Bible with a number of other women in the New Testament, some of them named Mary (such as Mary of Bethany, the sister of Lazarus) and others anonymous, including the woman who anoints Jesus with ointment and wipes his feet with her hair. He also adds into the mix Mary of Egypt, a repentant prostitute from Alexandria who lived as a hermit in the desert, covered only by her hair. Mary of Egypt was a figure from a much later date, having died in about 421—but Voragine blithely assimilates her into his composite character of Mary Magdalene.

  Voragine begins his tale by giving Mary Magdalene an impressive (and obviously false) pedigree: she came from a wealthy and noble family, he says, with a castle near Nazareth named Magdalo. As a young woman she gave herself over to sensual delights, for which Jesus forgave her, showing her “many marks of love,” such as having her act as his housekeeper when he was on the road. He counted her “among his closest familiars,” and took her side when her sister, Martha, denounced her as lazy or when Judas called her wasteful. The attachment was indeed a sentimental one: “Seeing her weep he could not contain his tears.”5

  According to Voragine’s account, Mary’s reputation increased after the death of Christ. She was entrusted by Peter to a man named Maximin (a figure not mentioned
in the Bible: Voragine confuses a fourth-century bishop of Trier with Maximinus, one of the seventy apostles mentioned in Luke 10:1). The pair of them, along with her sister, Martha, and brother, Lazarus, were persecuted by villains who tried to kill them by the cruel and unusual expedient of putting them out to sea on a rudderless ship. The ship miraculously fetched up in Marseilles, where Mary won the locals away from idolatry, becoming a miracle worker and gathering disciples about her. At the height of her powers she retired to live in an empty wilderness, all alone except for attending angels who each day carried her up to heaven to eat manna and listen to celestial music. Following thirty years of this idyllic regime, she died and was interred in a church in Aix-en-Provence, from which, in the time of Charlemagne, her bones were taken to the abbey of Vézelay. Here she continued to work miracles, raising a knight from the dead, letting a blind man see, and helping a duke of Burgundy conceive an heir.

  Thanks to these relics, Vézelay became one of the most important pilgrimage destinations in France, and a new abbey needed to be constructed to accommodate the hordes of pilgrims. However, toward the end of the thirteenth century the Dominicans at the church of Saint-Maximin in Aix claimed that they, not the Benedictines in Vézelay, possessed her true relics. Their claim was based on the opening of an ancient sarcophagus in the church in 1279, roughly two decades after Voragine popularized Mary Magdalene in The Golden Legend. The authorities confirmed the relics were indeed hers, with the Dominican inquisitor Bernard Gui recounting in his chronicle how a marvelous odor issued from her tomb, “as if an apothecary shop of sweet spices had been opened,” and how a tender green shoot—what was later described as a palm frond—was sprouting on her tongue.6

  The Dominicans henceforth became the guardians of Mary Magdalene’s relics. She was one of their most important saints, in part because she supposedly spread Christ’s message in southern France, where Dominic evangelized in the early years of the thirteenth century. In fact, it was on her feast day in 1206 that Dominic received a vision of a ball of fire above a shrine to Mary Magdalene on a hill outside the village of Prouille. Taking this vision as a sign from God, he opened the first Dominican convent on the site a few months later, appealing for the patronage of Mary Magdalene. She was declared the patroness of the Dominican Order itself in 1297, and her feast day was observed with such zeal that anyone failing to observe it properly risked a flogging.7

  Given such veneration, the Dominicans of Santa Maria delle Grazie would not have regarded the appearance in a Last Supper of Mary Magdalene—if Leonardo were to put her there—as unusual or heretical. There was even a precedent for including Mary Magdalene among the company at the Last Supper. Fra Angelico placed her prominently in a Last Supper fresco at the Dominican convent of San Marco in Florence, showing her kneeling and haloed in the room with the twelve apostles. The sight of Mary Magdalene among the apostles did not cause disquiet or disturbance given her supposed apostolic career in France and the title by which she was known in the Middle Ages—apostolorum apostola, apostle of the apostles—a name given to her because, as the Gospels made clear, she was the first witness of the Resurrection and the one whom Christ asked to spread the news.8

  Leonardo would have seen numerous images of Mary Magdalene during his youth in Florence. Most striking was Donatello’s wooden statue in the baptistery, a harrowing portrait that shows her with a gaunt face, sunken eyes, a protruding sternum, and long, matted hair covering her emaciated body. Donatello was basing his depiction on a life of Mary Magdalene composed by a Dominican friar in the middle of the fourteenth century. Emphasizing her extreme penitence, this biography described how she physically abused herself after giving up prostitution, clawing her face and legs until they bled, tearing out clumps of hair, and striking her face with her fists and her breasts with a stone. At the end of this violent self-laceration she cried, “Take the reward, O my body, of the vain pleasures thou has frequented.”9

  Donatello’s version was extreme, but the dominant image of Mary Magdalene in the fifteenth century was as a penitent.10 She was the patron saint of prostitutes, and her image often adorned the charitable institutions in Florence and elsewhere that gave refuge to reformed prostitutes. She was also, as a completely rehabilitated sinner, an image for all sinners to contemplate, not just reformed prostitutes—an example of how even the most degraded could recover purity of heart and find salvation. Such was her rehabilitation that she was regarded by the church (perhaps unexpectedly given her career as a prostitute) as one of the virgin saints. The Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas explained this transformation: “A person who has lost virginity by sin recovers by repenting, not the matter of virginity but the purpose of virginity.” A Luca Signorelli fresco in the cathedral in Orvieto, Retinue of Chaste Virgins—a project on which Dominican friars served as theological advisers—duly depicted her as the leader of the virgin saints. A far cry from Donatello’s haggard penitent, she has golden hair and a rose-colored gown.11

  The Communion of the Apostles by Fra Angelico, with Mary Magdalene kneeling in the lower left

  By the 1490s, then, Mary Magdalene had a rich history and a wide range of meanings: prostitute, close companion of Christ, “apostle of the apostles,” patron saint of the Dominicans, miracle worker, virgin saint, and, most of all, reformed sinner—an example of how fallen humanity could redeem itself, and how even the most lowly and despised could be called by Christ to an apostolic mission. She was prolifically represented in frescoes and altar-pieces. There could be nothing controversial or theologically untoward about her appearance in a painting showing Christ and his apostles.

  That much said, did Leonardo in fact omit John from his Last Supper and substitute Mary Magdalene in his place? Does the figure traditionally identified as John betray, as Sophie Neveu exclaims, the “hint of a bosom” and—perhaps—other female features that require us to identify her as a woman, not a man?

  One reason for the supposed cameo by Mary Magdalene was removed, under oath, during a corruption trial in a French court, where Leonardo’s role as grandmaster of the shadowy “Priory of Sion” was revealed as a crude hoax. The Priory of Sion was supposedly a secret society founded in Jerusalem in 1099 to safeguard documents proving that Mary Magdalene gave birth to Christ’s baby. The descendants of Christ went on to found the Merovingian dynasty of Frankish kings, who ruled most of what is now France (and large chunks of Germany) between the fifth and eighth centuries. In fact, the Priory of Sion was invented in the 1950s by Pierre Plantard, an anti-Semite, hoaxer, and fantasist who believed himself to be the true king of France and the latest in a long line of descendants of Christ and Mary Magdalene. Leonardo got dragged into the tale because his name—along with those of Sir Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, and a corrupt French businessman named Roger-Patrice Pelat—was inscribed on a list of “grandmasters” that Plantard composed and then stashed in the Bibliothèque nationale. In 1993, Plantard admitted his forgery in French court before an unamused judge.12

  If Leonardo is not the custodian of insider knowledge about Mary Magdalene’s secret nuptials, Christ’s Gallic descendants, or Pierre Plantard’s right to the French throne, what reason might he have had to show her in The Last Supper? Or, if indeed he depicted her, why disguise her? He could, like Fra Angelico, simply have shown her—the apostle of the apostles—among the others. If the Dominicans at San Marco in Florence did not object to her appearance in Fra Angelico’s depiction, why should the Dominicans at Santa Maria delle Grazie protest, especially given their veneration of her?

  A clue to the identity of the mysterious figure beside St. Peter is undoubtedly his or her gender. In The Da Vinci Code, she is unambiguously a woman. “Leonardo was skilled at painting the difference between the sexes,” a character explains to Sophie.13 On the contrary: Leonardo was skilled at blurring the differences between the sexes. He was fond of producing mysteriously androgynous figures: not only the beautiful adolescent (probably based on Salai) who appears almost obsessively in hi
s sketches, but also figures such as Uriel, the angel kneeling on the right in his Virgin of the Rocks. For this painting Leonardo drew on a fourteenth-century biography of John the Baptist by Domenico Cavalca that described how as a child John was living under the protection of the angel Uriel when he met the Christ Child in the wilderness. Leonardo’s Uriel is a gloriously enigmatic creature who defies easy gender categorization. Judging from the beautiful silver-point drawing of Uriel’s head, Leonardo’s model was almost certainly female. In the two versions of The Virgin of the Rocks he heightened and emphasized the angel’s feminine qualities with golden curls and delicate features. The end result is head-scratchingly ambiguous: a young woman or androgynously beautiful adolescent male? Leonardo was deliberately coy about “the difference between the sexes.”

  Equally ambiguous is the figure in one of his last paintings, St. John the Baptist. The subtle shading of the Baptist’s features gives soft tones to his smooth, feminized face, with its wide, come-hither eyes and the sphinxlike smile. Many viewers have been disturbed by this remarkable-looking figure. “Is it even a man?” asked Hippolyte Taine. “It is a woman, the body of a woman, or the body of a beautiful ambiguous adolescent.”14 Perhaps most alarmed by this she-male was Bernard Berenson. The great connoisseur could not understand “why this fleshy female should pretend to be the virile sun-dried Baptist... And why did it smirk and point up and touch its breasts?”15

  Leonardo’s St. John the Baptist

  The model for this mysteriously leering séducteur may have been Salai, then in his thirties and still, apparently, possessed of powers of both attraction and repulsion. Salai has been advanced as the model for another of Leonardo’s bewitching portraits: the art investigator Silvano Vinceti claims he was the model for the Mona Lisa. Vinceti, the man who discovered Caravaggio’s remains in 2010, based his theory on supposed similarities between the faces of the Baptist and the subject of the Mona Lisa, noting that Leonardo often used Salai as a model, and that he “certainly inserted” some of Salai’s characteristics into Lisa’s features.16 Vinceti’s theory is seriously undermined by a lack of visual evidence: we do not actually know exactly what Salai looked like. There are no certain sketches of him, merely drawings of a ringleted youth that it is reasonably assumed were modeled by the young man. However, it should be noted that ringleted youths appear in Leonardo’s sketches before Salai’s arrival in his studio.