Leonardo and the Last Supper

by Ross King

  Along with bread, wine was regularly (and copiously) served with meals, both in the refectory and in the family home, in part because its alcoholic content meant that, unlike water, it was free from bacteria and other pathogens. The average Florentine household went through seven barrels (or more than 2,800 liters) of wine per year, and the annual per capita consumption of wine across the whole of Italy during the Renaissance is estimated to have been between 200 and 415 liters (compared to a paltry 60 liters in present-day Italy).24 Leonardo was certainly careful to keep his own house well stocked with wine: his shopping lists record frequent purchases. One of his notes observed that a particular wine cost one soldo a bottle, and at that rate his household, over the course of three days in 1504, must have downed at least twenty-four bottles. Wine was even on the menu at breakfast chez Leonardo since a note from 1495 proclaimed, “On Tuesday I bought wine for morning.”25

  The clergy drank as abundantly as the rest of the population. The Dominicans, in particular, were well-known for their love of wine. St. Dominic took his wine “austerely diluted,” but his follower and successor, Jordan of Saxony, was more enthusiastic, noting that “wine brings delight and puts a man at his ease.” Soon Dominicans began acquiring a reputation for enjoying too much of this delight. One master of the order complained that in the refectories—where silence was supposed to reign—the friars discussed the merits of their wines through “almost an entire meal,” saying, “This one is like that and the other like that, and so on.”26 These oenophiles could at least console themselves that Aquinas declined to classify sobriety as a virtue and proclaimed “sober drinking” to be good for both body and soul.27

  Leonardo placed at least twelve glasses of wine on the table in The Last Supper, all of them at varying levels (the one sitting in front of Bartholomew is nearly drained: another reason, perhaps, to see the famously high-living Bramante as his model). Like most painters he gave Jesus and the apostles red wine, the better to allude to the blood of Christ. He also showed numerous rolls of bread distributed across the table. No cutlery appears except for several bread knives and the dangerous-looking knife in Peter’s hand, more weapon than utensil. The lack of cutlery is in keeping with the dining habits of the day. Leonardo’s own inventory of his kitchen listed such items as a cauldron, a frying pan, a soup ladle, a jug, glasses and flasks, saltcellars, and a single knife, but no other cutlery.28 The fork was not yet widely in use, though by the Middle Ages the Italians had invented a single-pronged fork for eating lasagna. People therefore ate with their fingers, often from communal plates. A poem on etiquette composed by a Milanese friar reminded them: “The man who is eating must not be cleaning / By scraping with his fingers at any foul part.”29

  In front of Christ there is, besides the half-finished plate of eels, a glass of wine, a roll of bread, and a pomegranate (or perhaps an apple). While Leonardo was interested, like no one before him, in the meticulously realistic depiction of natural objects, he was not above using natural objects symbolically. One of his Madonna and Child paintings, known as the Benois Madonna, shows the infant Christ holding some kind of cruciferous plant, an obvious symbol of the Passion. Another, Madonna of the Yarnwinder, shows the Christ Child holding his mother’s cross-shaped distaff: another allusion to the Passion. The Virgin of the Rocks, meanwhile, is rich in botanical symbols, with Mary’s grace and purity emphasized by flowers such as violets and lilies, and Christ’s Passion foreshadowed by the palm tree and (in the left foreground of the Paris version) the anemone, the red of whose flowers was said to have come from Christ’s dripping blood. Symbolic elements have even been read into the Mona Lisa. Despite the portrait’s apparent naturalism, a scholar has convincingly argued that it represents the triumph of Virtue over Time.30

  Leonardo used some of the food on the table in The Last Supper in a similarly symbolic fashion. The bread and wine allude, obviously, to the body and blood of Christ. The apple (if it is indeed an apple) would indicate that Christ is the “new Adam.” If the fruit is a pomegranate, the iconography is equally appropriate. Pomegranates made frequent appearances in Italian art: in Botticelli’s 1487 Madonna of the Pomegranate, the Christ Child holds a pomegranate that is split open and oozing seeds. The numerous red seeds symbolize not only the blood of Christ but also the many people who come together under the unity of the church.

  Leonardo shows Christ’s hands on the table, near his servings of bread and wine. He appears to be simultaneously indicating with his left hand and reaching for something with his right. This double gesture seems simple and natural, but how are we to interpret it? More to the point, how would the Dominicans have interpreted it? Is Christ about to dip his hand in the dish with Judas, thereby identifying him as the traitor? Or is he reaching for the bread and wine to institute the Eucharist?

  Matthew described the institution of the Eucharist: “And whilst they were at supper, Jesus took bread and blessed and broke and gave to his disciples and said: Take and eat. This is my body. And taking the chalice, he gave thanks and gave to them, saying: Drink all of this. For this is my blood of the new testament, which shall be shed for many unto remission of sins” (Matthew 26:26–8). Mark gave almost the same description, but Luke reversed the order: the wine is taken first, then the bread. The synoptic Gospels also disagree about the exact point in the meal when the institution of the Eucharist takes place. In Matthew and Mark, Christ’s announcement of the impending betrayal precedes the sharing of the body and blood of Christ; for Luke, the sacrament comes first, or perhaps—in a moment of high drama—Jesus actually institutes the Eucharist at the same time as he announces the betrayal: “But yet behold,” says Jesus as he shares out the wine from the chalice, “the hand of him that betrays me is with me on the table.” The statement that he is about to die for his companions is immediately followed, in other words, by the startling declaration that a traitor sits among them.

  A painter of a Last Supper needed to decide how to juggle these varying accounts. Some followed the versions describing Christ sharing the bread and wine in order to show a Last Supper subgenre known as the Communion of the Apostles. The best example is probably the one by Fra Angelico at San Marco: the table has been cleared and Jesus is on his feet, chalice in hand, offering bread to John while the other apostles sit more or less imperturbably in their places or else kneel on the floor (with Mary Magdalene among them), awaiting their turn to take Communion.

  Tellingly, Fra Angelico’s scene was painted not in a refectory but in a monk’s cell. Such scenes, with their obvious sacramental associations, were far more common in chapels than in refectories. Painters of Last Suppers in refectories often followed the Gospel of St. John, which, as we have seen, makes no mention of the institution of the Eucharist. Therefore they emphasized the literal food and wine rather than the body and blood of Christ—so much so that no holy chalice appears in a refectory version of a Last Supper before the seventeenth century.31 Hence the famous “lack” of a chalice in Leonardo’s Last Supper (“There was no chalice in the painting,” declares The Da Vinci Code. “No Holy Grail”).32

  Rather than the apostles taking Communion, painters of refectory Last Suppers might show John asleep on Christ’s bosom or, less often, Jesus offering a sop of bread to Judas. This latter gesture fixes the narrative at a very specific point: the revelation of Judas as the traitor. This way of proceeding was more common in earlier centuries, especially in illuminated manuscripts. It was likewise popular among Sienese painters in the fourteenth century, with Duccio, Pietro Lorenzetti, and Barna da Siena all showing how Christ identified the guilty party by handing a sop of bread to Judas. Yet by the fifteenth century the exact moment in the narrative became more ambiguous and less dramatic as painters such as Castagno and Ghirlandaio dispensed with the motifs of both the dipped bread and the sharing of bread and wine. They merely showed the company assembled at the table for dinner, with John resting on Christ’s breast and Judas seated on the opposite side of the table.

 
Leonardo was adamant that a figure’s actions and expressions needed to convey a clear and specific meaning to the spectator: “A picture or representation of human figures,” he wrote in his treatise on painting, “ought to be done in such a way as that the spectator may easily recognise, by means of their attitudes, the purpose in their minds.”33 What, then, is the purpose of Christ’s mind?

  Many earlier viewers of the painting were in little doubt about which particular moment Leonardo depicted. One of the first copies of Leonardo’s Last Supper ever made, an engraving done about 1500 and attributed to the Milanese artist Giovanni Pietro da Birago, tried to remove any confusion. The engraving boldly added to Leonardo’s scene a caption—a kind of early speech bubble—that reads, “Amen dico vobis, quia unus vestrum me traditurus est.” That is, “Amen I say to you that one of you is about to betray me” (Matthew 26:21).34

  For Giovanni and many who followed, the subject of the painting was Jesus’s announcement of the betrayal and the subsequent agitation among the apostles. Goethe gave his considerable authority to this interpretation, noting that “the whole company is thrown into consternation” by Jesus’s words: “There is one among you that betrays me.”35 Goethe, whose essay appeared in 1817, was influenced by a book on The Last Supper published seven years earlier by Giuseppe Bossi, who restored the painting after it was badly damaged in a flood. For Bossi, the painting was all about human emotion: Leonardo “wished to engage the spirits of all men capable of feeling, men of all times and of every creed.” Bossi was eager to discount the possibility of any religious dimension to the painting. In The Last Supper, he insisted, Leonardo sacrificed nothing to “private opinions or religious ceremonies, which are neither as eternal nor as universal as human feelings.” The universal human feelings in question were, according to Bossi, “friendship and the horror of treason.”36 Leonardo becomes, in this reading, a Shakespeare of the paintbrush, raising ethical questions and capturing universal emotions in a scene of tense drama that has little, if anything, to do with a religious ceremony.

  Readings that emphasized the painting’s secular qualities at the expense of the religious prevailed for many years, particularly in the classrooms of American colleges and universities. A textbook published in the United States in 1935 confidently reassured students that “this celebrated religious painting is not fundamentally religious in character. It represents the psychological observations of the profoundest scientist of his century.”37 In other words, Leonardo was ignoring the religious hocus-pocus of the Gospels and simply using their narrative to offer a scientific and psychological exploration of human behavior that might have done credit to Freud or a good novelist. A generation later, in 1969, the scholar Frederick Hartt published a survey of Italian art in which he likewise argued that Leonardo was “not in the least concerned with the institution of the Eucharist...but with a single aspect of the narrative—the speculation regarding the identity of the betrayer.”38

  The appeal of these sorts of readings is obvious. For one thing, the puzzled reactions to Christ’s announcement are (unlike the institution of the Eucharist) described in all four Gospels. Also, not only do these readings commonsensically explain the twisting bodies, protesting gestures, and surprised expressions in The Last Supper; they also allow the painting to take as its subject one of the most suspenseful and dramatic passages in the entire Bible. Further, these readings fit with our impression of how the Italian Renaissance witnessed painters and sculptors depicting human emotion rather than religious symbolism. There is also the added benefit—especially attractive for a lapsed Protestant like Goethe, who did not consider himself a Christian, let alone a Catholic, or for twentieth-century American educators who needed to keep religion off the curriculum—of doing away with the sacramental component and burnishing the image of Leonardo as “the profoundest scientist of his century.”39

  This consensus eventually began to break down, mainly due to the scholarly exertions of the American art historian Leo Steinberg. In 1973, Steinberg wrote a 113-page article in Art Quarterly advancing erudite and dizzyingly intricate arguments for recognizing the sacramental component.40 Meanwhile other art historians had also begun looking more closely at Christ’s hands, at the bread and wine on the table, and perhaps even at their Bibles, and then reevaluating the action of the painting. The bestselling university textbook on any subject in the last decades of the twentieth century was H. W. Janson’s A History of Art: A Survey of the Major Visual Arts from the Dawn of History to the Present Day. The Russian-born Janson made room for the Eucharist by acknowledging that Leonardo was doing more than simply showing one particular moment in a psychological drama, and by viewing Christ’s hand gestures as an indication of “his main act at the Last Supper, the institution of the Eucharist.”41 Likewise another widely used textbook found in Leonardo’s painting a “brilliant conjunction” of the dramatic “one of you shall betray me” and the liturgical ceremony of the Eucharist.42 By 1983 an art historian and Leonardo expert could write that most authorities on the subject agreed that The Last Supper was “an amalgam of two consecutive situations”—that is, the announcement of the betrayal and the institution of the Eucharist.43

  A number of different things, then, are happening in the work, whose complexity of detail earlier viewers overlooked in their haste to purge the work of religious content. Through both dramatic gestures and subtle feints and allusions Leonardo captured the interweaving of successive events as they unfolded in the chamber in Jerusalem (and in the varying versions given in the Gospels). The announcement of the betrayal is only the most obvious. Jesus has evidently spoken (“Amen I say to you that one of you is about to betray me”) but has now fallen silent. The other apostles react with astonished puzzlement. Leonardo gave the full range of responses provided in the Gospels’ accounts: he showed them asking, “Is it I, Lord?” (as in Matthew and Mark), inquiring “among themselves” (Luke), and looking “upon one another, doubting of whom he spoke” (John). He included, as we have seen, the incident from the Gospel of St. John where Peter beckons John, who, rousing himself from Jesus’s bosom, leans to his right to hear the question: “Who is it of whom he speaks?”

  Leonardo’s notes reveal his undeniable fascination with the dynamics of how people speak, listen, ask questions, or convey emotions with their faces, hands, and bodies. Even so, there is more to the painting than merely the revelation of betrayal and the subsequent responses. Crucially, Jesus is performing other actions besides announcing the presence of the traitor. Leonardo clearly regarded the hands of Christ to be essential to his composition. These hands were so fundamental that Alessandro Carissimi da Parma—a man with, presumably, elegant and expressive hands—was conscripted as a model: evidently not just any pair of hands would do. Christ’s hands are also quite literally central to the composition, since they help form the equilateral triangle at the center of the painting. To ignore these hands is therefore to miss an important aspect of the mural.

  With his right hand Jesus reaches toward the same dish to which Judas, two seats away, is likewise reaching. As they approach the dish, their two hands, skillfully foreshortened and almost mirror images of one another, suggest the line from Matthew: “He that dips his hand with me in the dish, he shall betray me.” Yet the dish, and Judas’s guilty hand, are not the only objects that Jesus’s hand approaches: he is reaching, simultaneously, for the wineglass in front of him. Indeed, two joints of his pinkie and the ball of his third fingers are seen, in yet another bedazzling show of painterly skill, only through the transparency of the wineglass. This display must originally have been so conspicuous and arresting that only the paint loss could have caused earlier viewers to miss the fact that Jesus is about to share the wine with the apostles.

  The left hand of Jesus is likewise in motion, indicating—with much subtlety and restraint in the midst of so much frantic gesticulation—the bread that sits within easy reach. More than that: Jesus is looking directly at the bread, which, despite the
commotion that surrounds him, is the sole object of his gaze. Leonardo was extraordinarily astute in his understanding of visual perception, and through single-point perspective he carefully controlled how the viewer experiences his painting. The perspective draws our attention to the face of Christ at the center of the composition, and Christ’s face, through his down-turned gaze, directs our focus along the diagonal of his left arm to his hand and, therefore, the bread. If Goethe and so many others once missed or ignored this graceful but obvious gesture, to the Dominicans of Santa Maria delle Grazie it would have been overt and unmistakable: the friars would have known they were seeing Christ about to administer the holy bread to his apostles.

  It would have been unusual to say the least for a painter to cover a wall in a Dominican convent with a work that was “not fundamentally religious in character.” While Franciscan art, such as Giotto’s at Assisi, excelled at offering inspiring narratives from biblical and church history, Dominican art was often meant to reinforce doctrinal issues. One such issue in which the Dominicans, as the church’s spiritual enforcers, took an acute interest was transubstantiation. This doctrine was established in 1215 in the opening creed of the Fourth Lateran Council, which stated that the body and blood of Christ “are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine.” Given its philosophical justification later in the century by Aquinas, a Dominican, the sacrament was celebrated after 1264 in the Feast of Corpus Christi. By the end of the thirteenth century, the Eucharist was the church’s most important sacrament. The entire philosophy of the church depended on the miracle of a wafer turning into flesh and wine into blood.44