Leonardo and the Last Supper

by Ross King

  In our secular age, with altarpieces removed from their original locations in chapels and hung on the walls of public museums, paintings can easily be seen for their artistic qualities alone. Italians during the fifteenth century certainly appreciated and celebrated these aesthetic values, but works of art also had another dimension for them. Paintings were invested with holiness because venerating an image of Christ or the Virgin was, according to the Council of Nicaea, tantamount to venerating Christ or the Virgin themselves, who could then intercede on behalf of the praying community. Giotto’s monumental altarpiece, the Ognissanti Madonna, is nowadays celebrated—quite rightly—as a landmark in the history of art because of its convincing illusion of depth and its realistic-looking treatment of facial features and bodily form. However, it was originally painted in the first decade of the fourteenth century not for purely formal and aesthetic reasons, but rather, primarily, to invite the intercession of the Virgin on behalf of the local religious community of Umiliati monks. Likewise, Leonardo’s Last Supper was created not for the art historians and tour groups of a later, secular age, but for a band of Dominican friars who ritually commemorated Christ’s sacrifice through the celebration of the Eucharist.

  How Leonardo’s contemporaries and immediate successors viewed his works for something more than their aesthetic qualities can be seen in the case of his Virgin of the Rocks. The altarpiece was believed to possess, like many religious paintings, special powers of intercession. During an outbreak of plague in 1576 the local people turned to Leonardo’s altarpiece (then installed in San Francesco Grande) to save them, dedicating special Masses of devotion to the image. The qualities they believed would save them were not those we appreciate today—the dramatic scenery and the sensitive handling of light and shade—but rather the fact that Leonardo had depicted the Virgin Mary.45

  There is another example. In 1501, the brutal warlord Cesare Borgia was threatening to invade Florence. At the same time, a Leonardo cartoon featuring the Virgin and her mother, St. Anne, was unveiled in Florence, causing a sensation. When it was exhibited, according to Vasari, “a crowd of men and women, young and old,...flocked there, as if they were attending a great festival, to gaze in amazement at the marvels he had created.”46 The temptation is to compare these huge crowds to those who swarm up the steps of today’s museums to gaze in amazement at blockbuster Leonardo exhibitions. Yet Frederick Hartt has pointed out that in Florence these crowds may well have been drawn to the cartoon less for reasons of artistic appreciation than because St. Anne was considered to be the special protectress of the city. These enthusiasts, Hartt writes, could have been “less a testament to Leonardo’s genius than an invocation to this mighty guardian against the menace of a new and pitiless master.”47 Religion, not art, was the major attraction. St. Anne and the Virgin were the draw, not Leonardo.

  One other reason makes it inconceivable that Leonardo should not have included a sacramental or religious aspect to his Last Supper. Lodovico Sforza intended to turn Santa Maria delle Grazie into a shrine for himself and his family. By 1497, his plans for a Sforza mausoleum had suddenly assumed a tragic urgency.

  The failure of Maximilian’s Italian expedition in the autumn of 1496 was the first of Lodovico’s misfortunes, the earliest indication that Il Moro no longer held the fate of the world in his hands. The second blow fell even before Maximilian left Italian soil. The emperor was on his way to Pavia, where the delights of Lodovico’s banqueting table awaited him, when news reached him that there had been a death in Il Moro’s family, and that more sober observations were in order.

  Besides his two sons from Beatrice, Lodovico was the father of at least two illegitimate children. At the end of 1496 his latest mistress, Lucrezia Crivelli, was pregnant, while two earlier concubines—Bernardina de Corradis and Cecilia Gallerani—had each given him a child. Cecilia’s son, born in 1491, was grandly christened Cesare Sforza Visconti and celebrated in sonnets by Lodovico’s court poets. He lived with his mother, who had gracefully retired to one of Milan’s grandest homes, the Palazzo del Verme. Bernardina’s child, a girl named Bianca, born about 1482, received even greater marks of affection. Legitimized by her father, she became great friends with Beatrice and was betrothed at a young age to the dashing Galeazzo Sanseverino. She even had her portrait done by Leonardo, a chalk sketch on vellum produced on the occasion of her marriage.48 She and Galeazzo were married in the summer of 1496, but the following November, aged only thirteen or fourteen, she died at Vigevano, probably from complications of a pregnancy.

  Bianca was buried in the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, her death plunging Lodovico’s court into mourning. Now heavy with child, Beatrice made frequent visits to the Dominican church to pray at the tomb of her beloved young companion. After one such visit, on 2 January 1497, she returned to the Castello and was taken ill. Delivered that evening of a stillborn child, a boy, she died shortly after midnight. Her death was attended by suitably frightening omens: the sky above the Castello blazed with flames and the walls of her enclosed garden toppled to the ground. “And from that time,” wrote a Venetian chronicler, “the duke began to be sore troubled, and to suffer great woes, having up to that time lived very happily.” Or as another witness put it, the death of the duchess meant that “everything went into ruins, and the Court was changed from a happy paradise into a gloomy hell.”49

  Beatrice’s body was taken from the Castello by pallbearers who included ambassadors from both Maximilian and the king of Spain. “We bore her to Santa Maria delle Grazie,” the ambassador from Ferrara wrote to Beatrice’s father, “attended by an innumerable company of monks and nuns and priests.” In the streets, he reported, there was “the greatest lamentation that was ever seen.”50 At Santa Maria delle Grazie her body was carried up the steps of the high altar, under Bramante’s dome, where she was laid on a bier draped with a golden cloth bearing the arms of the House of Sforza. She was interred next to Bianca, while Cristoforo Solari was commissioned to carve her tomb from Carrara marble.

  The beautification of Santa Maria delle Grazie henceforth became an even higher priority for Lodovico. New altars were dedicated in honor of St. Louis and St. Beatrice, the patron saints of Lodovico and his late duchess. Solari was also engaged to carve reliefs for the high altar, and the grieving Lodovico lavished gifts on the Dominican convent: chalices, a jewel-encrusted crucifix, several candelabra, an embroidered altar cloth, illuminated choir books with jeweled bindings, and even a new organ. He planned to convene a team of architectural experts to design a facade for the church. And Lodovico suddenly became anxious for Leonardo, working only a few yards away from Beatrice’s last resting-place, to complete his painting in the refectory.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Language of the Hands

  There is no reason to doubt that Beatrice’s death caused the “greatest lamentation” in Milan. The Italians were notably demonstrative in their grief. The death of a loved one might cause bereaved friends and relatives to wail in the streets, tear apart their clothing, beat their breasts, and tear out their hair by the roots. Such intemperate displays were not limited to women: men, too, gathered in public to weep openly and chant elegies together. These spectacles eventually became so extreme that in the Middle Ages a number of cities introduced legislation to prohibit such violent histrionics. Spies were sent to funerals and the grief stricken could face heavy fines and sometimes beatings. But the authorities were fighting a losing battle. Emotional outbursts were, it seems, part of the culture. Long after the legislation was enacted, Petrarch was still complaining about the “loud and indecent wailing” of people grieving in the streets.1

  Italians were equally demonstrative in their other emotions, and Goethe believed this habit of impassioned expression was a boon for Leonardo when he came to paint The Last Supper. “In this nation,” he wrote, “the whole body is animated, every member, every limb participates in any expression of feeling, of passion, and even of thought.” Furthermore, the Italians h
ad a “national peculiarity” to use distinctive hand gestures and body language when they spoke: a resource that was, he believed, obvious to an Italian like Leonardo when he came to paint The Last Supper.2

  Leonardo was fascinated, as no one before him, by the expressive possibilities of the human hand. Among the studies for his unfinished Adoration of the Magi are two sheets of paper covered with drawings of hands in various poses sketched from every conceivable angle. The hands in question are probably those of a musician, perhaps one of Leonardo’s friends such as Atalante Migliorotti (to whom he supposedly gave music lessons): a left hand, at any rate, is poised gracefully on the neck of what looks to be a musical instrument. Likewise, one of Leonardo’s notebooks features a drawing of a woman playing a lute, her left hand adeptly positioned on the fingerboard.3 Watching his own hands or those of his students holding the long bow of a lira da braccio, or dancing along the instrument’s fingerboard, may have awakened him to the hand’s possibilities for beauty and expression.

  Leonardo’s sketches of hands in various poses

  Other pairs of hands also fascinated Leonardo. When he first arrived in Milan, he must have met Cristoforo de’ Predis, the father of the brothers Ambrogio and Evangelista. Cristoforo was a successful artist in his own right, a talented miniaturist who had illustrated books for Galeazzo Maria Sforza. He was also a deaf-mute. Leonardo, with his typically insatiable curiosity, observed how deaf-mutes like Cristoforo were able to communicate by using both facial expressions and “the movements of their hands.” He urged young painters to study “the motions of the dumb” in order to understand how best to convey thoughts or emotions. He observed how deaf people could understand what was said to them through their ability to interpret the hand gestures of a speaker: “Thus it is with a deaf and dumb person who, when he sees two men in conversation—although he is deprived of hearing—can nevertheless understand, from the attitudes and gestures of the speakers, the nature of their discussion.” For Leonardo, a person looking at a painting (which he calls “dumb poetry”) was like a deaf person studying an animated conversation: he could understand what was happening through the language of gesture.4 Paintings were a sort of dumb show, in other words, whereby the figures were to signal “the purpose in their minds” through their body language and hand gestures.

  Hand gestures and facial expressions abound in Leonardo’s paintings, but nowhere more so than in The Last Supper. A wide array of gestures and actions suggest the apostles’ shocked, puzzled, angry, or sorrowful reactions to Christ’s announcement. The painting is a brouhaha of pointing and gesticulation. “What a pack of vehement, gesticulating, noisy foreigners they are,” Bernard Berenson once complained.5 Philip’s hands touch his breast, James the Greater’s are thrown wide, while John’s are demurely clasped together. James the Lesser touches Peter’s shoulder, and Peter in turn touches the shoulder of John with one hand, while in the other he clutches a knife. Andrew, Matthew, and Simon all open or extend their hands in gestures that can be interpreted as—well, what exactly?

  Several of the apostles perform gestures whose significance is far from apparent. Some are downright puzzling and ambiguous. What, for example, are we to make of the hand gestures of Thaddeus, the apostle second from the right? His right hand cups the air, thumb extended, perhaps pointing at someone in an accusative jerk, while his left hand rests somewhat awkwardly on the table. Over the years, various commentators have tried to explain Thaddeus’s gesture. One claimed the thumb points to Christ as he vows that he, Thaddeus, is not the guilty party. Another maintained that Thaddeus is telling Simon (on his left) to trust the report of Matthew (on his right), whom he indicates with his thumb. Yet another viewer of the painting believed Thaddeus was “pointing his thumb surreptitiously at Judas,” thereby identifying him as the culprit.

  The apostle Thaddeus

  One thumb, three different targets—and each reading imputes a different purpose. Goethe, meanwhile, did not believe Thaddeus was pointing at anyone. Instead, he is about to strike the back of his right hand into the palm of his left, a distinctive gesture whose meaning, Goethe says, is clear: “Did I not tell you so! Did I not always suspect it!”6 So Thaddeus, in these interpretations, is doing everything from protesting his innocence to saying, “I told you so!”

  As Goethe noted, by using hand gestures Leonardo was capitalizing on what we have come to think of as a national trait. The great German poet, fluent in Italian and steeped in the culture, claimed the Italians had at their disposal an entire repertoire of hand gestures. By a “varied position and motion of the hands” they could signify such things as: “What do I care!” or “This is a rogue!” or “Attend to this, ye that hear me!”7 Undoubtedly Italians use hand gestures and body language more creatively and prolifically than other European cultures. In 1832 a priest and curator from Naples named Andrea de Jorio published La Mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano (Gestural Expression of the Ancients in the Light of Neapolitan Gesturing). De Jorio wished to see how the expressive gestures of a living population—namely, his fellow Neapolitans—might help explain the gestures and postures seen in ancient statues, vases, and frescoes such as those found near Naples at Herculaneum and Pompeii. He believed a “perfect resemblance” existed between the gesturing of his fellow Neapolitans and that of their distant ancestors buried under Vesuvius’s pyroclastic flow.8

  What de Jorio produced was an illustrated catalog of gestures and expressions that documents the wide repertoire used by Neapolitans (and by Italians more generally) not only in the nineteenth century but—as he suspected—back and forth across the centuries. Some are still practiced to-day, such as the mano cornuto, or “horn hand,” in which the middle and ring fingers are held down with the index finger and pinkie extended. Or the beseeching gesture where the palm is turned upward and fingers and thumb are extended and joined in a point—which means, de Jorio explained, “What are you talking about?” He also described the familiar gesture he called negativa: the outside tips of the fingers are held upright under the chin and then pushed violently forward, indicating that the subject “wishes to distance his head from whatever is offered to him or proposed that does not please him.” Other gestures are familiar not only today but also from examples in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The obscene mano in fica or “fig hand”—thumb protruding between the middle and index finger of a fist—appears both in Dante’s Inferno and on the vault of the Sistine Chapel, where one of Michelangelo’s irreverent putti performs it.9

  A page from Andrea de Jorio’s treatise on hand gestures

  Yet de Jorio makes sober reading for anyone hoping to decipher the purpose in the minds of the apostles in Leonardo’s Last Supper. The hand gestures of Italians are not, apparently, as clear-cut as Goethe believed. De Jorio discovered that knowing the purpose of someone’s mind through hand gestures was no easy business. A single gesture could have many different significations. Even the mano infica turned out to have three different interpretations: it could mean the subject was warding off evil, or dishing out an insult, or making “a kind of offensive or impertinent invitation.” Thirteen different gestures meant “no,” while the mano cornuto possessed, by de Jorio’s reckoning, no fewer than fifteen different meanings: everything from defending someone against an evil spell to threatening to gouge out their eyes. Someone sitting with their fingers interlaced was either feeling sad or else trying to cast a spell on a woman giving birth.e Even a simple gesture such as raising the hands in the air had numerous potential meanings: acclamation, ridicule, a request, a dismissal, an entreaty, a surprise.

  There are, wrote de Jorio, “various small modifications in the gesture that determine its particular meaning in each case.”10 The meaning of a particular action of the hand was understood only in terms of the positioning of the entire body, the facial expression, and the direction of the glance. Gesture, stressed de Jorio, always needed context, including that of the conversation itself. Even the slightest change i
n the orientation of a hand could radically change the meaning of a particular gesture.

  The context for the gestures in The Last Supper is, of course, a religious one, because the mural illustrates a story from the Gospels, and because its initial audience was a group of Dominican friars. These friars were the ones to whom, above all, the actions of the apostles needed to speak.

  Bodily movement was vital to the vocation of the Dominicans. They were preachers, and as public speakers who addressed the masses in city squares they understood, as few others did, the value of gesture and movement. Numerous books on rhetoric and the art of preaching instructed them in how to use gesture to enhance their sermons. The most famous and influential of them, Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, instructed speakers to use “the language of the hands” to communicate their thoughts, emotions, and intentions.11 When Leonardo praised “good orators” as an example for young painters to study because they “accompany their words with gestures of their hands and arms,” he was probably telling his students to watch—among other things—the sermons of Dominican friars.12 Although Leonardo likely never saw him speak, the most electrifying orator of the fifteenth century was a Dominican, Girolamo Savonarola, who expressed himself with “lively and almost violent gesticulations.”13

  Gesture also had a more private significance for the Dominicans, serving them in the cloister as well as in the piazza. Because monks and friars were obliged to observe silence for many hours of the day, including in the refectory, a language of gesture was developed (initially by the Benedictines and Cistercians) to help them communicate. Among the several hundred signs were ones for affirmation (“lift your arm gently...so that the back of the hand faces the beholder”), demonstration (“a thing one has seen may be noted by opening the palm of the hand in its direction”), and grief (“pressing the breast of the palm with the hand”). Individual gestures were even developed in some monasteries to refer to bread, fish, and vegetables.14 Like deaf-mutes, therefore, the Dominicans would have been adept at miming their intentions and emotions, a spectacle Leonardo surely must have witnessed during his time at Santa Maria delle Grazie.