by Ross King
The Dominicans used ritualized movements to communicate with saints and martyrs as well as with their fellow friars. An illustrated Dominican prayer manual, De modo orandi, taught novices how to use physical gestures to improve their prayers and meditations. The treatise maintained that specific bodily postures, based on those used by St. Dominic, could be used to induce certain psychological states. All of Dominic’s gestures were carefully described and examined: “Sometimes he would hold his hands out, open before his breast, like an open book... At other times, he joined his hands and held them tightly fastened together in front of his eyes, hunching himself up.” Humility he achieved with a bow, ecstasy by standing with his hands joined together and raised over his head, and penitence through self-flagellation. Many of these postures found their way into paintings.15 The Dominicans of Santa Maria delle Grazie were an audience highly literate in the language of gesture. What, then, might they have made of Leonardo’s gesticulating apostles?
One of the simplest hand gestures in Leonardo’s Last Supper is performed by John, who clasps his hands on the table, fingers interlaced. As de Jorio pointed out, this gesture, which he called mani in pettine (“comb hands”), can be used to indicate sorrow. Leonardo himself noted that the gesture could be used by painters to indicate sorrow and weeping: “As to types of weeping,” he wrote, “one shows despair, another is moderate; some are tearful, some shout, some weep their face to heaven with their hands held low, their fingers intertwined.”16
Leonardo’s study for the hands of the apostle John
John was often shown by painters in postures of grief, standing or kneeling at the foot of the cross with his hands clasped together. For example, Masaccio depicted him performing exactly these gestures in his Holy Trinity in the Dominican basilica of Santa Maria Novella, a work certainly known to Leonardo (and probably to many of the Dominicans in Santa Maria delle Grazie). According to the Gospel of St. John, the beloved disciple was one of the few who, with Mary and Mary Magdalene, “stood by the cross of Jesus” (19:25) in his time of dying. Scenes of the Crucifixion therefore showed John in a posture of mourning, usually with his hands clasped and fingers intertwined in the mani in pettine. That, in fact, is exactly how Giovanni da Montorfano depicted him on the opposite wall of the refectory in Santa Maria delle Grazie: a blond, beardless figure who stands beside the cross with his brow knit and his fingers interlaced. His head is tipped to his left, making him a kind of mirror image of Leonardo’s John on the opposing wall. Anyone in doubt about the figure sitting beside Christ in Leonardo’s painting need only to turn around to see his double in Montorfano’s Crucifixion.
A number of the other gestures in Leonardo’s mural likewise allude to forthcoming episodes in the Passion. Perhaps the most obvious is the one performed by Peter, whose right arm is held akimbo in the posture de Jorio calls the mano infianco—a gesture of indignation.17 In his hand Peter holds a knife, a weapon whose pointed blade is a good eight inches long. Ghirlandaio showed Peter with a similar knife in his Last Supper in the church of Ognissanti, finished in 1480 while Leonardo was still in Florence. In both cases the knife foretells the event that occurred later that same evening when Peter, defending Jesus from “a great multitude with swords and clubs,” sliced off the ear of Malchus, the servant of the high priest (Matthew 26:47). In placing the knife in Peter’s hand, Leonardo revealed his familiarity not only with the Gospels—all four of which tell the story of the severed ear—but also with Ghirlandaio’s painting.
Peter’s knife points, quite literally, to something else: its tip is aimed at Bartholomew, the apostle who stands at the left end of the table.18 As we have seen, saints were often identified by the symbols of their martyrdom. Montorfano, for example, gave clues to help identify the various saints in his fresco: St. Peter of Verona (who was murdered by Cathars) has a bloody sword buried in his skull, while St. Catherine of Siena (who took out her “stony” heart and exchanged it for Christ’s loving one) is identifiable by the disembodied heart she holds in her right hand. Bartholomew’s attribute was the knife with which he was flayed alive by Armenian barbarians (a martyrdom that explains why he is the patron saint of both Armenia and skinners). Michelangelo would later depict Bartholomew on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel clutching both a knife and his own flayed skin. Leonardo, by showing the knife, foretold not only Bartholomew’s gruesome death but also the agonies and tribulations that awaited the apostles (many of whom would be martyred) as they witnessed to Christ “in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and Samaria, and even to the uttermost part of the earth” (Acts 1:8).
Another hand gesture that anticipates future events is the one performed by Thomas, who, as he leaves his place at the table and appears from behind James the Greater, points his right index finger into the air. In Leonardo’s art a pointing finger is often, like the smile, an enigmatic gesture. Uriel in The Virgin of the Rocks (Louvre version) and the mysterious creature in his John the Baptist both point with their index fingers. Uriel directs our gaze to the infant John the Baptist, while in the latter painting the Baptist points upward, presumably an allusion to his recognition of the Messiah foretold in prophecy.
Thomas’s finger in The Last Supper, likewise pointing upward, is more clear-cut, because if any man in history is defined by his finger, it is surely Thomas. Informed by the other apostles that they had seen the risen Christ, Thomas demanded empirical proof. “Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails,” he informed them, “and put my finger into the place of the nails, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” Eight days later, Christ entered the same room as Thomas and closed the door behind him. “Put in your finger hither,” he instructed him (John 20:25, 27). Such was the importance of Thomas’s finger that in the fourth century its relic was brought from Jerusalem by St. Helena and placed in the basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in Rome.
Leonardo knew very well the story of Thomas’s doubt and his probing finger. For the entirety of the time that he studied and worked with Verrocchio, the master was designing and casting the life-size bronze sculpture group The Incredulity of Saint Thomas for a niche in the exterior wall of Orsanmichele in Florence. Around the time Leonardo entered his workshop, Verrocchio received the commission from the Università della Mercanzia, the commercial tribunal that presided over all of the Florentine guilds. Leonardo’s father, Ser Piero, who rented rooms from the Mercanzia and served as their notary, may even have negotiated the contract. The Mercanzia’s motto—“No judgment should be given until truth is tangibly manifest”—meant that Thomas, the apostle who wanted truth to manifest itself, seemed the saint most appropriate to represent the inquisitorial members of the tribunal, and indeed Tuscan town halls often used Thomas as a symbol of justice.19 Verrocchio’s entire sculpture is about a hand gesture, and he showed Thomas, encouraged by Christ, about to probe the wound with his finger.
The apostle Thomas
If Thomas was an appropriate saint for the Mercanzia, he was likewise, as someone who demanded ocular and tactile proof, and who “anatomized” the resurrected Christ with his finger, an apt saint for Leonardo, who accepted nothing on faith, who needed to probe and feel and see for himself. For Leonardo as for Thomas, seeing was believing. “All our knowledge has its foundation in our sensations,” he declared in one manuscript. In another: “All science will be vain and full of errors which is not born of experience, mother of all certainty. True sciences are those which experience has caused to enter through the senses.”20
“Every painter paints himself”: if Leonardo used his own features in The Last Supper, as Gasparo Visconti claimed, then Thomas, in terms of personal identification, would have been the most attractive candidate. Visconti claimed that Leonardo represented not only his own features but also his own “actions and ways”—that is, his gestures and expressions. The pointing finger was such a well-known Leonardo trademark by 1511 that Raphael included it in the supposed portrait of the painter as Plato in The School of Athens
(which features Bramante as Euclid and Michelangelo as Heraclitus). This Vatican fresco shows a bearded and balding Plato replicating the gesture of Leonardo’s Thomas by pointing skyward with his index finger. Raphael was certainly playful with his portraits and allusions. His fresco gently mocked the gloomy, truculent Michelangelo by means of the figure of Heraclitus—a famously cantankerous philosopher—while at the same time paying tribute to his talents by imitating his powerful new style. In similar fashion he may have been self-consciously duplicating both Leonardo’s style (the total conception of The School of Athens, according to Janson, “suggests the spirit of Leonardo’s Last Supper”) and one of the signature gestures of his art.21
The difficulty of ascribing Leonardo’s features to Thomas is that no drawing exists that would allow us to see the original conception, which often differed (as the example of Bartholomew shows) from the end result on the wall of the refectory. Also, while Thomas is far from ugly, revealing large eyes and a fine Greek nose, he is hardly the paragon of beauty rhapsodized by later writers—though neither, it must be said, is the solemn old codger in The School of Athens. Thomas is one of Leonardo’s nutcracker men, arguably toothless, complete with a down-turned mouth, beetling lower lip and protuberant jaw. However, the paint loss in the mural makes it difficult to determine the finer details of his original appearance. Earlier restorers of the painting were guilty of coarsening and exaggerating the features of several of the apostles, and recent conservation of the mural found that one of them altered the contours of Thomas’s mouth, giving it a downward turn.22 By contrast, some of the earliest copies of the mural, such as a copperplate engraving done in about 1500 or the version done in oil by Leonardo’s student Giampietrino, reveal a version of Thomas whose mouth and jaw are far less grotesque.
The apostle James the Lesser, reversed, opposed to Francesco Melzi’s portrait of Leonardo
Thomas appears to have been modeled by the same person Leonardo used for James the Lesser, the apostle second from left, beside Bartholomew. James’s features, likewise in profile, are less caricatured and therefore perhaps allow us to appreciate Leonardo’s appearance in the mid-1490s. Difficult as it is to compare the James of the ravaged mural with the beautiful and highly detailed red chalk profile portrait, apparently of Leonardo, the two subjects do bear certain similarities: both have Greek noses and long hair worn parted in the middle. Also, both wear beards, and the beards in The Last Supper may help explain Visconti’s claim about Leonardo’s self-portraiture. He would have detected the painter’s lineaments in both Thomas and James the Lesser even more readily if Leonardo wore a beard in the 1490s: a rare sight, as we have seen, on the chins of fifteenth-century Italians.23
This kind of Leonardo spotting must stay stuck, for lack of further evidence, in the realm of speculation. What is more certain is that the friars of Santa Maria delle Grazie, looking at the gesticulating apostles, would have seen revealed in their gestures, not merely human emotions realistically and eloquently portrayed, but also clear and unmistakable allusions to the Christian story.
Painters were always careful to identify the traitor at the Last Supper. Often Judas reaches for the bread offered by Christ or else, in an unholy communion, opens his mouth to receive the sop. Sometimes he sits on the opposite side of the table from Christ and the other apostles, while in other paintings he is the lone apostle without a halo. Cosimo Rosselli’s Last Supper in the Sistine Chapel shows him with a dark halo and, lest there be any lingering doubts about his identity, a winged demon perched on his shoulder. Some versions show Judas with a fish or other item of food concealed behind his back. In the Middle Ages, especially in Passion plays, his thieving was emphasized along with his treachery. “Abjured traitor, thief, money-grubber, faithless man filled with rancour,” fumes a French play of 1486.24
Leonardo was more subtle than most painters, but his Judas is still unmistakable. Like many other artists, he showed him reaching for the same dish as Christ. However, Leonardo departed from every other painter who included this motif by depicting Judas reaching with his left hand, not his right. Leonardo’s Judas is, like Leonardo himself, a mancino. The only other Judas who reaches with his left hand is found in a stained-glass window in Chartres cathedral, though viewed from the other side, this Judas is, naturally, right-handed.
Leonardo, of all people, would have known how left-handedness was regarded with fear and suspicion. The well-known connection between “left-handed” and “sinister” is usually explained with reference to the Roman auguries: a bird or other sign appearing to the left of the priest—on the “sinister” (left) side as opposed to the “dexter” (right)—supposedly foretold unfavorable events. Left-handedness certainly came to be synonymous with bad luck and even evil. In Christianity, the right side of the body was viewed as morally superior and supposedly protected by God. According to St. Augustine, the left hand represented the temporal, the mortal, and the bodily, as opposed to the right, which stood for “God, eternity, the years of God which fail not.”25 For centuries the preference for the right hand over the left governed how people fished, ploughed fields, twisted rope, and ate their meals. The Greeks and Romans, for example, always reclined on the left side, propped on the left elbow, leaving the right hand free for the business of eating and drinking. Plutarch noted that parents taught children to eat right-handed from a young age, and “if they do put forth the left hand, at once we correct them.”26 The prejudice against the left hand persisted during the Renaissance, with parents freeing a child’s right hand from its swaddling clothes to ensure right-handedness at the dinner table as well as at the writing desk.
Painters were acutely conscious of the implications of left versus right. In profile portraits, the lady always faced to the left, which meant she was in the position known as the “heraldic sinister” because she was on God’s left hand, while her husband, hierarchically superior, faced to the right.27 Crucifixion scenes always showed Christ with his head inclined to the right, the side of salvation and eternity. Giovanni da Montorfano followed the usual pattern: his fresco in Santa Maria delle Grazie shows Christ’s head turned to the right, toward the Good Thief (above whom rises an angel) and away from the Bad Thief (above whom perches a demon) to his left. Among the few left-handers to appear in paintings are witches: artists like Albrecht Dürer and Parmigianino deliberately portrayed them as left-handed.28
Leonardo’s invention of Judas as a mancino therefore cleverly exploits this cluster of negative cultural associations. The sight of someone eating with his left hand would have been highly unusual, the anomaly all the more obvious in a refectory setting. It comes as an unexpected surprise, however, that Leonardo, one of history’s most famous left-handers, should have pressed this antisouthpaw bias into service, though possibly he, more than other artists, was attuned to these negative connotations.
Judas is doing something else besides reaching for food with his left hand: he rears forward and twists sideways and, in doing so, tips over the saltcellar and spills its contents. This gesture—another of Leonardo’s inspired inventions—was anticipated in his earlier description of how to show a group of men dining at a table. One part closely matches (albeit with some modifications) the Peter-Judas-John grouping: “Another speaks into his neighbour’s ear and he, as he listens to him, turns towards him to lend an ear, while he holds a knife in one hand, and in the other the loaf half cut through by the knife. Another who has turned, holding a knife in his hand, upsets with his hand a glass on the table.” Leonardo chose, in the end, to show an overturned saltcellar rather than a glass.
This saltcellar, unfortunately, is no longer visible: every trace of it has been lost due to the mural’s deterioration. It can clearly be seen in many early copies, such as Giampietrino’s and the one at Ponte Capriasca, and there is no question that Leonardo’s mural included a saltcellar. He was not the first artist to put a saltcellar on the table at the Last Supper: they feature in at least two other versions painted in northern I
taly in the second half of the fifteenth century.29 However, he invented the motif of the spilled salt—and in doing so this least superstitious of men became responsible, ironically, for a famous and widespread superstition.
Spilling salt is usually taken as a sign of ill omen. Once again the Roman priests who took the auguries are to blame. Spilling salt was one of a series of events of calamitous significance that the priests called dirae (others included sneezing, spilling wine, hearing certain portentous words or sounds, or seeing apparitions). Saltcellars were symbols of families for the ancient Romans, with Horace praising the “ancestral salt-box” gleaming on the table as an image of stability and domestic bliss. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance the saltcellars of royal families became ornate affairs proclaiming the wealth and status of their owners, and in England a dinner guest sitting “above the salt” occupied a privileged place at the table between the saltcellar and the host. Saltcellars in France were bejeweled and often shaped like ships, and it is easy to imagine that upsetting one of these royal saltcellars—which symbolized the “ship of state”—could be taken as ominous.30
How much Leonardo knew of these superstitions, or how widespread they were in fifteenth-century Italy, is debatable. What he could have known about, however, is the religious significance of salt. Salt is mentioned many times in both the Old and New Testaments, most famously in Jesus’s metaphor to describe the apostles: “You are the salt of the earth,” he tells them (Matthew 5:13). In the Old Testament, salt was used to seal agreements between God and man, such as the “covenant of salt” by which God gave the kingdom of Israel to David and his descendants (2 Chronicles 13:5). This phrase probably originated because salt, as a preservative, readily symbolized something that endured. Also, salt was necessary to make offerings to God: “Whatsoever sacrifice you offer,” stipulates the Book of Leviticus, “you shall season it with salt” (2:13). Salt was believed by the ancient Hebrews to have healing or talismanic powers. The prophet Elisha purified Jericho’s toxic water supply by casting salt into its springs (2 Kings 2:19–24), and newborn children were rubbed with salt (Ezekiel 16:4).
