Leonardo and the Last Supper

by Ross King

  This latter practice—which links salt with the preservation of health—survived in Florence: a small supply of salt left with a child dropped anonymously at the Ospedale degli Innocenti, the foundling hospital, meant the infant was unbaptized.31 Besides preserving health, the salt was probably also meant to protect the infant from evil spirits. Consecrated salt, sprinkled like holy water, was used against witches and demons, and in some countries it was thrown on gypsies.32

  Although Leonardo may have been aware of these associations, he need not have turned to his Bible or folk superstitions to appreciate the importance of salt. The nature of salt fascinated him: its origins and composition, and the fact that, as he wrote, it “is in all created things.” His manuscripts include a series of notes refuting Pliny the Elder’s argument about why the sea is salty. His discussion veers off in an interesting direction when he begins considering the necessity of salt (which he views as essential to life) to the human diet. Leonardo observed that humans have “eternally been and would always be consumers of salt.” But how long, he wondered, will supplies last? Was the world’s supply of salt finite, in which case humans would die out when they use it all up? Or was it renewable and self-replenishing? He decided on the latter because salt recycles itself through our bodies, “either in the urine or the sweat or other excretions where it is found again,” thereby ensuring an undiminishing supply (even if we would eventually need to source it from “places where there is urine”). The interesting thing about these comments is the quasi-religious language Leonardo employed to describe salt: he pondered whether it “dies and is born again like the men who devour it” or whether it is “everlasting,” concluding that it must be everlasting because not even fire can destroy it.

  Salt therefore had a range of possible meanings for Leonardo and the first spectators of The Last Supper, the Dominican friars: essential to human life and an image of endless renewal, while symbolizing not only the apostles’ and man’s covenant with God but also good health and good luck. The spillage of salt at such a crucial moment—the announcement of the traitor—was at best a bad omen and at worst a kind of desecration.

  Spilling salt is, of course, still regarded as a dire omen by people in modern nations: a recent study found that 50 percent of people in England admit to throwing salt over their shoulders to ward off bad luck if the saltshaker overturns.33 Ironically for Leonardo, the man who did more than anyone to popularize this superstition, we counter the ill omen by throwing a pinch of salt over our left shoulder—because the devil, naturally, appears on our left.

  Judas is performing yet another gesture in The Last Supper: Leonardo shows him clutching his purse of ill-gotten gains. This action is in keeping with the Gospels, which describe Judas as the keeper of the communal purse and, of course, as the traitor who betrays Jesus for (according to the Gospel of St. Matthew) thirty pieces of silver. Yet the sight of Judas clutching a purse is much rarer than we might expect in Last Suppers: Perugino, in a fresco done a few years earlier in Florence, is one of the few other artists to feature the motif. Later, in 1512, the Tuscan painter Luca Signorelli would paint a version showing Judas, in a brazen act of theft, furtively slipping the Eucharist into his money bag.

  Judas clutching a money bag was an evocative image in a Last Supper. A money bag was a common attribute of Jews in European art, bringing together Judas’s betrayal of Jesus with Christian denunciations of avarice and contemporary social tensions about the sin of usury. Psalters and illustrated Bibles frequently featured such images as Jews with money bags around their necks happily greeting the devil or languishing miserably in hell.34

  Leonardo is far subtler than Signorelli or the illustrated Bibles, but by giving Judas a money bag he links the story of Judas’s betrayal of Christ to the wider history of the Jews. Judas and the Jews had become virtual synonyms thanks in part to etymological “proof” offered by the church fathers: “The Jews take their name,” declared St. Jerome, “not from that Judah, who was a holy man, but from the betrayer.”35 St. Ambrose, a fourth-century bishop of Milan, saw a link between Judas, the Jews, usurers, and ultimately the devil, who “himself should be compared to a usurer, who destroys the things of the soul.”36 Christians practiced moneylending, of course: the Medici and other Florentine families built up their immense fortunes by lending out money at interest. But usury became so identified with Jewry that the charging of interest was known as “judaizing.”37 The so-called crime of usury was one of the reasons why the Jews were expelled from England in 1290 and from France in 1306.

  The papacy was more tolerant of usurers than secular monarchies, but that did not stop various preachers from railing against the sin. “God has commended that a person should not lend in usury,” proclaimed the Franciscan firebrand Bernardino da Siena, who died in 1444. “It is theft, it is done against the command of God, and thus you must object to usury and to any person who practices usury.”38 Bernardino called for marking Jews with a distinguishing sign. Periodically Jews in Italy were forced to wear a yellow badge, the segno del O. A law passed in Florence in 1463 fined any Jew failing to display this badge the substantial sum of twenty-five lire. In 1452, a similar law was effected in Milan, where it was one of the prices Jews paid for the right to live in the city, build synagogues, and celebrate their feasts. This yellow circle appears to have been intended to represent a coin, thereby stigmatizing all Jews as accomplices of Judas.39

  The language of officialdom was often severe in dealing with Jews. In 1406, Jewish moneylenders had their rights revoked in Florence with a decree proposing that “Jews or Hebrews are enemies of the cross, of our Lord Jesus Christ, and of all Christians.”40 Several decades later, in 1442, the Council of Florence made clear the church’s attitude toward the Jews, classifying them along with “heretics and schismatics” as people who “cannot share in eternal life and will go into the everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels.”41 However, little of this theological abomination of Jews actually seems to have made its way into everyday life in fifteenth-century Italy. Vasari did tell the story of an ironworker in Florence, a contemporary of Leonardo known as Il Caparra, who refused to work for Jews, and who “was wont, indeed, to say that their money was putrid and stinking.” However, Vasari stressed that Caparra was a hotheaded eccentric, “whimsical in brain,” and his bigotry seems to have been a minority view.42 Jewish-Christian relations in Milan, for instance, were mostly cordial, with a good deal of mutual toleration and shared camaraderie. Jews and Christians frequently ate meals together and participated in one another’s feasts. Jews taught Christian noblewomen music and dance, while Christians served as midwives and even wet nurses to Jewish families.43 Galeazzo Maria Sforza, monstrous in so many other respects, treated the Jews with admirable restraint, releasing them in 1466 from the obligation of wearing the segno del O and then in 1475 forbidding the clergy from attacking Jews in their sermons.

  Leonardo presumably took the same liberal attitude toward the Jews as most of his contemporaries in Milan. He would have known Jews from, among other places, the court of Lodovico Sforza, who was interested in fostering Hebrew studies. In 1490 he appointed the scholar Benedetto Ispano to a newly established chair of Hebrew studies. Another Jewish scholar, Salomone Ebreo, was invited by Lodovico to live in the Castello while he translated Hebrew manuscripts into Latin.44

  One Leonardo expert has argued that the Judas of The Last Supper is “clearly Semitic in type.”45 Arguably, a number of the apostles look Semitic. A nineteenth-century ethnographer named William Edwards even used the faces in Leonardo’s Last Supper to argue for the purity and continuity across the centuries of the Jewish “national countenance”: the faces of nineteenth-century Jews, he believed, appeared “feature for feature” in Leonardo’s painting.46 Edwards was under the illusion that Leonardo’s models were Jewish, whereas it is not certain that even the model for Judas was Jewish. One of the few clues to his identity is the story told by Giovanni Battista Giraldi, who
claimed that Leonardo went to the outskirts of Milan, to a neighborhood known as the Borghetto, to sketch the physiognomies of vile and depraved characters (no mention is made of Jews). The Borghetto (“little borough”) should not be confused with a Jewish ghetto such as that established in Venice some decades earlier. It was a cluster of small houses in the northeast corner of Milan, outside the city walls. Going to this poor area, roughly a mile as the crow files from the Corte dell’Arengo, by no means guaranteed Leonardo a Jewish model. Indeed, if we believe Giraldi, Leonardo considered a gentile for his model: harassed to finish the work by Vincenzo Bandello, the prior of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Leonardo threatened to immortalize the irritating prior as Judas.

  Leonardo’s red chalk study of Judas

  Giraldi is theoretically a good source, since he got information from his father, who knew Leonardo and watched him at work on the scaffold. At the same time, Giraldi was a storyteller (one of his collections, published in 1565, provided Shakespeare with the plots for both Measure for Measure and Othello). We therefore cannot discount that he was exaggerating Leonardo’s words and actions for the sake of a good story. His observation is found, after all, in a work called “A Discourse on the Manner of Composing Romance and Comedy.” However, his story (which Vasari repeated) may not have been completely wide of the mark. Leonardo appears to have used one of the friars, at any rate, as his model for Judas: a red chalk study for Judas’s head clearly shows him with the clerical tonsure—that is, the shaven crown—worn by the Dominicans. Thus, Leonardo had no need to frequent the slums of Milan to find a model: he may simply have cast his eye around Santa Maria delle Grazie.

  Very little of the original paint remains on the face of Leonardo’s Judas. Only from the red chalk drawing do we get a sense of his earliest conception. On the evidence of this study, the model for Judas is not really “Semitic in type” beyond having an aquiline nose—if an aquiline nose can truly be viewed as an exclusively Semitic trademark. Judas’s proboscis is certainly not the exaggerated hook often used by artists to stereotype and caricature Jews. Furthermore, Leonardo sketched dozens of faces with aquiline noses, noting that it was one of the ten different shapes noses came in. Aquiline noses were not regarded as grotesque during the Italian Renaissance: named after the beak of the eagle (aquila), they were seen by some as markers of nobility.47 Several of the other apostles have identical Roman noses, most notably Simon, shown in profile on the far right. Simon was, in fact, almost certainly modeled by the same person as Judas: their noses and mouths (down-turned and sunken) are virtually identical. Intriguingly, an engraving of Vincenzo Bandello shows the prior to have, besides the clerical tonsure, a pronounced aquiline nose.48

  In any case, Leonardo’s Judas is no crude caricature of a Jew. His supposedly villainous face is partly the creation of successive restorers who reworked his features, and partly that of copyists determined to give the traitor an appropriately evil look. Goethe noted that Leonardo’s Judas was “by no means ugly” but that some copyists—such as Andrea Vespino, who made a full-size version between 1612 and 1616—had transformed him into a “monster” whose features and expression testified to a “malicious love of evil.”49 These transformations were not necessarily aimed at making Judas look more Semitic. However, the increasing vilification of Judas would have been in keeping with the Italian tradition of Last Suppers. Judas was often represented as the only non-Christian at the table, a stand-in for Jews in general, the people who tortured and murdered Jesus. A good example is a Communion of the Apostles painted for the Confraternity of the Corpus Domini in Urbino by Joos van Ghent in 1474. The altarpiece shows Judas clutching a money bag and wearing a Jewish prayer shawl. In keeping with a northern European tradition (van Ghent was Flemish) Judas has red hair, because redheads were viewed, like left-handers, as dangerous and untrustworthy.50

  Many have noted that in Leonardo’s Last Supper Judas is the only apostle whose face is in shadow. Leonardo did indeed contrast Judas’s face, darkened by shade and turned partially away from the viewer, with the radiant features of Christ haloed by the window. But Judas was also downgraded in another way. Leonardo dressed him in a costume consisting of a violet undergarment and blue mantle (whose sleeve, as the light catches it, turns green). Leonardo used a good deal of ultramarine in his fresco, most conspicuously in Christ’s mantle, where it is applied most thickly and freely, but also in the costumes of Bartholomew, Peter, Matthew, and Philip. Judas is one of these figures in blue but, unlike Christ and the other apostles, he did not warrant ultramarine, the expensive pigment that artists reserved, as we have seen, for the most revered parts of a painting. Instead, Judas’s costume was painted with azurite, a pigment thirty times less expensive.51

  Finally, one story about Leonardo’s Judas may be safely discounted. To borrow the phrase of Lorenzo Valla, it is “knavishly forged.” It seems to have been spread through America in the first decades of the twentieth century by a Presbyterian evangelist from Indiana named J. Wilbur Chapman. Chapman probably took it from what appears to be the first of its many appearances in print, Harry Cassell Davis’s Commencement Parts, an 1898 compendium of “valedictories, salutatories, orations, essays, class poems, ivy orations, toasts; also original speeches and addresses for the national holidays and other occasions.”

  The anecdote involves Leonardo and a youngster named Pietro Bandinelli. The name is impressively plausible but appears absolutely nowhere in any documents on Leonardo. Identified variously as a chorus boy and a seminarian, Pietro was supposedly selected by Leonardo to model the head of Christ. Leonardo then went looking for a model for Judas. He had no luck until, in a eureka moment many years later, he found a beggar in whose vicious features he saw the perfect fit. This ugly old indigent, it transpired, was none other than Pietro Bandinelli, his Christlike features corrupted by—and here comes the moral of the story—years of sinful living.

  The story is typical of the crackpottery that follows Leonardo. It is riddled with numerous errors, such as the length of time it assumes that Leonardo took to paint the mural and the fact that not even several lifetimes of the most unbridled debauchery could turn the features of Jesus into those of Judas. Occasionally the story is even set in Rome, not Milan, and The Last Supper is said to have been painted on canvas, not a wall. But such stories seldom founder on the rocks of hard fact, and in the past decade it has been related uncritically in at least eight different books. The legend of Pietro Bandinelli sails determinedly on, as difficult to sink as the equally fictitious stories about golden rectangles or the mysterious substitution of Mary Magdalene for St. John.52

  CHAPTER 15

  “No One Loves the Duke”

  By the summer of 1497, Leonardo had been at work on The Last Supper, off and on, for several years. At times he was no doubt guilty of neglecting his duties in Santa Maria delle Grazie in favor of many other projects and pursuits. His mathematical studies obsessed him, and he was still hard at work on his illustrations for Luca Pacioli’s Divine Proportion. Someone who lived in Milan during these years later observed that whenever Leonardo “should have attended to his painting...he devoted himself completely to geometry, architecture and anatomy.”1

  With Giovanni da Montorfano having completed his Crucifixion on the opposite wall of the refectory at least eighteen months earlier, Lodovico Sforza was anxious to see Leonardo finish his own wall. At the end of June he instructed his secretary “to urge Leonardo the Florentine to finish the work already begun in the refectory of the Grazie.” Lodovico wanted Leonardo to complete The Last Supper because he had another task for him: Leonardo was to “attend to the other side of the refectory.”2

  Montorfano had either left several blank patches of wall in his fresco or else Lodovico was planning for the removal and replastering of several sections of the foreground to make room for a late addition: portraits of Lodovico, his late duchess, and their two children. This time, having learned his lesson with The Last Supper, the duke was taking no chanc
es with his capricious painter. He referred to a contract for the portraits that Leonardo evidently had yet to sign. The secretary was told to make Leonardo “sign the contract with his own hand and oblige him to finish within an agreed time.”3

  Altarpieces and frescoes often included portraits of the people who commissioned them, anachronistically showing families in modern dress kneeling at the foot of the cross or even, as in Joos van Ghent’s Communion of the Apostles, mixing with Christ and the apostles at the Last Supper. In Montorfano’s fresco, Lodovico was to be shown in profile on the left side of the scene, kneeling beneath the figure of the Dominican martyr St. Peter of Verona, his son Massimiliano at his side. Beatrice and son number two, Francesco, were to be on the right, beneath St. Catherine of Siena. Because of Beatrice’s death at the start of the year, there would be a great poignancy to her portrait, which Lodovico was understandably anxious to see completed.