Leonardo and the Last Supper (13 page)

Leonardo’s sketch of five men seated on a bench

Nothing indicates that Leonardo was commissioned to paint a Last Supper in Florence in the early 1480s. His sketch was merely a prototype—impulsive and possibly soon forgotten. A dozen years would pass before the opportunity came to transform his vivacious bench sitters into something new and extraordinary.

One indication of how Leonardo began thinking about composing his
Last Supper
for Santa Maria delle Grazie is found in the pages of a small notebook begun in the early 1490s. Almost uniquely for the time, he sometimes planned his paintings (or works he hoped to paint) not only by means of sketches but also through meticulous descriptions of what a particular scene could or should look like. Often the scenes described are ones of tumult—battles, storms, floods, and fires—that go beyond sets of instructions to would-be painter and become horrifying visions of mankind’s helplessness before the lethal energies of a chaotic nature. However, his primary concern was always the realistic depiction, based on actual observation, of gesture and expression.

For example, his prescription for a battle scene involved arrows and cannonballs flying through the air and soldiers “in the agonies of death” rolling their eyes and grinding their teeth, with his dedication to persuasive verisimilitude extending to instruction on how the nostrils of the defeated troops must be depicted.
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A passage on how to paint a flood resembles the screenplay for a disaster movie: mountains topple into valleys, water foams over farmland carrying a detritus of boats and bedsteads, and terrified people cluster on hilltops and fight with animals (including lions) for the few spots of dry land. He imagines many people committing suicide to escape the horror of the waves: “Some flung themselves from lofty rocks, others strangled themselves with their own hands, others seized their own children and violently slew them at a blow. Some wounded and killed themselves with their own weapons.”
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Leonardo’s small notebook provided equally detailed directions for how to make a scene such as a Last Supper convincing. On one page he offered a blow-by-blow account of the individual reactions at a dinner table to a speaker (not identified in the text with Christ). The page has no accompanying drawings that might specifically identify it as a description of a Last Supper, and the gestures of eleven rather than twelve men are described. Nonetheless, the context is self-evident:

One who was drinking and has left the glass in its position and turned his head towards the speaker. Another, twisting the fingers of his hands together, turns with stern brows to his companion. Another with his hands spread open shows the palms, and shrugs his shoulders up his ears, making a mouth of astonishment. 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. Another lays his hand on the table and is looking. Another blows his mouthful. Another leans forward to see the speaker shading his eyes with his hand. Another draws back behind the one who leans forward, and sees the speaker between the wall and the man who is leaning.
¹⁸

Painting for Leonardo was all about capturing the small and telling details of the kind he recorded, according to legend, in the sketchbook at his belt—in particular, facial expressions and bodily movements. In his treatise on painting he claimed that the artist had “two principal things to paint: that is, man and the intention of his mind. The first is easy; the second difficult, because it has to be represented by gestures and movements of the parts of the body.”
¹⁹
This passage shows how he smoothly translated his observations into the context of a Last Supper. He outlined the distinctive reactions of these participants in terms of both their physical actions (lifting or upsetting a glass, holding a knife, recoiling backward, or leaning forward) and their facial expressions (furrowed brows, shaded eyes, and the
bocca della maraviglia
, or mouth of astonishment). He froze the moment in time so the spectator would see the dinner guests in midgesture, with the loaf of bread “half cut through” and the drinking glass still at the lips. The effect, as he planned it here, would impress itself on the viewer through actions
and expressions ranging across a whole gamut of emotions, such as anger, amazement, and bewilderment—all communicated to the viewer through a language of gesture.

This dinner table scene would not be a solemn and meditative tableau such as that frescoed by Castagno for the nuns of Sant’Apollonia. Instead, it would capture all of the drama and excitement of the Gospel verses on the Last Supper.

CHAPTER 5
Leonardo’s Court

Soon after receiving his commission for the mural in Santa Maria delle Grazie, Leonardo would have begun work in his studio, making a series of sketches. His studio—in which the clay model of the giant horse still loomed—was appropriately grand for a
pictor et ingeniarius ducalis
. In his notes Leonardo advised painters to have a small rather than a large studio: “Small rooms or dwellings discipline the mind, large ones weaken it.”
¹
There was often a gap, however, between what Leonardo wrote and what he did. Rather than a small studio, he occupied spacious rooms in a castle.

Leonardo’s studio and living quarters were found in the Corte dell’Arengo, which was sometimes known as the Corte Vecchia, or “old court.” It had been home to the Visconti rulers of Milan before—toward the end of the fourteenth century—they moved across the city to their massive new fortress, the Castello di Porta Giovia. The Corte dell’Arengo stood in the very heart of Milan, immediately south of the half-built cathedral, onto whose
piazza its gates opened. It was a medieval castle, complete with towers, courtyards, and moats. After the Viscontis decamped, it fell into a state of dilapidation until in the 1450s the architect Filarete “restored it to health” (as he boasted) “without which restoration it would soon have ended its days.”
²
Francesco Sforza moved his court into the renovated palace, and at his command the walls were frescoed with portraits of ancient heroes and heroines. Following Francesco’s death in 1466, his son Galeazzo Maria took possession, hosting sumptuous banquets and pageants there before, like the Viscontis before him, moving his court to the Castello di Porta Giovia. Lodovico, too, preferred the grand fortress of the Castello (which in time would come to be known as the Castello Sforzesco). The Corte dell’Arengo was therefore surplus to ducal requirements, and Leonardo, needing a large space in which to work on his equestrian monument, was given rooms there in the late 1480s or early 1490s. “
La mia fabrica
,” he called it: my factory.
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Here, possibly in one of the courtyards or the great hall itself, he raised his twenty-four-foot-high clay model.

The Corte was both lavish and commodious. Yet it must have been a gloomy place through whose corridors stalked the ghosts of the mad, tragic Visconti tribe, such as Luchino, poisoned by his third wife in 1349, or Bernabò, poisoned by his nephew in 1385, or even Francesco’s wife, Bianca Maria, poisoned (according to gossip) by Galeazzo Maria in 1468. Adding to the bleak air of ill omen was the fact that the Corte had been for extended periods the quarters of the usurped Giangaleazzo and his angry, anguished wife, Isabella. Theirs had not been a happy home. “There is no news here,” one Milanese courtier wrote to an envoy in Mantua in 1492, “saving that the Duke of Milan has beaten his wife.”
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Leonardo would have ushered inside the forbidding walls of the Corte dell’Arengo a much livelier spirit. When not promoting the virtues of a small studio, his writings celebrate the painter’s atelier as a place of culture and refinement. His notes for a projected treatise on painting describe a “well-dressed painter”—probably an idealized version of himself—who adorns himself with “such garments as he pleases” as he works away at his art. “His dwelling is full of fine paintings, and is clean and often filled with music, or the sound of different beautiful books being read, which are often heard with great pleasure.”
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A lover of books and music, Leonardo may well have stocked his studio with readers and musicians, and he himself probably
played the lyre and sang. Vasari claimed that Leonardo employed “singers and musicians or jesters” as he worked on the
Mona Lisa
: hence, he claims, her famous smile, which is one of contented amusement.
⁶

In his advice to young painters, Leonardo extolled of the benefits of living an isolated life. The painter or draftsmen, he insisted, needed to be solitary: “While you are alone you are entirely your own master, and if you have one companion you are but half your own.”
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However, Leonardo was far from solitary in his quarters in the Corte dell’Arengo, since he always had a team of assistants living and working with him, much in the same way that he and his fellow apprentices had lived and worked with Verrocchio. One of his memoranda remarked that he had six mouths to feed, and this number generally accords with other of his memos that faithfully document the comings and goings of various assistants.
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Leonardo would certainly have needed a large team to help him with the casting of the bronze equestrian monument.

Leonardo’s helpers paid a monthly rent and performed household tasks in return for their studies and general upkeep. One of his helpers at this time was a “Maestro Tommaso,” who in November 1493 made candlesticks for him and paid nine months’ rent.
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Tommaso was probably the Florentine known as Zoroastro, the son of a gardener named Giovanni Masini. The eccentric Tommaso claimed, however, to be the illegitimate son of Bernardo Rucellai, one of Florence’s richest men and the brother-in-law of Lorenzo de’ Medici. Tommaso knew Leonardo in Florence and evidently followed him to Milan. His dabbling in the occult arts brought him the nickname Zoroastro, while a costume he decorated with nuts (probably for one of Leonardo’s theatrical performances) earned him a less exalted moniker: Il Gallozzolo (The Gall-Nut). Tommaso also worked as a fortune-teller, hence yet another of his nicknames, Indovino (Diviner). Leonardo had nothing but scorn for the arts of alchemists and necromancers, whom he called “false interpreters of nature” whose sole purpose was to deceive. He can have had little sympathy with Zoroastro’s pursuits, and he put him to work making candlesticks, grinding colors and doing the household accounts.
¹⁰

Another of Leonardo’s notes recorded that in March 1493 “Giulio, a German, came to live with me.”
¹¹
He listed three other names immediately after Giulio’s: Lucia, Piero, and Leonardo. These, too, were probably helpers, with Lucia no doubt serving as his housekeeper and cook. Later that year, Giulio the German was still with Leonardo, making fire tongs and a lever for the
master, and paying a monthly rent. Then, a few months later, an assistant named Galeazzo arrived, paying Leonardo five lire per month.
¹²
Galeazzo’s father must have had business dealings in Holland or Germany, since he paid the boy’s rent in Rhenish florins (which were worth slightly less than Florentine florins). Five lire per month was steep at a time when a little more than double that amount would rent a small house in Florence for an entire year.
¹³
But of course Galeazzo’s father was paying more than merely his son’s rent: he was paying for him to be trained by one of the greatest artists in Italy. Yet even Leonardo’s reputation was not always enough to concentrate their minds, and occasionally he was forced to rouse his young men from their beds and chivvy them along. In his notebooks one of them wrote (rather like a child writing lines on a chalkboard): “The master said that lying down will not bring you to Fame, nor staying beneath the quilts.”
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