Leonardo and the Last Supper (17 page)

King Alfonso had once predicted that his sins would bring down misfortunes on his head. Those misfortunes had now arrived. As fortress after fortress fell to the French, he was seized with such fear and panic that during the night he cried out that he could hear the approach of the enemy, and that even the stones and trees shouted, “France, France.”
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The shade of his father appeared to him, prophesying disaster. He was also visited by the ghosts of his murdered political enemies. Abdicating in favor of his son Ferdinand II, he loaded five galleys with manuscripts, tapestries, and casks of wine, and fled to a monastery in Sicily. Twenty-five-year-old Ferdinand put up a brief show of defiance before abandoning Naples and escaping to the island of Ischia. On 22 February, Charles entered the city as a liberator and conquering hero. He immediately made himself popular with the people of Naples by slashing taxes and allowing the continuation of slavery.

Lodovico Sforza’s original objective—that of ridding himself of the threat from King Alfonso—had been spectacularly met. But the duke found alarming the ease and speed of the French conquest of the Italian peninsula. Equally troubling was the fact that French troops still occupied Pisa, Siena, and various fortresses in both Tuscany and the Papal States, and that they seemed in no hurry to depart. Most disturbing of all, Charles’s cousin, Louis of Orléans, would-be claimant to the Duchy of Milan, was biding his time at Asti, a mere sixty miles southwest of Milan.

Within a week of Charles’s arrival in Naples, Lodovico began laying plans for evicting from Italy the invaders that he himself had invited. “Naples is lost,” he wrote to the Venetian Senate, “and the French king has been joyfully welcomed by the people. I am ready to do whatever the Republic desires. But there is no time to waste; we must act at once.”
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The Venetians, hitherto neutral, were prepared to listen to Lodovico’s entreaties. As Guicciardini wrote, after seeing Charles’s army proceed “like a thunderbolt” through Italy, they, too, “began to consider the misfortunes of others as dangers to themselves.”
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Charles had earlier pledged himself to launch a crusade against the Turks after conquering Naples. However, once in his new kingdom he began to
think better of an arduous overseas adventure. He and his soldiers preferred to remain in the fleshpots of Naples, “giving themselves over to pleasure.”
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By then a strange and debilitating new disease had announced itself: one that the French soldiers called the “Neapolitan disease” and that the Neapolitans called the “French disease.” Guicciardini graphically described the horrors of the boils, ulcers, and intense pains in the joints and nerves. “This disease killed many men and women of all ages,” he wrote, “and many became terribly deformed and were rendered useless, suffering from almost continuous torments.”
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Two years later, when it had become widespread across both Italy and France, a physician from Ferrara described this “disease of an unusual nature” in a treatise insistently entitled
De morbo Gallico (On the French Disease)
. He noted how the contagion had either been imported by the French into Italy, or else “Italy had become infested by this disease and by the French arms at the same time.”
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Philosophers and physicians would argue how exactly the disease was contracted, and whether or not it had come to Europe on board Columbus’s galleons. But virtually all were agreed that this dreadful pox (eventually christened syphilis) was a punishment inflicted by God on a wayward society. As the court physician in Ferrara despaired, “We also see that the Supreme Creator, now full of wrath against us for our dreadful sins, punishes us with the cruellest of ills.”
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Leonardo was not the only artist preparing to begin work in Santa Maria delle Grazie in 1495. A local painter named Giovanni Donato da Montorfano was hired—probably by Lodovico Sforza—to paint a Crucifixion scene on the wall opposite the one where Leonardo was to work. Two teams of painters would therefore be at work in the refectory at the same time.
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A Crucifixion scene was almost as common in a convent refectory as a Last Supper—so common, in fact, that in the 1580s a painter marveled at how artists and patrons found the subject an appropriate accompaniment to meals.
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In the refectories of Florence, Last Suppers were often specifically paired with Crucifixion scenes. Taddeo Gaddi’s
Last Supper
in Santa Croce was painted beneath a massive Crucifixion, also by Gaddi, featuring St. Francis clasping the foot of the cross. In Sant’Apollonia, Andrea del Castagno frescoed an image of Christ on the cross (along with an Entombment and a
Resurrection) directly above his
Last Supper
. These scenes allowed the monks and nuns to identify with Christ’s sufferings and, as they were exhorted, to contemplate the mysteries of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. As one text stressed, the true disciple of Christ must “seek to carry Jesus Christ’s cross in his mind and in his flesh, so that he may truly say and feel within himself the word of Paul the Apostle...
Christo confixus sum cruci
, that is, I am nailed to the cross with Christ.”
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There may have been another reason why Montorfano was given the commission to fresco a wall in the same room as Leonardo. Patrons were beginning to pair artists off against each other, arranging competitions between or among artists in an attempt to inspire them to greater glories. In 1408, the wardens of Florence’s cathedral commissioned three sculptors, Donatello among them, to carve marble statues of the Evangelists to adorn the facade, with the understanding that the fourth block of marble, and the commission for the fourth Evangelist, would go to the victor. (The competition fizzled when the sculptors lingered so long over their work that the wardens ran short of patience and gave the block of marble to a fourth sculptor.) Later, when Pope Sixtus IV arranged to have a team of painters fresco the walls of the Sistine Chapel in the early 1480s, he turned the commission into a contest by offering a prize to the artist whose work he judged the best. According to Vasari, the winner was Cosimo Rosselli, whose gaudy display of gold and ultramarine, though ridiculed by the other painters, impressed the pontiff, a man with unsophisticated artistic tastes.
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Lodovico may well have hoped to prompt Leonardo, notorious for his slow progress, into completing his work in a more timely manner. Yet if the two commissions were planned as part of an informal contest, the competitors were unevenly matched. Little is known of Montorfano’s life other than that he came from a family of Milanese painters long patronized by the Sforza family. A relative named Baptista, probably an uncle, did decorations for Galeazzo Maria in the Castello di Porta Giovia in the early 1470s.
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Giovanni himself probably trained with his father, Alberto, after which he appears to have worked with his brother Vincenzo. His commissions included frescoes in several Milanese churches.

Although a capable craftsman, the thirty-five-year-old Montorfano was certainly not a painter of the caliber of Leonardo. He worked in a more antiquated style, blissfully unconcerned with the Florentine’s attention to naturalistic details or his innovations in movement and expression.
However, Montorfano possessed one significant advantage over the man working at the opposite end of the refectory. As his commissions in various of Milan’s churches reveal, by 1495 he had extensive experience in fresco, while Leonardo had never before attempted the difficult task of painting on a plaster wall.

“We must act at once,” Lodovico Sforza had urged the Venetian Senate, and within weeks he had laid plans to drive the French invaders from Italy. Late in the evening on the last day of March 1495, after engaging in what a French ambassador deplored as “artifice and deception,”
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Lodovico compacted a powerful confederacy—a “Holy League”—against the French.

The other members of the Holy League were Pope Alexander VI, the Holy Roman emperor Maximilian I, and Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. These powers pledged to defend Christendom against the Turks, to preserve the dignity of the church and the rights of the Holy Roman Empire, to respect and protect one another’s territories, and to evict the foreign invaders—to wit, the French—from the Italian peninsula. To this final end, the signatories engaged Francesco II Gonzaga, the Marquess of Mantua, to lead a forty-thousand-strong army against the French. The French ambassador to Venice, learning the terms of the Holy League, trembled for the safety of his king: “I was extremely troubled and concerned for my master’s person,” he wrote, “as I feared that he and his whole army were in great danger.”
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No such concerns clouded the placid horizons of Charles and his army, still enjoying their blissful sojourn in Naples, where the French king (as his ambassador to Venice noted disapprovingly) “minded nothing but his pleasures and his ministers attended to nothing but their own advantage.”
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Charles was effusive about the many delights of his new kingdom. One of the treasures that Alfonso took with him on his escape to Sicily was a collection of seeds from the royal gardens. It would have been small consolation for him to know that Charles truly appreciated these horticultural delights. “My brother,” he wrote to the duke of Bourbon, “this is the divinest land and the fairest city that I have ever seen. You would never believe what beautiful gardens I have here. So delicious are they, and so full of rare and lovely flowers and fruits, that nothing, by my faith, is wanting, except Adam and Eve, to make this place another Eden.”
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Eventually, realizing he needed to retreat from Italy before the Holy League could collect their forces for an assault, Charles was forced to quit his Neapolitan Eden. On 20 May, after helping himself to some of Naples’ historic treasures, including the bronze gates of the castle, he and half his army quit the city. The remainder, some thirteen thousand men, he left behind in an attempt to hold the conquered kingdom in his name. He began marching north toward Rome, which he reached on the first of June, claiming to be coming “as a good son of the Holy Church” and requesting an audience with Pope Alexander VI.
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He had been crowned with much pomp in Naples a fortnight earlier, but without the consent of the pope, the suzerain of Naples, the ceremony had no real meaning. He therefore wanted papal sanction and an official investiture as king of Naples.

Alexander, however, had already headed for the Tuscan hills with twenty of his cardinals, leaving Charles little choice but to depart from Rome after three days. He continued north, and at Poggibonsi, near Siena, he was met by one of his few friends left in Italy, Girolamo Savonarola. The friar berated him for having disappointed God by failing to reform the church, “which, by my mouth, He had charged you to undertake, and to which He had called you by so many unmistakeable signs.” Ever willing to foretell doom, Savonarola gave Charles an urgent warning. Failure to heed God’s commands would bring down on his head “far more terrible misfortunes.”
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