Leonardo and the Last Supper (25 page)

Galeazzo appears to have been happy to assist Leonardo with his work. When Leonardo designed the bronze statue he was given access to Galeazzo’s stables to study the exotic breeds. Some of his drawings of horses are captioned: “Messer Galeazzo’s Sicilian horse” and “Messer Galeazzo’s big genet,” a reference to a Berber horse known as a
giannetto
.
¹⁶
Whether Galeazzo himself ever served Leonardo as a model is impossible to ascertain since no portraits of him are known to exist.

Another figure almost as celebrated and conspicuous as Galeazzo Sanseverino was the architect Donato Bramante. Born Donato d’Angelo Lazzari, he was known as Bramante—which means “wishing” or “craving”—because of his grand ambitions and epicurean tastes. “I cared not what I spent on good living,” he supposedly declared.
¹⁷
Like Leonardo, who shared these extravagant tastes and ambitions, he was an outsider in Milan, a farmer’s son from the village of Monte Asdrualdo, near Urbino. Like Leonardo, too, he was blessed with a dazzling and apparently effortless brilliance. The most conspicuous mark of his genius was at Santa Maria delle Grazie, where he attached a magnificent cylindrical appendage to the east end of Solari’s original church. He was also involved in plans to rebuild the cathedral in Pavia, and in 1495 he was designing in Vigevano a central piazza so large that he demolished much of the town.

Bramante would have been a natural and attractive candidate for a model for Leonardo’s
Last Supper
. He and Leonardo were close friends. Leonardo in one of his notes referred to Bramante as “Donnino,” while Bramante dedicated a book of poetry to Leonardo, calling him a “
cordial caro ameno socio
” (cordial, dear, and delightful associate).
¹⁸

Leonardo may have wished to commemorate Bramante on the wall of Santa Maria delle Grazie for one reason in particular. While Leonardo had no prior experience in fresco or wall painting, Bramante actually began his career as a painter. One of his many specialties in Milan was frescoing the
fronts of palaces and villas. He also frescoed a series of philosophers, known as
Men at Arms
, for the Casa Panigarola in Milan, and between 1490 and 1493 he had created for Lodovico a fresco in the Castello known as
Argus
.

Given his extensive experience, Bramante may well have offered Leonardo assistance or advice as he began work on his own mural project. At the very least he could have helped Leonardo with the design and construction of the scaffold, the same task that a dozen years later he was assigned by Pope Julius II when Michelangelo began work in the Sistine Chapel. Vasari’s description of the scaffold that Leonardo built for himself a few years later in Florence—with a scissor mechanism that allowed its platform to be raised or lowered—was probably inspired by Bramante, who designed drawbridges. One of Leonardo’s notes, accompanied by a diagram of crisscrossed poles, reads, “The structure of the drawbridge shown me by Donnino.”
¹⁹

Raphael later included Bramante’s portrait in two separate frescoes in the Vatican Apartments, most famously as Euclid in
The School of Athens
. Around the same time, Michelangelo portrayed him as the prophet Joel on the vault of the Sistine ceiling, and his pupil Bramantino, in a tapestry made for the castle in Milan, showed him carousing at a feast: a tribute, no doubt, to his reputation for good living.
²⁰
Even more reliably, his likeness was also depicted in profile on a medallion struck by Caradosso in about 1505. Executed some ten to twelve years later, these portraits show him to have been handsome and balding, with unruly curls and slightly aquiline features.

Michelangelo’s painting of the prophet Joel on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel

Leonardo’s study for the apostle Bartholomew

If Leonardo did depict Bramante as one of the apostles, the most obvious choice, based on the evidence of these likenesses, is Bartholomew, the apostle standing at the far left. Leonardo’s red chalk study for Bartholomew shows a good-looking man on whose windswept curls male-pattern baldness is in the process of taking its toll. He has a strong brow, a pronounced nose, an intense, intelligent expression, and a jaw set in steely determination. The model is clearly a man in middle age: Bramante turned fifty in 1494. In the mural, Bartholomew’s hair is restored and he wears a beard, details that slightly obscure his likeness to Bramante. However, this figure who leans forward with his hands on the table, vigorous and alert, must still have been recognizable to Milanese courtiers as the famous architect.

Another model Leonardo apparently used in
The Last Supper
was—in the venerable tradition of Florentine workshops—himself. In the days of his apprenticeship there was a proverb attributed to Cosimo de’ Medici: “
Ogni pittore dipinge sé
” (Every painter paints himself).
²¹
The phrase became a kind of truism for Leonardo. “I have known some who in all their figures,” he wrote, “seem to have portrayed themselves from life, and in these figures are seen the motions and manners of their creator.”
²²

The Caradosso medal (reversed) featuring Donato Bramante’s profile

Certainly many painters sneaked their self-portraits into their works as a kind of signature. The swart, handsome features of Domenico Ghirlandaio and the podgy face of Pietro Perugino can be seen peering out from the crowd scenes in various of their frescoes. Some Florentine painters, such as Filippo Lippi and Sandro Botticelli, seem to have repeatedly painted themselves into their works, lending their facial features and head shapes to various of their figures (the evidence suggests that Lippi had a round face and prominent ears). These self-portraits were not necessarily the consequence of narcissism, unconscious or otherwise; they may simply have resulted from the sheer convenience of the artist looking into a mirror and enlisting himself as a model.
²³

Leonardo believed such a practice was to be avoided, stressing that painters should try to avoid producing in their work faces “which have some resemblance to your own.”
²⁴
Ironically, however, he was accused of filling his own works with self-portraits. In the 1490s, a poet attached to the Sforza court, Gasparo Visconti, lampooned an unnamed artist in a work called “Against a Bad Painter.” He complained that this painter’s favorite subject was himself because he “holds firmly in his mind his own image, / And when he paints others, it often happens / That he paints none other than himself.” According to Visconti, this artist tended to reproduce not only his own face—“however handsome it may be”—but also his own “actions and ways.”
²⁵

Leonardo is usually understood as the target of Visconti’s attack. However, it is difficult to know exactly what paintings or self-portraits the poet was referring to—though there are at least two candidates for Leonardo self-portraits in
The Last Supper
. Certain faces do recur in Leonardo’s paintings and, even more so, in his drawings. Two in particular are memorable. The first is an angelic youth with curly hair and an androgynous face, the second a more virile figure, a fierce-looking older man with a hooked nose and jutting chin. It is hard to distinguish Leonardo—who was in his midforties when Visconti’s verses were written—in either of these distinctive types.

Visconti wrote his verses around the time Leonardo was working on
The Last Supper
. If he was indeed thinking of Leonardo, his objections must have arisen from what he saw as the painter’s excessive self-portraiture in the mural—the fact, presumably, that Leonardo used himself as the model for various of the apostles, even down to having them imitate, with their gestures, his own “actions and ways.”

Visconti was a friend of Bramante and also, no doubt, of Leonardo: the poem’s tone is one of good-natured ribbing rather than vehement critique, and Leonardo even owned a copy of Visconti’s sonnets. Visconti had the advantage—denied to us today—of knowing exactly what Leonardo looked and acted like. Leonardo’s actual physical appearance is yet another of his enigmas. We have few clues as to what Leonardo looked like at the time of
The Last Supper
. Details about his taste for purple capes and pink hats may be gleaned from his clothing inventories. A handwritten list dating from a decade after
The Last Supper
indicates that by his midfifties, at the latest, he wore glasses and, in bed, a nightcap.
²⁶
But of his facial features and general appearance—beyond the comments on his physical beauty given by various early biographers (none of whom ever actually saw or met him)—we have virtually nothing.

Leonardo is known to have executed at least one self-portrait: a Florentine poet claimed to have seen one done in charcoal, but the work has long since vanished.
²⁷
The only figure in one of his paintings with any credibility as a self-portrait is the figure in the lower right-hand corner of his
Adoration of the Magi
: a handsome, brooding man set apart from the fray who averts his attention from the kneeling Magi and the Christ Child to look at something beyond the bounds of the picture. But since the altarpiece was never finished the features remain frustratingly obscure.

Lack of knowledge about Leonardo’s physical appearance has not deterred art historians from putting forward various candidates for self-portraits. Leonardo spotting has become a popular pastime, and his features have been identified in everything from his famous
Vitruvian Man
drawing (done in the late 1480s) to a needle-nosed character who looks out with a lazy-eyed stare from beneath the lines of mirror script on a page of his
Codex on the Flight of Birds
.
²⁸
However, some thirty years would pass after the
Adoration
self-portrait before Leonardo definitively reappeared, this time in a red chalk drawing by one of his assistants, probably Francesco Melzi. Sketched in about 1515, it shows Leonardo in profile: a regal, classically handsome figure in middle age, with a Greek nose and wavy, flowing hair, slightly receding, and a long beard. This is surely the portrait that inspired later writers, such as Vasari and the Anonimo Gaddiano, to enthuse over Leonardo’s grace and beauty.