Leonardo and the Last Supper (38 page)

These descriptions of John drinking from the Lord’s breast were developed in the Middle Ages into the cult of the Sacred Heart, which regarded Jesus’s heart as the symbol of his love for humanity and a source from which devotees could imbibe grace and wisdom. Its most famous expression
is found in
The Herald of Divine Love
by the Benedictine nun Gertrude of Helfta. Gertrude’s work describes a vision she received during Holy Week in 1289, when she rested her head on Jesus’s left arm, near the wound in his side, and heard the “loving pulsation” of his heart. The Sacred Heart was represented in art by the image of a beardless and youthful St. John leaning on Jesus’s breast. The pair was sometimes shown holding hands like a bride and bridegroom: an image of contented mystical matrimony.
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Painters of Last Supper scenes during the Renaissance had the cult of the Sacred Heart in mind when they showed Jesus and John seated intimately together at the table. Many portrayed John sitting to Christ’s left, with his head over Christ’s heart. Equally, the cult of the Sacred Heart could have been influenced by images of the Last Supper, since the earliest known work of art to feature John leaning on Jesus’s bosom at the Last Supper (on the bronze door of the basilica of San Zeno in Verona) predated Gertrude by some two centuries.

The marriage hinted at in
The Last Supper
is therefore not a secret one between Jesus and Mary Magdalene but rather the much-celebrated mystical union between Jesus and the beloved disciple. As we have seen, one of Leonardo’s sketches experimented with the idea of placing John asleep on Christ’s breast (in the same way that it experimented with—and finally abandoned—the idea of placing Judas on the opposite side of the table). His description of how to paint a Last Supper makes no mention of this tableau, offering instead a scenario much closer to what he actually painted: “Another speaks into his neighbour’s ear and he, as he listens to him, turns towards him to lend an ear.” Ever concerned with action and movement, Leonardo chose to depict the scene that occurred a second or two later than that portrayed by all the other representations: not the still vignette that finds John asleep on the bosom of Christ, but rather John awake—albeit barely—and in the act of listening to Peter’s importunate question, “Who is it of whom he speaks?”

CHAPTER 13
Food and Drink

Leonardo was, famously, a vegetarian. In 1516 an Italian traveler to India wrote home to Giuliano de’ Medici, the son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, that the Indians were a “gentle people ... who do not feed on anything that has blood, nor will they allow anyone to hunt living things, like our Leonardo da Vinci.”
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Leonardo’s shopping lists attest to an apparently vegetarian diet: kidney beans, white and red maize, millet, buckwheat, peas, grapes, mushrooms, fruit, and bran. “Have some ears of corn of large size sent from Florence,” reads a note written around the time he painted
The Last Supper
. Corn was a completely new food in Italy, having been introduced to Europe from the Americas only a few years previously. Leonardo had evidently developed a taste for this exotic new import.
²

When precisely Leonardo became a vegetarian is unknown. Meat does turn up on several of his lists: one of them, from 1504, records the purchase of “good beef.”
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However, he was probably supplying it to his assistants and
apprentices rather than to himself. Certain writings from his years in Milan in the 1490s clearly demonstrate that he regarded eating flesh with revulsion. “Oh! how foul a thing, that we should see the tongue of one animal in the guts of another,” he wrote of the sausage. He was disturbed by the paradox of life sustaining itself on the death of something else. “Our life is made by the death of others,” he wrote in his notes on physiology. “In dead matter insensible life remains, which, reunited to the stomachs of living beings, resumes life, both sensual and intellectual.” The image of dead animals coming back to life in our bellies is enough to give second thoughts, surely, to even the most enthusiastic of carnivores.
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Leonardo’s writings from this period also reveal his outrage at the mistreatment of animals. He offered a horrified and gruesome litany of animals caught in traps, eaten by their owners, or treated with “blows, and goadings, and curses, and great abuse.”
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In this context we can believe the famous story told by Vasari of how Leonardo used to buy caged birds only to release them into the air, “giving them back their lost freedom.”
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Leonardo was, in this respect, different from so many other Italians. Blood sports were popular pastimes at all Italian courts, including Lodovico’s, with courtiers and visiting dignitaries regularly descending on the duke’s country home at Vigevano to slaughter stags, boars, and wolves. Even Beatrice was a dedicated participant, “always either riding or hunting,” as Lodovico boasted in a letter to his sister-in-law.
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Leonardo’s assistant Tommaso Masini—the eccentric dabbler known as Zoroastro—was also a vegetarian: a later source claimed that he wore linen because he could not bear to wear dead animals, and that he “would not for anything kill a flea.”
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Other vegetarians in Italy at this time were members of the mendicant orders. Luca Pacioli was probably a vegetarian because the Franciscans, following the example of St. Francis, abstained from meat. St. Francis himself offered a precedent for Leonardo’s love of the animal kingdom: he was said to have freed animals from traps, preached a sermon to the birds, and tamed the man-eating wolf of Gubbio. St. Dominic likewise abstained from meat, and the Dominican Constitutions urged friars to forego flesh except in the case of serious illness.
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That Leonardo took any inspiration for his vegetarianism from the religious orders seems unlikely. The Dominicans avoided meat not because they objected to the cruelty inflicted on animals, but because eating meat
was a pleasure of the flesh that needed to be denied lest it expose a friar to other dangers and temptations: Aquinas, as we have seen, believed meat stimulated sexual appetites and produced a surplus of “seminal matter.” Nonetheless, vegetarianism was one of the few things that Leonardo and the friars of Santa Maria delle Grazie shared in common.

Given that he was painting a dinner scene, Leonardo probably paid attention to how the friars ate their meal in the refectory—to their food and the other accoutrements of their table. After all, Last Supper scenes painted in refectories were meant to reflect the communal meal taken by nuns or friars, allowing them to identify with one of the most important episodes in the Passion. Like so many other artists, Leonardo accommodated certain features of his painting to its setting. As Goethe noted, “Christ was to celebrate his Last Supper among the Dominicans at Milan.” Visiting Santa Maria delle Grazie at the end of the eighteenth century, the German poet believed that the original configuration of tables was still evident. The prior’s table stood opposite the entrance, raised a step above the ground, while the friars’ tables ran lengthwise down either side of the room. He conjectured that Leonardo took these tables as the model for the one in his painting. There is no doubt, he wrote, “that the tablecloth, with its pleated folds, its stripes and figures, and even the knots at the corners, was borrowed from the laundry of the convent. Dishes, plates, cups, and other utensils were probably likewise copied from those which the monks made use of.”
¹⁰

Goethe’s instinct was probably right. The knots in the corner of the tablecloth are a nice touch, and it is easy to imagine the tablecloth in the mural reflecting those spread on the refectory tables. In earlier centuries, Leonardo’s depiction of the tablecloth, food, and utensils excited much comment and admiration. A French priest visiting Santa Maria delle Grazie in 1515 described Leonardo’s painting as “a thing of extraordinary excellence,” and what he singled out for special praise was the table setting: “because as one sees the bread on the table one would say that it is actual bread, not simulated. The same can be said of the wine, the glasses, the vessels, the table and tablecloth.”
¹¹
Vasari, too, reserved high praise for the tablecloth, noting that its texture “is counterfeited so cunningly that the linen itself could not look more realistic.”
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Four hundred years later, the pleasures of Leonardo’s table were what attracted Andy Warhol to the painting. The artist who made his name with soup cans and Coke bottles claimed that he “felt comfortable
with the subject of food” and, excited about the opportunity to “update Leonardo’s dining scene,” went on to produce forty paintings and silk screens of
The Last Supper
.
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Warhol died in 1987, a dozen years before the most recent conservation of this “dining scene” was completed. This cleaning of the painting has allowed us to appreciate, as previous generations could not, these still-life details. Prominent in the lifelike tableware is the cruet of water that sits before James the Greater: Leonardo captured not only the transparency of the glass (through which we see the plate behind it) but also the reflection of light on its bulbous surface: a truly virtuoso performance.

If Leonardo took his models for the tablecloth and utensils from the convent, other details in the painting created a sharp contrast with the humble and spartan refectory. The walls of the room in which Christ and the apostles take their meal are hung with eight tapestries, four on each lateral wall. These tapestries have a floral design similar to the
millefleurs
(thousand flowers) pattern of fifteenth-century Flemish tapestries (with the finicky details no doubt left to Leonardo’s apprentices). The appearance of these tapestries introduces a contemporary courtly note into the scene, and one alien to the experience of the friars at Santa Maria delle Grazie, whose walls would have been bare of such ornate decor. Flemish tapestries were popular and prestigious decorations at Italian courts. Their beauty and expense made them conspicuous markers of wealth and magnificence. The wedding feast for Lodovico Sforza’s brother Galeazzo Maria saw the main piazza in Pavia draped with sumptuous tapestries. Without this opulent display, a courtier explained to the groom’s mother, “we would be put to great shame.”
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In Milan, many rooms in the Castello Sforzesco were hung with tapestries. Lodovico’s father, Francesco, had brought four master weavers from Flanders to Milan, and before his death in 1466 another five had arrived to assist them. In Lodovico’s day, the tapestries in the Castello were valued at more than 150,000 ducats.
¹⁵
None of the tapestries woven for the Castello survives, but Leonardo may well have taken from them the pattern for the tapestries in
The Last Supper
, thereby deliberately suggesting a link between his mural and the grandeur of the Sforza court.
¹⁶

One indication of the value and importance of tapestries comes from a few decades later. For his marriage in 1514, the future King François I of France was given the gift of a Flemish tapestry that in 1533 he ceremoniously
presented to Pope Clement VII. The scene depicted on this tapestry was Leonardo’s
Last Supper
.

Painters of Last Suppers had only a few indications from the Gospels about the food and drink served to Jesus and the apostles. These clues are sometimes ambiguous and conflicting. Matthew gave a very compressed account of the Last Supper. He stated that it was the Passover feast, from which we can assume (though he did not say) that a lamb and unleavened bread were served. Mark and Luke likewise indicated that the Last Supper took place at Passover, and so when the apostles “made ready the pasch” (Luke 22:13) their preparations would have involved a lamb and unleavened bread. Like Matthew, both added the scene in which Christ shares bread and wine with the apostles.

John’s account is, typically, rather different. He clearly stated that the Last Supper took place several days before the Passover feast, so lamb was presumably not on the menu. The only food he mentioned is the bread that Jesus dips and then offers to Judas. John did not describe the institution of the Eucharist and so there is no reference to a chalice of wine.

What was an artist to make of these various descriptions? The Gospels were certainly rich in drama, with the startling announcement of the traitor in the midst of the apostles and the description (in Matthew, Mark, and Luke) of the institution of the Eucharist. But props were lacking for the painter, who needed to use his imagination to furnish the table with food and drink.