Leonardo and the Last Supper (41 page)

Leonardo’s notes reveal his undeniable fascination with the dynamics of
how people speak, listen, ask questions, or convey emotions with their faces, hands, and bodies. Even so, there is more to the painting than merely the revelation of betrayal and the subsequent responses. Crucially, Jesus is performing other actions besides announcing the presence of the traitor. Leonardo clearly regarded the hands of Christ to be essential to his composition. These hands were so fundamental that Alessandro Carissimi da Parma—a man with, presumably, elegant and expressive hands—was conscripted as a model: evidently not just any pair of hands would do. Christ’s hands are also quite literally central to the composition, since they help form the equilateral triangle at the center of the painting. To ignore these hands is therefore to miss an important aspect of the mural.

With his right hand Jesus reaches toward the same dish to which Judas, two seats away, is likewise reaching. As they approach the dish, their two hands, skillfully foreshortened and almost mirror images of one another, suggest the line from Matthew: “He that dips his hand with me in the dish, he shall betray me.” Yet the dish, and Judas’s guilty hand, are not the only objects that Jesus’s hand approaches: he is reaching, simultaneously, for the wineglass in front of him. Indeed, two joints of his pinkie and the ball of his third fingers are seen, in yet another bedazzling show of painterly skill, only through the transparency of the wineglass. This display must originally have been so conspicuous and arresting that only the paint loss could have caused earlier viewers to miss the fact that Jesus is about to share the wine with the apostles.

The left hand of Jesus is likewise in motion, indicating—with much subtlety and restraint in the midst of so much frantic gesticulation—the bread that sits within easy reach. More than that: Jesus is looking directly at the bread, which, despite the commotion that surrounds him, is the sole object of his gaze. Leonardo was extraordinarily astute in his understanding of visual perception, and through single-point perspective he carefully controlled how the viewer experiences his painting. The perspective draws our attention to the face of Christ at the center of the composition, and Christ’s face, through his down-turned gaze, directs our focus along the diagonal of his left arm to his hand and, therefore, the bread. If Goethe and so many others once missed or ignored this graceful but obvious gesture, to the Dominicans of Santa Maria delle Grazie it would have been overt and unmistakable: the friars would have known they were seeing Christ about to administer the holy bread to his apostles.

It would have been unusual to say the least for a painter to cover a wall
in a Dominican convent with a work that was “not fundamentally religious in character.” While Franciscan art, such as Giotto’s at Assisi, excelled at offering inspiring narratives from biblical and church history, Dominican art was often meant to reinforce doctrinal issues. One such issue in which the Dominicans, as the church’s spiritual enforcers, took an acute interest was transubstantiation. This doctrine was established in 1215 in the opening creed of the Fourth Lateran Council, which stated that the body and blood of Christ “are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine.” Given its philosophical justification later in the century by Aquinas, a Dominican, the sacrament was celebrated after 1264 in the Feast of Corpus Christi. By the end of the thirteenth century, the Eucharist was the church’s most important sacrament. The entire philosophy of the church depended on the miracle of a wafer turning into flesh and wine into blood.
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In our secular age, with altarpieces removed from their original locations in chapels and hung on the walls of public museums, paintings can easily be seen for their artistic qualities alone. Italians during the fifteenth century certainly appreciated and celebrated these aesthetic values, but works of art also had another dimension for them. Paintings were invested with holiness because venerating an image of Christ or the Virgin was, according to the Council of Nicaea, tantamount to venerating Christ or the Virgin themselves, who could then intercede on behalf of the praying community. Giotto’s monumental altarpiece, the
Ognissanti Madonna
, is nowadays celebrated—quite rightly—as a landmark in the history of art because of its convincing illusion of depth and its realistic-looking treatment of facial features and bodily form. However, it was originally painted in the first decade of the fourteenth century not for purely formal and aesthetic reasons, but rather, primarily, to invite the intercession of the Virgin on behalf of the local religious community of Umiliati monks. Likewise, Leonardo’s
Last Supper
was created not for the art historians and tour groups of a later, secular age, but for a band of Dominican friars who ritually commemorated Christ’s sacrifice through the celebration of the Eucharist.

How Leonardo’s contemporaries and immediate successors viewed his works for something more than their aesthetic qualities can be seen in the case of his
Virgin of the Rocks
. The altarpiece was believed to possess, like many religious paintings, special powers of intercession. During an outbreak of plague in 1576 the local people turned to Leonardo’s altarpiece (then installed
in San Francesco Grande) to save them, dedicating special Masses of devotion to the image. The qualities they believed would save them were not those we appreciate today—the dramatic scenery and the sensitive handling of light and shade—but rather the fact that Leonardo had depicted the Virgin Mary.
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There is another example. In 1501, the brutal warlord Cesare Borgia was threatening to invade Florence. At the same time, a Leonardo cartoon featuring the Virgin and her mother, St. Anne, was unveiled in Florence, causing a sensation. When it was exhibited, according to Vasari, “a crowd of men and women, young and old,...flocked there, as if they were attending a great festival, to gaze in amazement at the marvels he had created.”
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The temptation is to compare these huge crowds to those who swarm up the steps of today’s museums to gaze in amazement at blockbuster Leonardo exhibitions. Yet Frederick Hartt has pointed out that in Florence these crowds may well have been drawn to the cartoon less for reasons of artistic appreciation than because St. Anne was considered to be the special protectress of the city. These enthusiasts, Hartt writes, could have been “less a testament to Leonardo’s genius than an invocation to this mighty guardian against the menace of a new and pitiless master.”
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Religion, not art, was the major attraction. St. Anne and the Virgin were the draw, not Leonardo.

One other reason makes it inconceivable that Leonardo should not have included a sacramental or religious aspect to his
Last Supper
. Lodovico Sforza intended to turn Santa Maria delle Grazie into a shrine for himself and his family. By 1497, his plans for a Sforza mausoleum had suddenly assumed a tragic urgency.

The failure of Maximilian’s Italian expedition in the autumn of 1496 was the first of Lodovico’s misfortunes, the earliest indication that Il Moro no longer held the fate of the world in his hands. The second blow fell even before Maximilian left Italian soil. The emperor was on his way to Pavia, where the delights of Lodovico’s banqueting table awaited him, when news reached him that there had been a death in Il Moro’s family, and that more sober observations were in order.

Besides his two sons from Beatrice, Lodovico was the father of at least two illegitimate children. At the end of 1496 his latest mistress, Lucrezia
Crivelli, was pregnant, while two earlier concubines—Bernardina de Corradis and Cecilia Gallerani—had each given him a child. Cecilia’s son, born in 1491, was grandly christened Cesare Sforza Visconti and celebrated in sonnets by Lodovico’s court poets. He lived with his mother, who had gracefully retired to one of Milan’s grandest homes, the Palazzo del Verme. Bernardina’s child, a girl named Bianca, born about 1482, received even greater marks of affection. Legitimized by her father, she became great friends with Beatrice and was betrothed at a young age to the dashing Galeazzo Sanseverino. She even had her portrait done by Leonardo, a chalk sketch on vellum produced on the occasion of her marriage.
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She and Galeazzo were married in the summer of 1496, but the following November, aged only thirteen or fourteen, she died at Vigevano, probably from complications of a pregnancy.

Bianca was buried in the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, her death plunging Lodovico’s court into mourning. Now heavy with child, Beatrice made frequent visits to the Dominican church to pray at the tomb of her beloved young companion. After one such visit, on 2 January 1497, she returned to the Castello and was taken ill. Delivered that evening of a stillborn child, a boy, she died shortly after midnight. Her death was attended by suitably frightening omens: the sky above the Castello blazed with flames and the walls of her enclosed garden toppled to the ground. “And from that time,” wrote a Venetian chronicler, “the duke began to be sore troubled, and to suffer great woes, having up to that time lived very happily.” Or as another witness put it, the death of the duchess meant that “everything went into ruins, and the Court was changed from a happy paradise into a gloomy hell.”
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Beatrice’s body was taken from the Castello by pallbearers who included ambassadors from both Maximilian and the king of Spain. “We bore her to Santa Maria delle Grazie,” the ambassador from Ferrara wrote to Beatrice’s father, “attended by an innumerable company of monks and nuns and priests.” In the streets, he reported, there was “the greatest lamentation that was ever seen.”
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At Santa Maria delle Grazie her body was carried up the steps of the high altar, under Bramante’s dome, where she was laid on a bier draped with a golden cloth bearing the arms of the House of Sforza. She was interred next to Bianca, while Cristoforo Solari was commissioned to carve her tomb from Carrara marble.

The beautification of Santa Maria delle Grazie henceforth became an
even higher priority for Lodovico. New altars were dedicated in honor of St. Louis and St. Beatrice, the patron saints of Lodovico and his late duchess. Solari was also engaged to carve reliefs for the high altar, and the grieving Lodovico lavished gifts on the Dominican convent: chalices, a jewel-encrusted crucifix, several candelabra, an embroidered altar cloth, illuminated choir books with jeweled bindings, and even a new organ. He planned to convene a team of architectural experts to design a facade for the church. And Lodovico suddenly became anxious for Leonardo, working only a few yards away from Beatrice’s last resting-place, to complete his painting in the refectory.

CHAPTER 14
The Language of the Hands

There is no reason to doubt that Beatrice’s death caused the “greatest lamentation” in Milan. The Italians were notably demonstrative in their grief. The death of a loved one might cause bereaved friends and relatives to wail in the streets, tear apart their clothing, beat their breasts, and tear out their hair by the roots. Such intemperate displays were not limited to women: men, too, gathered in public to weep openly and chant elegies together. These spectacles eventually became so extreme that in the Middle Ages a number of cities introduced legislation to prohibit such violent histrionics. Spies were sent to funerals and the grief stricken could face heavy fines and sometimes beatings. But the authorities were fighting a losing battle. Emotional outbursts were, it seems, part of the culture. Long after the legislation was enacted, Petrarch was still complaining about the “loud and indecent wailing” of people grieving in the streets.
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Italians were equally demonstrative in their other emotions, and Goethe believed this habit of impassioned expression was a boon for Leonardo
when he came to paint
The Last Supper
. “In this nation,” he wrote, “the whole body is animated, every member, every limb participates in any expression of feeling, of passion, and even of thought.” Furthermore, the Italians had a “national peculiarity” to use distinctive hand gestures and body language when they spoke: a resource that was, he believed, obvious to an Italian like Leonardo when he came to paint
The Last Supper
.
²

Leonardo was fascinated, as no one before him, by the expressive possibilities of the human hand. Among the studies for his unfinished
Adoration of the Magi
are two sheets of paper covered with drawings of hands in various poses sketched from every conceivable angle. The hands in question are probably those of a musician, perhaps one of Leonardo’s friends such as Atalante Migliorotti (to whom he supposedly gave music lessons): a left hand, at any rate, is poised gracefully on the neck of what looks to be a musical instrument. Likewise, one of Leonardo’s notebooks features a drawing of a woman playing a lute, her left hand adeptly positioned on the fingerboard.
³
Watching his own hands or those of his students holding the long bow of a
lira da braccio
, or dancing along the instrument’s fingerboard, may have awakened him to the hand’s possibilities for beauty and expression.