Leonardo and the Last Supper (42 page)

Leonardo’s sketches of hands in various poses

Other pairs of hands also fascinated Leonardo. When he first arrived in Milan, he must have met Cristoforo de’ Predis, the father of the brothers Ambrogio and Evangelista. Cristoforo was a successful artist in his own right, a talented miniaturist who had illustrated books for Galeazzo Maria Sforza. He was also a deaf-mute. Leonardo, with his typically insatiable curiosity, observed how deaf-mutes like Cristoforo were able to communicate by using both facial expressions and “the movements of their hands.” He urged young painters to study “the motions of the dumb” in order to understand how best to convey thoughts or emotions. He observed how deaf people could understand what was said to them through their ability to interpret the hand gestures of a speaker: “Thus it is with a deaf and dumb person who, when he sees two men in conversation—although he is deprived of hearing—can nevertheless understand, from the attitudes and gestures of the speakers, the nature of their discussion.” For Leonardo, a person looking at a painting (which he calls “dumb poetry”) was like a deaf person studying an animated conversation: he could understand what was happening through the language of gesture.
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Paintings were a sort of dumb show, in other words, whereby the figures were to signal “the purpose in their minds” through their body language and hand gestures.

Hand gestures and facial expressions abound in Leonardo’s paintings, but nowhere more so than in
The Last Supper
. A wide array of gestures and actions suggest the apostles’ shocked, puzzled, angry, or sorrowful reactions to Christ’s announcement. The painting is a brouhaha of pointing and gesticulation. “What a pack of vehement, gesticulating, noisy foreigners they are,” Bernard Berenson once complained.
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Philip’s hands touch his breast, James the Greater’s are thrown wide, while John’s are demurely clasped together. James the Lesser touches Peter’s shoulder, and Peter in turn touches the shoulder of John with one hand, while in the other he clutches a knife. Andrew, Matthew, and Simon all open or extend their hands in gestures that can be interpreted as—well, what exactly?

Several of the apostles perform gestures whose significance is far from apparent. Some are downright puzzling and ambiguous. What, for example, are we to make of the hand gestures of Thaddeus, the apostle second from the right? His right hand cups the air, thumb extended, perhaps pointing at someone in an accusative jerk, while his left hand rests somewhat awkwardly on the table. Over the years, various commentators have tried to explain Thaddeus’s gesture. One claimed the thumb points to Christ as he vows that he, Thaddeus, is not the guilty party. Another maintained that Thaddeus is telling Simon (on his left) to trust the report of Matthew (on his right), whom he indicates with his thumb. Yet another viewer of the painting believed Thaddeus was “pointing his thumb surreptitiously at Judas,” thereby identifying him as the culprit.

The apostle Thaddeus

One thumb, three different targets—and each reading imputes a different purpose. Goethe, meanwhile, did not believe Thaddeus was pointing at anyone. Instead, he is about to strike the back of his right hand into the palm of his left, a distinctive gesture whose meaning, Goethe says, is clear: “Did I not tell you so! Did I not always suspect it!”
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So Thaddeus, in these interpretations, is doing everything from protesting his innocence to saying, “I told you so!”

As Goethe noted, by using hand gestures Leonardo was capitalizing on what we have come to think of as a national trait. The great German poet, fluent in Italian and steeped in the culture, claimed the Italians had at their disposal an entire repertoire of hand gestures. By a “varied position and
motion of the hands” they could signify such things as: “What do I care!” or “This is a rogue!” or “Attend to this, ye that hear me!”
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Undoubtedly Italians use hand gestures and body language more creatively and prolifically than other European cultures. In 1832 a priest and curator from Naples named Andrea de Jorio published
La Mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano
(
Gestural Expression of the Ancients in the Light of Neapolitan Gesturing
). De Jorio wished to see how the expressive gestures of a living population—namely, his fellow Neapolitans—might help explain the gestures and postures seen in ancient statues, vases, and frescoes such as those found near Naples at Herculaneum and Pompeii. He believed a “perfect resemblance” existed between the gesturing of his fellow Neapolitans and that of their distant ancestors buried under Vesuvius’s pyroclastic flow.
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What de Jorio produced was an illustrated catalog of gestures and expressions that documents the wide repertoire used by Neapolitans (and by Italians more generally) not only in the nineteenth century but—as he suspected—back and forth across the centuries. Some are still practiced to-day, such as the
mano cornuto
, or “horn hand,” in which the middle and ring fingers are held down with the index finger and pinkie extended. Or the beseeching gesture where the palm is turned upward and fingers and thumb are extended and joined in a point—which means, de Jorio explained, “What are you talking about?” He also described the familiar gesture he called
negativa
: the outside tips of the fingers are held upright under the chin and then pushed violently forward, indicating that the subject “wishes to distance his head from whatever is offered to him or proposed that does not please him.” Other gestures are familiar not only today but also from examples in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The obscene
mano in fica
or “fig hand”—thumb protruding between the middle and index finger of a fist—appears both in Dante’s
Inferno
and on the vault of the Sistine Chapel, where one of Michelangelo’s irreverent putti performs it.
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A page from Andrea de Jorio’s treatise on hand gestures

Yet de Jorio makes sober reading for anyone hoping to decipher the purpose in the minds of the apostles in Leonardo’s
Last Supper
. The hand gestures of Italians are not, apparently, as clear-cut as Goethe believed. De Jorio discovered that knowing the purpose of someone’s mind through hand gestures was no easy business. A single gesture could have many different significations. Even the
mano infica
turned out to have three different interpretations: it could mean the subject was warding off evil, or dishing out an insult, or making “a kind of offensive or impertinent invitation.” Thirteen different gestures meant “no,” while the
mano cornuto
possessed, by de Jorio’s reckoning, no fewer than fifteen different meanings: everything from defending someone against an evil spell to threatening to gouge out their eyes. Someone sitting with their fingers interlaced was either feeling sad or else trying to cast a spell on a woman giving birth.
^e
Even a simple gesture such as raising the hands in the air had numerous potential meanings: acclamation, ridicule, a request, a dismissal, an entreaty, a surprise.

There are, wrote de Jorio, “various small modifications in the gesture that determine its particular meaning in each case.”
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The meaning of a particular action of the hand was understood only in terms of the positioning of the entire body, the facial expression, and the direction of the glance. Gesture, stressed de Jorio, always needed context, including that of the conversation
itself. Even the slightest change in the orientation of a hand could radically change the meaning of a particular gesture.

The context for the gestures in
The Last Supper
is, of course, a religious one, because the mural illustrates a story from the Gospels, and because its initial audience was a group of Dominican friars. These friars were the ones to whom, above all, the actions of the apostles needed to speak.

Bodily movement was vital to the vocation of the Dominicans. They were preachers, and as public speakers who addressed the masses in city squares they understood, as few others did, the value of gesture and movement. Numerous books on rhetoric and the art of preaching instructed them in how to use gesture to enhance their sermons. The most famous and influential of them, Quintilian’s
Institutio oratoria
, instructed speakers to use “the language of the hands” to communicate their thoughts, emotions, and intentions.
¹¹
When Leonardo praised “good orators” as an example for young painters to study because they “accompany their words with gestures of their hands and arms,” he was probably telling his students to watch—among other things—the sermons of Dominican friars.
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Although Leonardo likely never saw him speak, the most electrifying orator of the fifteenth century was a Dominican, Girolamo Savonarola, who expressed himself with “lively and almost violent gesticulations.”
¹³

Gesture also had a more private significance for the Dominicans, serving them in the cloister as well as in the piazza. Because monks and friars were obliged to observe silence for many hours of the day, including in the refectory, a language of gesture was developed (initially by the Benedictines and Cistercians) to help them communicate. Among the several hundred signs were ones for affirmation (“lift your arm gently...so that the back of the hand faces the beholder”), demonstration (“a thing one has seen may be noted by opening the palm of the hand in its direction”), and grief (“pressing the breast of the palm with the hand”). Individual gestures were even developed in some monasteries to refer to bread, fish, and vegetables.
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Like deaf-mutes, therefore, the Dominicans would have been adept at miming their intentions and emotions, a spectacle Leonardo surely must have witnessed during his time at Santa Maria delle Grazie.

The Dominicans used ritualized movements to communicate with saints and martyrs as well as with their fellow friars. An illustrated Dominican prayer manual,
De modo orandi
, taught novices how to use physical gestures to improve their prayers and meditations. The treatise maintained that specific
bodily postures, based on those used by St. Dominic, could be used to induce certain psychological states. All of Dominic’s gestures were carefully described and examined: “Sometimes he would hold his hands out, open before his breast, like an open book... At other times, he joined his hands and held them tightly fastened together in front of his eyes, hunching himself up.” Humility he achieved with a bow, ecstasy by standing with his hands joined together and raised over his head, and penitence through self-flagellation. Many of these postures found their way into paintings.
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The Dominicans of Santa Maria delle Grazie were an audience highly literate in the language of gesture. What, then, might they have made of Leonardo’s gesticulating apostles?