Leonardo and the Last Supper (44 page)

This kind of Leonardo spotting must stay stuck, for lack of further evidence, in the realm of speculation. What is more certain is that the friars of Santa Maria delle Grazie, looking at the gesticulating apostles, would have seen revealed in their gestures, not merely human emotions realistically and eloquently portrayed, but also clear and unmistakable allusions to the Christian story.

Painters were always careful to identify the traitor at the Last Supper. Often Judas reaches for the bread offered by Christ or else, in an unholy communion, opens his mouth to receive the sop. Sometimes he sits on the opposite side of the table from Christ and the other apostles, while in other paintings he is the lone apostle without a halo. Cosimo Rosselli’s
Last Supper
in the Sistine Chapel shows him with a dark halo and, lest there be any lingering doubts about his identity, a winged demon perched on his shoulder. Some versions show Judas with a fish or other item of food concealed behind his back. In the Middle Ages, especially in Passion plays, his thieving was emphasized
along with his treachery. “Abjured traitor, thief, money-grubber, faithless man filled with rancour,” fumes a French play of 1486.
²⁴

Leonardo was more subtle than most painters, but his Judas is still unmistakable. Like many other artists, he showed him reaching for the same dish as Christ. However, Leonardo departed from every other painter who included this motif by depicting Judas reaching with his left hand, not his right. Leonardo’s Judas is, like Leonardo himself, a
mancino
. The only other Judas who reaches with his left hand is found in a stained-glass window in Chartres cathedral, though viewed from the other side, this Judas is, naturally, right-handed.

Leonardo, of all people, would have known how left-handedness was regarded with fear and suspicion. The well-known connection between “left-handed” and “sinister” is usually explained with reference to the Roman auguries: a bird or other sign appearing to the left of the priest—on the “sinister” (left) side as opposed to the “dexter” (right)—supposedly foretold unfavorable events. Left-handedness certainly came to be synonymous with bad luck and even evil. In Christianity, the right side of the body was viewed as morally superior and supposedly protected by God. According to St. Augustine, the left hand represented the temporal, the mortal, and the bodily, as opposed to the right, which stood for “God, eternity, the years of God which fail not.”
²⁵
For centuries the preference for the right hand over the left governed how people fished, ploughed fields, twisted rope, and ate their meals. The Greeks and Romans, for example, always reclined on the left side, propped on the left elbow, leaving the right hand free for the business of eating and drinking. Plutarch noted that parents taught children to eat right-handed from a young age, and “if they do put forth the left hand, at once we correct them.”
²⁶
The prejudice against the left hand persisted during the Renaissance, with parents freeing a child’s right hand from its swaddling clothes to ensure right-handedness at the dinner table as well as at the writing desk.

Painters were acutely conscious of the implications of left versus right. In profile portraits, the lady always faced to the left, which meant she was in the position known as the “heraldic sinister” because she was on God’s left hand, while her husband, hierarchically superior, faced to the right.
²⁷
Crucifixion scenes always showed Christ with his head inclined to the right, the side of salvation and eternity. Giovanni da Montorfano followed the usual
pattern: his fresco in Santa Maria delle Grazie shows Christ’s head turned to the right, toward the Good Thief (above whom rises an angel) and away from the Bad Thief (above whom perches a demon) to his left. Among the few left-handers to appear in paintings are witches: artists like Albrecht Dürer and Parmigianino deliberately portrayed them as left-handed.
²⁸

Leonardo’s invention of Judas as a
mancino
therefore cleverly exploits this cluster of negative cultural associations. The sight of someone eating with his left hand would have been highly unusual, the anomaly all the more obvious in a refectory setting. It comes as an unexpected surprise, however, that Leonardo, one of history’s most famous left-handers, should have pressed this antisouthpaw bias into service, though possibly he, more than other artists, was attuned to these negative connotations.

Judas is doing something else besides reaching for food with his left hand: he rears forward and twists sideways and, in doing so, tips over the saltcellar and spills its contents. This gesture—another of Leonardo’s inspired inventions—was anticipated in his earlier description of how to show a group of men dining at a table. One part closely matches (albeit with some modifications) the Peter-Judas-John grouping: “Another speaks into his neighbour’s ear and he, as he listens to him, turns towards him to lend an ear, while he holds a knife in one hand, and in the other the loaf half cut through by the knife. Another who has turned, holding a knife in his hand, upsets with his hand a glass on the table.” Leonardo chose, in the end, to show an overturned saltcellar rather than a glass.

This saltcellar, unfortunately, is no longer visible: every trace of it has been lost due to the mural’s deterioration. It can clearly be seen in many early copies, such as Giampietrino’s and the one at Ponte Capriasca, and there is no question that Leonardo’s mural included a saltcellar. He was not the first artist to put a saltcellar on the table at the Last Supper: they feature in at least two other versions painted in northern Italy in the second half of the fifteenth century.
²⁹
However, he invented the motif of the spilled salt—and in doing so this least superstitious of men became responsible, ironically, for a famous and widespread superstition.

Spilling salt is usually taken as a sign of ill omen. Once again the Roman priests who took the auguries are to blame. Spilling salt was one of a series
of events of calamitous significance that the priests called
dirae
(others included sneezing, spilling wine, hearing certain portentous words or sounds, or seeing apparitions). Saltcellars were symbols of families for the ancient Romans, with Horace praising the “ancestral salt-box” gleaming on the table as an image of stability and domestic bliss. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance the saltcellars of royal families became ornate affairs proclaiming the wealth and status of their owners, and in England a dinner guest sitting “above the salt” occupied a privileged place at the table between the saltcellar and the host. Saltcellars in France were bejeweled and often shaped like ships, and it is easy to imagine that upsetting one of these royal saltcellars—which symbolized the “ship of state”—could be taken as ominous.
³⁰

How much Leonardo knew of these superstitions, or how widespread they were in fifteenth-century Italy, is debatable. What he could have known about, however, is the religious significance of salt. Salt is mentioned many times in both the Old and New Testaments, most famously in Jesus’s metaphor to describe the apostles: “You are the salt of the earth,” he tells them (Matthew 5:13). In the Old Testament, salt was used to seal agreements between God and man, such as the “covenant of salt” by which God gave the kingdom of Israel to David and his descendants (2 Chronicles 13:5). This phrase probably originated because salt, as a preservative, readily symbolized something that endured. Also, salt was necessary to make offerings to God: “Whatsoever sacrifice you offer,” stipulates the Book of Leviticus, “you shall season it with salt” (2:13). Salt was believed by the ancient Hebrews to have healing or talismanic powers. The prophet Elisha purified Jericho’s toxic water supply by casting salt into its springs (2 Kings 2:19–24), and newborn children were rubbed with salt (Ezekiel 16:4).

This latter practice—which links salt with the preservation of health—survived in Florence: a small supply of salt left with a child dropped anonymously at the Ospedale degli Innocenti, the foundling hospital, meant the infant was unbaptized.
³¹
Besides preserving health, the salt was probably also meant to protect the infant from evil spirits. Consecrated salt, sprinkled like holy water, was used against witches and demons, and in some countries it was thrown on gypsies.
³²

Although Leonardo may have been aware of these associations, he need not have turned to his Bible or folk superstitions to appreciate the importance of salt. The nature of salt fascinated him: its origins and composition,
and the fact that, as he wrote, it “is in all created things.” His manuscripts include a series of notes refuting Pliny the Elder’s argument about why the sea is salty. His discussion veers off in an interesting direction when he begins considering the necessity of salt (which he views as essential to life) to the human diet. Leonardo observed that humans have “eternally been and would always be consumers of salt.” But how long, he wondered, will supplies last? Was the world’s supply of salt finite, in which case humans would die out when they use it all up? Or was it renewable and self-replenishing? He decided on the latter because salt recycles itself through our bodies, “either in the urine or the sweat or other excretions where it is found again,” thereby ensuring an undiminishing supply (even if we would eventually need to source it from “places where there is urine”). The interesting thing about these comments is the quasi-religious language Leonardo employed to describe salt: he pondered whether it “dies and is born again like the men who devour it” or whether it is “everlasting,” concluding that it must be everlasting because not even fire can destroy it.

Salt therefore had a range of possible meanings for Leonardo and the first spectators of
The Last Supper
, the Dominican friars: essential to human life and an image of endless renewal, while symbolizing not only the apostles’ and man’s covenant with God but also good health and good luck. The spillage of salt at such a crucial moment—the announcement of the traitor—was at best a bad omen and at worst a kind of desecration.

Spilling salt is, of course, still regarded as a dire omen by people in modern nations: a recent study found that 50 percent of people in England admit to throwing salt over their shoulders to ward off bad luck if the saltshaker overturns.
³³
Ironically for Leonardo, the man who did more than anyone to popularize this superstition, we counter the ill omen by throwing a pinch of salt over our left shoulder—because the devil, naturally, appears on our left.

Judas is performing yet another gesture in
The Last Supper
: Leonardo shows him clutching his purse of ill-gotten gains. This action is in keeping with the Gospels, which describe Judas as the keeper of the communal purse and, of course, as the traitor who betrays Jesus for (according to the Gospel of St. Matthew) thirty pieces of silver. Yet the sight of Judas clutching a purse is much rarer than we might expect in Last Suppers: Perugino, in a
fresco done a few years earlier in Florence, is one of the few other artists to feature the motif. Later, in 1512, the Tuscan painter Luca Signorelli would paint a version showing Judas, in a brazen act of theft, furtively slipping the Eucharist into his money bag.