Leonardo and the Last Supper (46 page)

The story is typical of the crackpottery that follows Leonardo. It is riddled with numerous errors, such as the length of time it assumes that Leonardo took to paint the mural and the fact that not even several lifetimes of the most unbridled debauchery could turn the features of Jesus into those of Judas. Occasionally the story is even set in Rome, not Milan, and
The Last Supper
is said to have been painted on canvas, not a wall. But such stories seldom founder on the rocks of hard fact, and in the past decade it has been related uncritically in at least eight different books. The legend of Pietro Bandinelli sails determinedly on, as difficult to sink as the equally fictitious stories about golden rectangles or the mysterious substitution of Mary Magdalene for St. John.
⁵²

CHAPTER 15
“No One Loves the Duke”

By the summer of 1497, Leonardo had been at work on
The Last Supper
, off and on, for several years. At times he was no doubt guilty of neglecting his duties in Santa Maria delle Grazie in favor of many other projects and pursuits. His mathematical studies obsessed him, and he was still hard at work on his illustrations for Luca Pacioli’s
Divine Proportion
. Someone who lived in Milan during these years later observed that whenever Leonardo “should have attended to his painting...he devoted himself completely to geometry, architecture and anatomy.”
¹

With Giovanni da Montorfano having completed his
Crucifixion
on the opposite wall of the refectory at least eighteen months earlier, Lodovico Sforza was anxious to see Leonardo finish his own wall. At the end of June he instructed his secretary “to urge Leonardo the Florentine to finish the work already begun in the refectory of the Grazie.” Lodovico wanted Leonardo to complete
The Last Supper
because he had another task for him: Leonardo was to “attend to the other side of the refectory.”
²

Montorfano had either left several blank patches of wall in his fresco or else Lodovico was planning for the removal and replastering of several sections of the foreground to make room for a late addition: portraits of Lodovico, his late duchess, and their two children. This time, having learned his lesson with
The Last Supper
, the duke was taking no chances with his capricious painter. He referred to a contract for the portraits that Leonardo evidently had yet to sign. The secretary was told to make Leonardo “sign the contract with his own hand and oblige him to finish within an agreed time.”
³

Altarpieces and frescoes often included portraits of the people who commissioned them, anachronistically showing families in modern dress kneeling at the foot of the cross or even, as in Joos van Ghent’s
Communion of the Apostles
, mixing with Christ and the apostles at the Last Supper. In Montorfano’s fresco, Lodovico was to be shown in profile on the left side of the scene, kneeling beneath the figure of the Dominican martyr St. Peter of Verona, his son Massimiliano at his side. Beatrice and son number two, Francesco, were to be on the right, beneath St. Catherine of Siena. Because of Beatrice’s death at the start of the year, there would be a great poignancy to her portrait, which Lodovico was understandably anxious to see completed.

These likenesses were to be one of a number of ways in which Lodovico commemorated his late wife, whom he clearly adored despite his various mistresses. He planned to open a new gate in the city walls and christen it the Porta Beatrice, while her portrait on a medallion would adorn the doors of Santa Maria delle Grazie. Inside the church, the commemoration continued, with Cristofo Solari carving a marble effigy for her tomb that would show her reposing peacefully on her back, arms folded and eyes closed, dressed in the clothing she wore to mark the birth of her eldest son. Draped over her hands would be—poignantly—the pelt of a marten, a creature believed to offer protection to women in childbirth.

Just as Beatrice had spent many hours each day at the sepulcher of Bianca, so, too, Lodovico, wrapped in a black cloak, now spent many hours mourning his wife in Santa Maria delle Grazie. “He goes every day to visit the church where his wife is buried,” wrote a young Venetian politician, “and never leaves this undone, and much of his time is spent with the friars of the convent.” In fact, he attended two or three masses each day. “He is very religious,” the young Venetian continued, “recites offices daily, observes fasts, and lives chastely and devoutly. His rooms are still hung with
black, and he takes all his meals standing.”
⁴
Two weeks after her death, as a kind of penance, he shaved his head.

How much progress Leonardo had made on
The Last Supper
by the summer of 1497 is impossible to know. Presumably it was nearing completion, though Lodovico’s urgent note to his secretary ordering Leonardo to “finish the work already begun” may imply that work was proceeding only fitfully, with no clear end in sight. Leonardo had, however, recommenced painting in 1497 following his “scandal” the previous year. That January, Matteo Bandello, the prior’s nephew, witnessed Leonardo working erratically on the scaffold, sometimes painting furiously from dawn to dusk without stopping for food or drink, at other times studying the mural for hours on end without touching his brushes.

Bandello gave further insights into Leonardo’s work at this time. He claimed that people used to gather in the refectory to watch Leonardo and offer opinions regarding his work—overtures that the painter welcomed. Bandello failed to identify these visitors beyond noting that one of them, early in 1497, was a Frenchman, Raymond Peraudi, the bishop of Gurk, who was staying at Santa Maria delle Grazie during a visit to Milan. Apparently the bishop was not impressed by what he saw. He believed that, on a salary of two thousand ducats, Leonardo was overpaid. Peraudi may have been aggrieved because his own annual income was a mere three thousand ducats. No doubt he regarded himself, as a bishop and a cardinal, infinitely more worthy than someone whose job it was to decorate a refectory.
⁵

Bandello also claimed that one reason why Leonardo sometimes failed to arrive at the refectory was because he was still working on his “stupendous horse of clay” in the Corte dell’Arengo. Bandello may have recalled the facts incorrectly, because his account was composed many decades later. Yet it may well be the case that, more than two years on, Leonardo was unwilling to abandon this magnificent project and therefore, still dreaming of seeing the work take shape in bronze, gamely continued modeling his horse even as he worked on
The Last Supper
. Certainly the project was never far from his thoughts, and his papers reveal that in the years between 1495 and 1497 he was still making notes on how to cast the giant horse. He could have had no encouragement, and no money, from Lodovico.
⁶

Leonardo was distracted by other projects, too, in 1497. He finally had an architectural commission: the remodeling of a villa owned by Mariolo de’ Guiscardi near the Porta Vercellina, a stone’s throw from Santa Maria
delle Grazie. Little is known about Mariolo beyond the fact that he was Lodovico’s chamberlain and that he owned a stable of horses, one of which Leonardo had considered as one of the models for his equestrian monument. Mariolo’s villa stood outside the city gate in a district recently transformed into a suburb for wealthy Milanese courtiers. Galeazzo Sanseverino, with his own stable of horses, was one of Mariolo’s neighbors.

Leonardo was given precise specifications for the villa, which was to be comfortable but not palatial. It was to feature a drawing-room forty-six feet in length and four bedrooms, including ones, Mariolo stipulated, “for my wife and her ladies.” There would also be a courtyard, a guard room, and a thirty-eight-foot-long dining hall for the servants. Leonardo applied himself to the task with enthusiasm, making many notes, drawings, and calculations. He seems to have thought of everything: kitchen, larder, scullery, a hen coop, stables for sixteen horses, and even places to store wood and keep manure. Comfort and convenience were paramount. “The servants’ hall beyond the kitchen,” Leonardo noted on his plan, “so that the master does not hear their noise.”
⁷

As work began on the villa, Leonardo also had other, less welcome distractions. Salai, though now an adolescent, was still proving a trial despite—or because of—Leonardo’s continued indulgence of him. In April 1497 Leonardo treated the young man to an expensive cloak made from silver-colored cloth trimmed with green velvet and decorated with loops. The garment cost twenty-six lire, the equivalent of a week’s wages for a construction worker. Unwisely, he gave Salai the money to pay for the cloak. “Salai stole the money,” Leonardo recorded in weary resignation.
⁸

Raymond Peraudi, whose bishopric was in present-day Austria, was visiting Milan to further the good relations between Lodovico and Maximilian. Following his failed expedition to Pisa, the emperor had bidden farewell to Lodovico in the last weeks of 1496, leaving Italy (as a Venetian noted) “in still greater confusion than he found her.”
⁹
The year 1497 witnessed continued upheaval and unrest. In Naples, Ferdinand II had died at twenty-seven, leaving conditions in his kingdom “more disturbed than they had ever been.”
¹⁰
In Florence, Girolamo Savonarola held the first of his “bonfires of the vanities.” A ninety-foot-high pyramid was built from perfume bottles,
wigs, hats, masks, dolls, chessmen, playing cards, musical instruments, books, manuscripts, paintings, and statues. After an effigy of Satan was placed on top, the glittering heap was sprinkled with gunpowder and set alight. “With the greatest happiness they burned everything,” recorded one witness. Afterward, a song was sung declaring Christ the king of Florence.
¹¹

Three months later, in May, Savonarola was excommunicated by Pope Alexander VI for having “disseminated pernicious doctrines to the scandal and great grief of simple souls.”
¹²
Then, in June, the pope’s son, Juan Borgia, the duke of Gandía, was murdered in Rome, his throat cut by an unknown assailant and his body tossed into the Tiber. The pope regarded his son’s mysterious death as a punishment from God, but he believed a hand besides the Lord’s had also been involved: that of Lodovico Sforza’s brother, Cardinal Ascanio. Juan’s restless ghost would soon be seen stalking Rome, and in October lightning struck the Castel Sant’Angelo, causing an explosion that showered the city with chunks of marble. “The reign of Pope Alexander,” wrote a Venetian chronicler, “is full of startling and portentous events.” The pope had his own theory about what was causing all of these problems. “May God forgive him who invited the French into Italy,” he told a Florentine envoy, “for all our troubles have arisen from that.”
¹³

A Venetian jealously scrutinizing Lodovico Sforza’s fortunes at the end of 1496 had reached a hopeful conclusion: “I believe that he will not continue long in prosperity, for God is just, and will punish him because he is a traitor and never keeps faith with any one.”
¹⁴
Lodovico’s chickens did indeed seem to be coming home to roost. The deaths of his wife and daughter had been terrible blows. Also, his enormous outlays of revenue—the dowry paid to Maximilian, the funds sent to Pisa, the money for the building of churches and the beautification of Milan and Vigevano, not to mention the endless rounds of banquets and other extravagances—forced him to impose higher and higher taxes on his people. A tax called the
inquinto
was levied, adding a further 20 percent on the existing taxes on such necessities as meat, wine, and bread. Before the end of the year, riots broke out in Cremona, Lodi, and Pavia. “In the whole Milanese there is trouble and discontent,” wrote a Venetian. “No one loves the duke.”
¹⁵

Danger also lay beyond Lodovico’s borders. The French were poised to descend into Italy, with Charles VIII, as one of his ambassadors observed, harboring “great hopes of revenging himself on the duke of Milan.”
¹⁶
The instrument of the duke’s destruction would be, it seemed, Louis of Orléans,
who in 1496 had massed thousands of troops at Asti in preparation for an invasion of Lombardy to press his claim to the dukedom of Milan. Other powers besides the French had turned on Lodovico. Louis gathered support for his invasion from Florence, from Bologna, from the duke of Mantua, and even—such was the brutal nature of Italian politics—from Lodovico’s own father-in-law, Ercole d’Este, the duke of Ferrara. The Venetians, too, were ready to join the French cause against Lodovico as punishment for his treachery.