Leonardo Da Vinci

by Charles Nicholl

  There are two separate drawings on the sheet. The left-hand sketch has ten figures: the sheet has probably been trimmed, losing the remaining three. There are arches lightly sketched behind the group – first thoughts for the background of the painting, the ‘upper room’ in which the supper took place. The right-hand sketch shows four figures, but is essentially a study of Christ and Judas. Here Leonardo is focusing on the dramatic moment of identification: ‘He that dippeth his hand with me in the dish, the same shall betray me’ (Matthew 26:23). Judas has climbed off his stool and is reaching forward with his hand to the dish. Christ’s hand is tried out in two positions – raised as if about to reach forward; and having reached the dish and hovering in a moment of poignant contact with the hand of his betrayer. This smaller sketch has intensified the focus, found the dramatic fulcrum – that ghostly moment of contact. In focusing on this moment, Leonardo is already moving the story back a few frames from the more conventional Last Supper depiction showing the institution of the Eucharist.

  The other constituent of this smaller sketch is the sleeping figure of St John with Jesus’s arm resting on his back: a note of tenderness which is scriptural – John is the disciple ‘whom Jesus loved’ – but in sceptical irreligious circles John ‘leaning on Jesus’s bosom’ was interpreted in terms of homosexuality. Among the blasphemies attributed to Christopher Marlowe a hundred years later was that Christ loved St John ‘with an extraordinary love’, and ‘used him as the sinners of Sodoma’. One remembers the Saltarelli episode, with its subtext of official disapproval of effeminate young models being used to depict angels and boyish Christs. Leonardo separated the figures in the final painting, though of all the disciples John remains the youngest and most beautiful.

  A little later, perhaps, is the sketch at the Accademia in Venice, its red chalk gone over in ink by another hand.86 It seems cruder, largely because of the inking, but something of the compositional rhythm of the painting is emerging. The disciples are forming into groups; there is more emphasis on their individual features; they are identified in hurriedly written captions (Philip being mentioned twice). But Judas is still on our side of the table, and John is still slumped asleep.

  These are glimpses into the early workings of Leonardo’s conception of the painting: miniature blueprints, made with rapidity and concentration and a questioning temper – this way or this? But, as so often with Leonardo, the roots of the painting run deeper, and, though these are the first actual studies for the Grazie Last Supper, we find in the reservoir of his sketchbooks a much earlier sheet, datable to c. 1480, with a trio of linked sketches: a group sitting at a table, a figure apart with his head in his hands, and a figure who is undeniably Christ, pointing with his finger at the fatal dish.87 These are not exactly studies for a Last Supper: the group is not the disciples, just five men at a table, passing the time in animated conversation – we might be at some village festivity, with men sitting round at trestle-tables. But something has triggered in Leonardo’s mind, which is realized in the swift poignant sketch of the Eucharistic Christ on the same sheet, and which grows to fruition in the great Milanese mural fifteen years later.

  From the compositional studies in Windsor and Venice the focus moves in to the features of individual figures, and so we come to the famous series of heads in Windsor, mostly in red chalk, some highly finished. We see the characters emerging from a mist: Judas, Peter, St James the Elder, St Philip (the latter two almost certainly drawn from the same model, though in the painting they are individuated). There is a beautiful study for the hands of St John, and for the sleeve of St Peter.88 These studies are complemented by brief comments in the Forster notebooks – that a certain Alessandro from Parma provided the model for Christ’s hand; that ‘Cristofano da Castiglione, who lives at the Pietà, has a good head’. There is a note headed simply ‘crissto’, under which Leonardo writes, ‘Giovanni Conte, the one with the Cardinal of Mortaro’; this may tell us the name of the model for Christ. According to the well-informed Luigi of Aragon, who saw the painting in 1517, some of the disciples were ‘real portraits of Milanese courtiers and important citizens’.89

  In a well-known passage, Leonardo lists some of the disciples’ reactions:

  One who was drinking and has left the glass in its position and turned his head towards the speaker.

  Another twisting the fingers of his hand together, turns with stern brow to his companion, and he with his hands spread shows the palms and shrugs up his shoulders to his ears, and makes a mouth of astonishment… Another who has turned, holding a knife in his hand, knocks over a glass on the table…

  Another leans forward to see the speaker, shading his eyes with his hand.90

  Some of these find their place in the finished painting – white-bearded St Andrew (third from left) shows his palms and shrugs up his shoulders. Others are transmuted, so that the man who turns with a knife in his hand (St Peter) is detached from the man who knocks over a glass, and the latter becomes a man (Judas) spilling a salt-cellar. At least one of these gestures is already enacted in that first compositional sketch in Windsor: in the smaller group, the figure between Christ and Judas ‘shades his eyes with his hand’.

  In these emotional dynamics, as much as in compositional planning, lies the radically new conception of Leonardo’s Last Supper, breaking with the tradition inherited from the Middle Ages in which the disciples are a stiffly linear grouping ranged along the table. In Florence he would have seen versions by Taddeo Gaddi, Andrea del Castagno, Fra Angelico and Domenico Ghirlandaio.91 The latter’s elegant, almost languid fresco in the refectory of Ognissanti was completed shortly before Leonardo’s departure for Milan. In Leonardo’s version the line of diners is magically disrupted. We have instead a group whose outline is a kind of wave-formation, which Pietro Marani has compared to the optical diagrams of Paris MS C.92 The waves are formed of four sub-groups, each of three disciples: knots and huddles of men suddenly in crisis. Leonardo has also found his dramatic moment: not the institution of the Eucharist, nor the identification of Judas, but the first shell-shock of Christ’s announcement – ‘Verily I say until you, that one of you shall betray me. And they were exceeding sorrowful’ (Matthew 26:21–2). Thus the new fluency of the composition is in part the product of a narrative – almost a cinematic – decision: the moment that tells the story. This is well described by one of the first recorded commentators on the mural, Luca Pacioli. In the dedication of his Divina proportione, dated 14 December 1498, he writes:

  One cannot imagine a keener attentiveness in the apostles at the sound of the voice of ineffable truth which says, ‘Unus vestrum me traditurus est.’ Through their deeds and gestures, they seem to be speaking among themselves, one man to another and he to yet another, afflicted with keen sense of wonder. Thus worthily our Leonardo created it with his delicate hand.93

  Pacioli’s description is interesting because of his close connection with Leonardo at this time: it contains, perhaps, a refraction of Leonardo’s own statements – on the quality of ‘attentiveness’ and ‘wonder’ which racks the dramatic intensity of the focus on Christ, and the sense of interplay among the apostles. This is how the painting works: the figures not in a row, but intertwined, speaking ‘l’uno a l’altro e l’altro a l’uno’.

  And then there is Judas: the villain of the piece, and yet in the preparatory profile study at Windsor (page 294) a man more ugly than evil – almost a grotesque, but with hints of remorse and self-disgust which touch the profile with tragedy, or indeed with Christian forgiveness. (The recent restoration of the painting has recovered subtleties in the faces lost beneath later retouchings; Judas is an example of a face now nearer to the preparatory drawing than it was before the restoration.) He recoils from the words of Christ even as his hand moves irrevocably towards the piece of bread he will dip in the dish.

  Of the face of Judas in Leonardo’s Last Supper there is a well-known anecdote in Vasari: how the prior of the Grazie constantly badgered Leonardo ‘t
o hurry up and finish the work’, and complained of the artist’s dilatoriness to the Duke. In response Leonardo told Ludovico he was still searching for a face evil enough to represent Judas, but that if he did not succeed ‘he could always use the head of that tactless and impatient prior’ as a model. At this the Duke roared with laughter, and ‘the unfortunate prior retired in confusion to worry the labourers working in his garden.’ This is one of those Vasarian anecdotes that proves to have a kernel of truth, or at least of contemporary witness. The story is lifted from the Discorsi of Giambattista Giraldi Cintio, published in 1554, and Cintio in turn had it from his father, Cristoforo Giraldi, a Ferrarese diplomat who knew Leonardo personally in Milan. The Giraldi version of the story purports to be a record of Leonardo’s own words:

  It remains for me to do the head of Judas, who was the great betrayer, as you all know, and so deserves to be painted with a face that expresses all his wickedness… And so for a year now, perhaps more, I have been going every day, morning and evening, down to the Borghetto, where all the base and ignoble characters live, most of them evil and wicked, in the hope that I will see a face which would be fit for this evil man. And to this day I have not found one… and if it turns out I cannot find one I will have to use the face of this reverend father, the prior.94

  Whether or not the story is true, we are close here to an authentic recording of Leonardo. This is how Cristoforo Giraldi, who knew him, remembers or imagines him speaking: ‘Ogni giorno, sera e mattina, mi sono ridotto in Borghetto…’

  The painting of the Last Supper began with the plastering of the refectory wall with an even layer of intonaco, which forms the structural base for the mural.95 The intonaco of the middle section – where the main action was to be painted – is coarser, to provide better adhesion for the paint-layers on top: the join between the two sections is perceptible as a faint horizontal line near the middle of the foreshortened ceiling. One of the discoveries to emerge from the latest restoration is the vestige of a sinopia, or outline drawing, done directly on to the plaster – ‘extremely concise red lines, executed freehand and with a fluid brush-stroke… to define the masses for his composition’. After this the gesso or ground was applied: modern analysis shows this to be ‘a slightly granular mixture, 100–200 microns thick, composed of calcium carbonate and magnesium with a proteinaceous binding agent’, and on top of that came a thin imprimatura of lead white. At this stage a number of incisions were made on the surface, mainly defining the form and perspective of the architectural setting, and – an eerie moment of precision – a small hole was punched in the centre of the pictorial area: the vanishing-point. This hole can be seen in a magnified photograph: it is at a point on the right temple of Christ.

  All these preparations remind us that this was a collective studio work (a point missing from Bandello’s account, with its misleading sense of artistic solitude). Leonardo did not work alone on the painting, as Michelangelo reputedly did on the Sistine Chapel, but had a team of assistants – among them probably Marco d’Oggiono, who would produce one of the earliest copies of the mural; Salai, now about sixteen and working as a garzone; and Tommaso Masini, whose participation in a later large-scale mural (the Anghiari fresco in Florence) is documented. To these trusted assistants may be added the new intake of pupils and assistants whose names are found on two sheets of the Codex Atlanticus:96

  Ioditti came on 8 September at 4 ducats a month.

  Benedetto came on 17 October at 4 ducats a month.

  The year referred to is either 1496 or 1497. Four ducats is the charge Leonardo exacts for their retta, or board and lodging; against this they can earn money for work they do as garzoni; thus by the end of the year Benedetto has earned nearly 39 lire – just under 10 ducats – which is approximately what he owed for his retta over that ten-week period. Benedetto’s name appears also on an undated sheet, partly cut off at the margin, which records the studio personnel at around the same time:

  [… ] nco 4

  [… ]iberdo 4

  Gianmaria 4

  Benedetto 4

  Gianpetro 4

  Salai 3

  Bartolomeo 3

  Girardo 4

  The first name is probably ‘Franco’, and may be a reference to Francesco Galli, known as Il Napoletano; the fifth may refer to Giampietrino Rizzoli; and the penultimate, who pays the lower retta of 3 ducats, may be Bartolomeo Suardi, known as Il Bramantino, the pupil of Leonardo’s friend Bramante.

  The painting itself probably began with the three heraldic lunettes above the depicted scene; they are now much damaged, but fragments of inscriptions and coats of arms, and a marvellous wreath of fruits and grasses, can still be seen. The painting of the central scene probably began on the left-hand side. We enter here the period described by Matteo Bandello – of intense work and arms-folded contemplation. Bandello’s description is borne out by technical data: ‘Leonardo’s slow progress is confirmed by a few pentimenti [rethinks] and by the attentive refinement of important details… Each figure and each object on the table shows minor or significant revisions of outlines, which stray into the adjacent colours, testifying to the fact that Leonardo allowed himself great freedom in returning more than once to a given motif.’97 Among the pentimenti identified by the restorers is a modification of the position of Christ’s fingers, which were more extended in the original version.

  In the summer of 1496, while he was at work on the Last Supper, Leonardo was also decorating certain rooms (camerini) – probably the apartments of Duchess Beatrice – in the Castello Sforzesco. This is the same job he mentions in the torn-up letter I quoted earlier: ‘Remember the commission to paint the rooms…’

  On 8 June 1496 there was some kind of scene, a rare losing of his cool. It is noted by one of the Duke’s secretaries, who writes, ‘The painter who is decorating the camerini caused something of a scandal today, and for this reason he has left.’98 This tension is perhaps connected to another fragmentary draft letter to the Duke, in which Leonardo complains of financial strains: ‘It vexes me greatly that you should have found me in need, and… that my having to earn my living has forced me to interrupt the work and to attend to lesser matters instead of following up the work which your Lordship entrusted to me.’99 The important work is almost certainly the Last Supper, and the ‘lesser’ labours which have distracted him from it may be the decoration of the Duchess’s chambers.

  The tone of this letter is very tetchy: consider the scarcely veiled sarcasm of the phrase ‘my having to earn a living’ – an inconvenience with which the Duke was unfamiliar. He continues: ‘Perhaps Your Excellency did not give further orders to Messer Gualtieri, believing that I had money enough… If your Lordship thought I had money, your Lordship was deceived.’ The reference is to Gualtiero Bascapé, elsewhere described as ducalis iudex dationum, the Duke’s judge of gifts, i.e. his dispenser of payments. It appears that some expected ‘gift’ had not been received: by ‘gifts’ are essentially meant payments provided in a form too irregular to be considered a salary. Accounts of Leonardo’s payment for the Last Supper vary wildly. According to Bandello he was on an annual salary of 2,000 ducats, but another well-informed source (Girolamo Bugati, a friar at the Grazie in the mid sixteenth century) says the Moor paid him only 500 ducats per annum.100 This would still compare well with the Virgin of the Rocks, for which Leonardo and Ambrogio de Predis had demanded 1,200 lire, or approximately 300 ducats.

  In this griping letter, in this unexpected explosion of temper – ‘something of a scandal’ at the castle – we are privileged with a back-stage glimpse of Leonardo under the profound creative pressure of the Last Supper, which pressure is always exacerbated rather than relieved by diversions. It is the same Leonardo snapped by Bandello’s camera, striding grimly up the hot silent street towards the Grazie.

  Bandello has another story, which shows Leonardo in more relaxed mood – chatting with a distinguished visitor to the Grazie, Cardinal Raymond Peraud, Bishop of Gurck. Documents conf
irm the Cardinal’s presence in Milan in late January 1497.101 Leonardo climbs down off the scaffolding to greet him. ‘They discoursed on many things,’ recalls Bandello, ‘and particularly on the excellence of painting, and some who were there said they wished they could see those paintings of antiquity that are so highly praised by great writers, so that they could judge whether the painters of our day could rank with the ancients.’ Leonardo also entertains the company with the picaresque story of the young Filippo Lippi being seized by ‘Saracens’ and held as a slave, and eventually winning his freedom because of his skill at drawing. This story is familiar from Vasari’s Life of Filippo Lippi.102 Two questions arise: Did Vasari take the story from Bandello? And did Bandello really first hear it from the lips of Leonardo da Vinci? The most one can say in each case is: possibly. Bandello’s Novelle were first published in Lucca in 1554 – four years after the first edition of the Lives – but they were certainly written earlier and were possibly available in manuscript. As for Leonardo, he could well have heard the story from Filippo’s son Filippino, whom he knew in Florence in the 1470s, and with whom he had cordial relations. It is equally possible that the opportunist Bandello was making a good story even better by spuriously ascribing it to Leonardo.

  Leonardo was still at work on the Last Supper in summer 1497. There is an entry in the monastery’s ledger for that year, recording a payment of 37 lire to some workmen ‘for work done on a window in the refectory where Leonardo is painting the Apostles’. And on 29 June 1497 Ludovico writes a letter to his secretary, Marchesino Stanga, in the course of which he says that he hopes that ‘Leonardo the Florentine will soon finish the work he has begun in the refectory’, so that he can ‘attend to the other wall of the refectory’.103 A note of ducal impatience is perhaps discernible here.