Leonardo and the Last Supper

by Ross King

  Leonardo might have had another reason for visiting Florence at this time: to operate as a spy against his native city. In his notebooks, someone—not Leonardo—scribbled a partially legible phrase, a “memorandum to Maestro Lionardo” that exhorted the painter to “produce as soon as possible the report on conditions in Florence,” and in particular how Savonarola “has organized the state of Florence.”11 Leonardo was evidently to report back to someone in Milan on the political condition of Florence: in effect, to pass on information about Savonarola and the new republican government, presumably to Lodovico Sforza. He was ordered to pay particular attention to the city’s fortifications, for example, how the forts were armed and garrisoned, which suggests that an attack or an invasion was being planned.

  No report from Leonardo survives, so it is unclear whether or not he operated as the duke’s secret agent in Florence. However, the assignment would not have been surprising in light of the poor relations between the two states. Florence had remained steadfast in its alliance with the French and, despite offers of military assistance from the other signatories, declined to join the Holy League. The French still occupied Pisa and various of Florence’s fortresses, but the Florentines clearly had more faith in the French than in Lodovico, whom they rightly suspected of aspiring to the lordship of Pisa. During the summer, in fact, Lodovico had dispatched a team of archers to Pisa to help the Pisans resist Florentine efforts to reclaim the city. He also hoped to undermine Savonarola’s influence. “I am doing things to turn people here against him,” reported his ambassador to Florence.12

  Lodovico, meanwhile, had reason to be wary of both Savonarola and the Florentine alliance with France. When the Dominican friar met with Charles VIII in June, he assured him that the entire city was on the French side. The entire city also seemed to be on Savonarola’s side. A Florentine shopkeeper noted in his diary that people of Florence were so devoted to Savonarola that they would have jumped into the fire if he asked.13 Upward of twelve thousand people flocked into the cathedral to hear his spellbinding sermons. His message was not a cheerful one. “I announce to you,” he declared from the pulpit in 1495, “that all Italy will be convulsed, and those who are most exalted will be most abased. O Italy! Trouble after trouble shall befall thee. Troubles of war after famine, troubles of pestilence after war, trouble from this side and that.”14

  A portrait of Savonarola by one of his followers, showing his fierce aquiline features partially obscured by a cowl, bore the inscription: “This is a picture of Fra Girolamo Savonarola, a prophet sent by God.” The intentions of this prophet were clear. As one of his followers put it, he wished to “purge our whole city of vices and fill her with the splendour of virtue.”15

  If Leonardo did indeed visit Florence in 1495, he could scarcely have sympathized with certain of Savonarola’s plans for purging Florence of vice. The friar’s opposition to vanity and luxury meant he sought to enforce sumptuary laws against ostentatious and “lascivious” clothing. He also deplored the study of pagan authors by humanist scholars. “Plato, Aristotle and the other philosophers are fast in Hell,” he blithely informed Florence’s enthusiasts of classical learning. Then in December 1494 he had called for the stoning and burning of sodomites. This appeal was quickly followed by an increase in anonymous denunciations of the kind that in 1476 saw Leonardo hauled before the court. Although the government rejected the death penalty for sodomites, the situation would soon become more menacing and dangerous as, early in 1496, Savonarola began mobilizing groups of white-robed children, his fanciulli, to search out and denounce sodomites. “The boys were held in such respect,” one citizen reported, “that everyone avoided evil, and most of all the abominable vice.”16

  This, clearly, was no longer the Florence of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Swayed by Savonarola, the Florentines were rejecting the values that over the previous century had given the city its unsurpassed reputation for intellectual and artistic excellence: the passion for the classical cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, the preoccupation with secular as well as transcendental values, the belief that a man might fulfill himself other than through the army or the church, and the conviction that the nude body (revealed in a work of art like Donatello’s bronze David or Botticelli’s Birth of Venus) was a site of beauty rather than shame. It must have been a relief for Leonardo to return to his castle in Milan.

  The Holy League had been intended to endure for twenty-five years. In fact, thanks to Lodovico Sforza, it lasted barely six months. In the middle of October, Il Moro effectively switched sides in the conflict. Evidently regarding the French a greater threat than the Venetians or the pope, he made a separate peace with Charles VIII, who denounced the duke of Orléans’s claim to Milan in return for Lodovico’s promise that “he would serve the king to the utmost of his power.”17 To that end, Lodovico promised not to help Alfonso’s son Ferdinand II recover his kingdom in Naples, to give free passage to French armies on their way to Naples, and even to provide troops and ships for Charles when and if he returned to do battle with Ferdinand. He also promised to fight against Venice—should the Venetians object to these arrangements—on behalf of the French.

  Lodovico’s actions understandably enraged the Venetians, who regarded him as a traitor. Meanwhile, suspicions lingered between Lodovico and Charles. Lodovico clearly had little intention of honoring his commitments, and a French ambassador, finding the duke reluctant to provide the requested ships for the renewed assault on Naples, began complaining about his “treacherous way of dealing.” Lodovico, for his part, did not trust Charles. According to the ambassador, he “told me plainly at last he could repose no confidence in our king.”18 When Charles proposed a conference in order to confirm the terms of the peace, Lodovico replied that he would meet the French king only if a river separated their respective camps, making a barrier between them.

  In the French camp, opponents of the peace between Lodovico and Charles—most notably the duke of Orléans—took heart from these latest proceedings. Louis was also encouraged by other events of a more tragic nature. Charles’s heir was his only son, three-year-old Charles Orland. The dauphin was, according to one courtier, “a very handsome and precocious child, and not alarmed at those things wherewith children are usually frightened.” But in December he contracted measles and died. The French court was plunged into mourning, with the eighteen-year-old queen distressed almost to the point of madness. Some courtiers, however, could not help noticing that Louis “rejoiced at the dauphin’s death, for he was (after him) next heir to the throne.”19 Lodovico’s deadly rival was now a heartbeat away from the French throne.

  CHAPTER 9

  Every Painter Paints Himself

  Leonardo was always on the lookout for people with interesting and expressive facial features. He once made a study of noses, finding (with typical exactitude) that they came in ten different shapes: “straight, bulbous, hollow, prominent above or below the middle, aquiline, regular, flat, round or pointed.”1 This interest was no doubt heightened as he began his work in Santa Maria delle Grazie because of the need to find models for thirteen different figures. If some of the stories about him are true, various residents of Florence and Milan were immortalized in his paintings—including in The Last Supper—without realizing it.

  Leonardo’s punctilious approach to facial features was described in a work published in 1554 by a writer named Giovanni Battista Giraldi, whose story has some credibility because his father knew Leonardo and watched him paint in Santa Maria delle Grazie. Giraldi claimed that whenever Leonardo wanted to paint a figure, he first considered “its quality and its nature”: such things as whether the figure was to be happy or sad, young or old, and good or evil. Having determined these details, he would take himself off to a place “where he knew persons of that kind congregated and observed diligently their faces, manner, clothes and bodily movements.”2

  This account is amplified by Vasari, who recounted how Leonardo was “always fascinated when he saw a man of
striking appearance, with a strange head of hair or beard.” Spotting such a character in the streets, Leonardo would “follow him about all day long,” impressing the unique features on his mind so that when he returned to his studio “he could draw him as if he were standing there in the flesh.”3

  Leonardo found no shortage of fantastic faces in Milan, producing a famous series of grotesque heads—drawings of men and women with comically and sometimes horrifically deformed features—around the time he began working on the mural. If we believe the evidence of the drawings, Milan was a veritable rogues’ gallery of toothless nutcracker men and pug-nosed women in ludicrous headgear. A number of his caricatures show men with conspicuously jutting chins. The models for them evidently suffered from pathologic mandibular prognathism—also known as the “Habsburg jaw”—a hereditary condition in which the lower jaw outgrows the upper, resulting in an elongated chin. This condition would feature in varying degrees in the faces of Judas, Peter, and Simon in The Last Supper.

  Leonardo’s interest in fantastic faces was not a simple voyeuristic attraction to physical freaks. He wanted to create faces that were more diverse, unique, and authentically expressive than those painted by his predecessors and contemporaries. Too many painters relied on stock facial expressions: stereotypical representations of emotions such as grief, fear, and piety. “A painter who takes no account of these varieties,” he wrote, “always makes his figures on one pattern so that they might all be taken for brothers.”4

  Fantastic faces were one of the keys to capturing and conveying realistic varieties of expression. Leonardo believed that over time a person’s characteristic traits stamped themselves on his or her physical features, making the face a reliable indicator of temperament and moral character. “The face,” he wrote, “shows some indications of the nature of men.” At times he was quite specific about how these indications appeared on the face. For example, one could tell if a person was cheerful from features such as “the marks which separate the cheeks from the lips,” while bestial and angry men were revealed by “great reliefs and hollows” in the face. Less fathomable is his claim that horizontal lines on the forehead indicate “men full of concealed pride or public lamentations.”5

  One of Leonardo’s drawings of grotesque heads

  Knowing which features corresponded with which temperaments would obviously help a painter reveal different character traits and emotional states. In this context, selecting the right model for Judas, a man whose face, by this logic, would surely bear the imprint of his wicked nature, was clearly of the utmost importance. Giraldi described how Leonardo went about finding a model for Judas whose face would be “fitting to such villainy.” For more than a year he haunted a certain neighborhood on the outskirts of Milan, the Borghetto, “where all the vile and ignoble people live, wicked and villainous for the most part,” in search of an ill-favored reprobate who would do justice to the subject.6 Whatever the truth of this story, Leonardo did produce a sketch of Judas, whose face is not exactly villainous. The drawing shows an older man with raised eyebrows, a hooked nose, a prominent chin, and a pronounced jaw muscle.

  Just as Leonardo made notes about particular horses in Milan while planning his equestrian monument (“The Florentine Morello of Mr. Mariolo, large horse, has a nice neck and a very beautiful head”), so, too, he recorded where to observe people whose looks intrigued him. “Cristofano da Castiglione at the Pietà has a fine head,” he wrote with reference to an employee of the Monte di Pietà, a charitable institution that loaned money at low rates of interest. Another note reads, “Giovannina, fantastic face, is at Santa Caterina, at the hospital.”7 Santa Caterina was the Augustinian convent of Santa Caterina da San Severino (later known as Santa Caterina alla Chiusa), which in April 1495 made arrangements with the duke to move from a rundown building to a new location beside the Porta Ticinese, on the southwest side of Milan. Leonardo must have come to know Giovannina, presumably one of the nuns, through his involvement with Lodovico’s secretary, Marchesino Stanga, who negotiated the property transfer. Stanga may have used Leonardo to inspect either or both of the properties, which would explain how he came to meet Giovannina.8

  Leonardo’s notebooks include the names of several people whom he evidently considered as models for Christ in The Last Supper. “Alessandro Carissimi da Parma, for the hand of Christ,” reads one of his notes.9 Little is known about Alessandro, though he came from a prominent aristocratic family with strong Sforza connections.10 Someone else, meanwhile, would serve as the model for Christ’s face. On another page, under the heading “Christ,” Leonardo specifies a man in the entourage of someone he calls the “Cardinal of Mortaro.” He actually meant Mortara, a town southwest of Vigevano, where Lodovico (one of whose titles was Count of Mortara) had a castle. The College of Cardinals included no such person as the Cardinal of Mortara, but Leonardo was almost certainly referring to Lodovico’s younger brother, Ascanio Sforza, a powerful cardinal with numerous benefices. Among other things, Cardinal Sforza (who narrowly missed becoming pope in 1492) was the administrator of the see of Pavia, in which lay Mortara and its various churches.

  While identifying this “Cardinal of Mortaro” is simple enough, the man in his entourage—the potential model for Christ—is distinguished, with frustrating brevity, only as “giova cote.”11 This phrase might refer to a Giovanni Conte, to a Count Giovanni, or else to il giovane conte (the young count). One candidate credibly put forward by an Italian scholar is a military man named Giovanni Conte, a captain of the militia who later entered the service of Cesare Borgia.12

  If this particular Giovanni Conte did serve as Leonardo’s model, there was a certain irony in the image of Christ, the Prince of Peace, coming courtesy of a soldier who would later serve under one of Italy’s most brutal warlords. Moreover, Giovanni’s employer at the time he caught Leonardo’s eye, Ascanio Sforza, was a notoriously worldly cardinal who dressed in armor and commanded a private army of two thousand soldiers. One of the wealthiest of all cardinals, he astonished Rome with the magnificence of his court, and so lavish was one of his parties that a chronicler dared not describe it, he claimed, lest he be mocked as a teller of fairy tales.13

  Leonardo’s references to Alessandro Carissimi da Parma and an aide-decamp to Cardinal Sforza reveal that he chose some of his models from among the upper echelons of Milanese society. As the ducal painter and engineer, he rubbed shoulders with Milanese high society, and his notes record the names of various social luminaries.14 He almost certainly used some of these figures as his other models. One visitor to Leonardo’s studio would later report that the apostles in The Last Supper were “portraits from the life of eminent Milanese courtiers and citizens of the times.”15 This statement, coming from someone who discussed the painting with Leonardo, must be taken seriously. Also, it would have been typical of Lodovico to use the painting to celebrate luminaries of the Sforza court and, by extension, himself.

  The most famous of all the courtiers in Milan was Lodovico’s military captain, Galeazzo Sanseverino. If Leonardo were making the mural into, among other things, an exaltation of Milanese high society, a picture of the dashing Galeazzo was a must. He was one of the dozen sons of Roberto Sanseverino, a mercenary captain from Naples known universally as Signor Roberto. Lodovico’s first cousin and onetime supporter, he eventually switched sides, backed Il Moro’s enemies and on three occasions tried to overthrow him. Galeazzo proved more loyal. In 1489 he was betrothed to Lodovico’s illegitimate daughter Bianca (she was seven years old at the time) and afterward served as his commander and faithful friend. The perfect figure of chivalry, he appeared at jousts and tournaments in a suit of golden armor and bearing a golden lance with which he effortlessly unseated opponent after opponent. Leonardo had been designing costumes for one of these very jousts when “in the house of Messer Galeazzo” Salai stole the purse of the undressed footman.

  Galeazzo appears to have been happy to assist Leonardo with his work. When Leonardo designed the b
ronze statue he was given access to Galeazzo’s stables to study the exotic breeds. Some of his drawings of horses are captioned: “Messer Galeazzo’s Sicilian horse” and “Messer Galeazzo’s big genet,” a reference to a Berber horse known as a giannetto.16 Whether Galeazzo himself ever served Leonardo as a model is impossible to ascertain since no portraits of him are known to exist.

  Another figure almost as celebrated and conspicuous as Galeazzo Sanseverino was the architect Donato Bramante. Born Donato d’Angelo Lazzari, he was known as Bramante—which means “wishing” or “craving”—because of his grand ambitions and epicurean tastes. “I cared not what I spent on good living,” he supposedly declared.17 Like Leonardo, who shared these extravagant tastes and ambitions, he was an outsider in Milan, a farmer’s son from the village of Monte Asdrualdo, near Urbino. Like Leonardo, too, he was blessed with a dazzling and apparently effortless brilliance. The most conspicuous mark of his genius was at Santa Maria delle Grazie, where he attached a magnificent cylindrical appendage to the east end of Solari’s original church. He was also involved in plans to rebuild the cathedral in Pavia, and in 1495 he was designing in Vigevano a central piazza so large that he demolished much of the town.

  Bramante would have been a natural and attractive candidate for a model for Leonardo’s Last Supper. He and Leonardo were close friends. Leonardo in one of his notes referred to Bramante as “Donnino,” while Bramante dedicated a book of poetry to Leonardo, calling him a “cordial caro ameno socio” (cordial, dear, and delightful associate).18