Leonardo and the Last Supper

by Ross King

  Leonardo would have been mesmerized by the various manifestations of the golden section in the natural world: in the phyllotaxis of sunflowers, for example, whereby the florets in the seed head are configured in two opposing spirals, which always happen to be consecutive Fibonacci numbers: 21, 34, 55, 89, or 144 running clockwise versus, respectively, 34, 55, 89, 144, or 233 running counterclockwise. But Leonardo and his contemporaries, including Pacioli, were completely unaware of these manifestations, most of which were not discovered until the first half of the nineteenth century. Only in the first decades of the twentieth century—thanks to the Bauhaus designers as well as American painters such as Robert Henri and George Bellows—did the golden section actually enter the studios of artists and architects.

  A few months after Luca Pacioli arrived in Milan, his collaborator and new friend abruptly vanished. In the summer of 1496, after some eighteen months of work at Santa Maria delle Grazie, Leonardo abruptly downed tools and left Milan. On 8 June, one of Lodovico Sforza’s secretaries reported that the artist had “caused a decided scandal, after which he left.”41

  The exact details of this scandal are not known. It may have involved a dispute over payment. Or perhaps Il Moro was losing patience with his tardy painter (who was perhaps spending more time on Pacioli’s polyhedra and less on the apostles) and urging him to finish. The scandal and the ensuing flight must have served to enhance Leonardo’s reputation as a willful and difficult artist. It also meant that The Last Supper, like so many of his other works, was in danger of being abandoned unfinished.

  For want of the original contract, we know none of the details about the commissioning, such as how much Leonardo was to be paid for The Last Supper or when he was supposed to finish. Reports about payments tend to vary widely. A friar at Santa Maria delle Grazie in the middle of the next century claimed Lodovico paid Leonardo an annual salary of five hundred ducats. This sum would have been substantial considering that the salary of high-ranking government officials was three hundred ducats, but it was hardly likely to keep Leonardo, with his expensive wardrobe and his entourage of servants and apprentices, in the lavish style to which he aspired. Matteo Bandello put Leonardo on a salary of two thousand ducats, which certainly would have kept him in lavish style.42 Bandello was probably exaggerating and he may not have had access to the facts (he was only ten years old when Leonardo began work). However, it is plausible that Leonardo was paid two thousand ducats for the entire job of painting in the refectory. That was the exact amount paid to Filippino Lippi a few years earlier when he frescoed the Carafa Chapel in Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome.43 A few years later, Michelangelo would receive three thousand ducats for frescoing the vault of the Sistine Chapel, a much larger commission.

  Two thousand ducats—if that were indeed his payment for The Last Supper—was a substantial amount. It would have been sufficient, for example, for Leonardo to purchase a grand house beside the Arno in Florence.44 It is tricky to translate two thousand ducats into today’s money. However, the ducat was composed of 0.1107 troy ounces (3.443 grams) of gold, which means that Leonardo (if Bandello is correct) received a total of 221.4 ounces of gold. Translated into today’s prices, with gold at $1,600 per ounce, Leonardo would have received the equivalent of a little more than $350,000.

  Given Leonardo’s apparently generous remuneration, one wonders if the artist was unhappy with certain other circumstances. His frustration and indignation may have stemmed from the myriad of smaller tasks assigned to him by Lodovico. Like the monks of San Donato a Scopeto, who got Leonardo to paint a sundial for them while he was working on his Adoration of the Magi, Lodovico regarded his resident painter as a journeyman to whom he could prescribe, on a whim, the most menial and uninspiring tasks. If Beatrice required new plumbing for her bathroom, or if her bedchamber needed a new coat of paint, Leonardo was conscripted into service. The duchess’s bedchamber may well have caused the breach, since Leonardo was painting her rooms in the Castello when he stormed off the job.

  It is unclear if at this point Leonardo simply left the Castello or whether his fit of high dudgeon compelled him to flee Milan altogether. If he did leave Milan, one possibility is that he went to Brescia, in Venetian territory forty miles east of Milan. His presence in Brescia is undocumented, but it appears that he hoped to secure work painting an altarpiece for the Franciscan church of San Francesco. Thanks to Luca Pacioli, he knew the general of the Franciscan Order, Francesco Nani. Leonardo had sketched Nani’s portrait earlier in the year, and he may have gone to Brescia in the hope that the powerful ecclesiastic, whose family came from the city, would help pull strings to secure him the altarpiece commission.45

  Leonardo’s brief description of the proposed altarpiece makes it sound like a fairly traditional work. He planned to feature the Virgin Mary and Brescia’s two patron saints, Faustino and Giovita. The Virgin was to be elevated, probably on a throne, and the trio would be surrounded by an ensemble cast of Franciscan worthies, such as St. Francis, St. Bonaventure, St. Clare, and St. Anthony of Padua. The design (no doubt dictated by the Franciscan friars) is eerily reminiscent of the kind of work—such as the altarpiece for the chapel of San Bernardo in the Palazzo della Signoria—that he had left behind, unfinished, in Florence. How he could have summoned much enthusiasm for these figures after the dramatic mural he was in the midst of creating in Milan is difficult to imagine.

  Back in Milan, Lodovico’s secretary wrote to the archbishop of Milan, requesting that he secure the services of Pietro Perugino—a reliable painter if ever there was one—to finish the work in Beatrice’s apartments. No mention was made of what would become of the half-finished mural in Santa Maria delle Grazie.46

  Lodovico Sforza had more pressing concerns in the summer of 1496 than merely the plight of his mercurial painter. Since the beginning of the year he had been busying himself with yet another risky plot. This time, instead of inviting the French into Italy as protection against the Neapolitans, he invited Maximilian into Italy as protection against the French. As before, there would be far-reaching consequences for virtually every principality and republic in Italy.

  During his invasion of Italy, Charles VIII had signed a treaty with the Florentines promising to return Pisa as soon as he captured Naples. However, restitution had not been forthcoming, partly because the Pisans complained to the French that the Florentines had “treated them very barbarously.”47 Florence was therefore attempting to recover her valuable possession by force. Lodovico, meanwhile, hoped to take advantage of the situation and capture Pisa for himself. The Pisans welcomed his overtures, which came in the form of military and financial assistance for the battle against Florence. The Venetians were also offering aid to Pisa, and Lodovico’s fears that the city might fall into the hands of Venice led him to appeal to Maximilian, the husband of his niece Bianca Maria.

  Besides helping him secure Pisa, the arrival of Maximilian on Italian soil would have the added benefit of providing a buffer against any future French invasion, another of which seemed likely in 1496. The Neapolitans were steadily recapturing all of their lost territories, and a large French force under Gian Giacomo Trivulzio—the Milanese mercenary captain who had switched sides to serve the king of France—was stationed at Asti, poised to descend into Italy once again. Faced with this threat, Lodovico found himself, according to a chronicler, “in a state of the greatest anxiety.”48

  In July, Lodovico met with Maximilian at a Benedictine abbey on the German frontier. Under the cover of hunting and feasting, they hatched a plan whereby Maximilian would enter Italy on the pretext of going to Rome and receiving the imperial crown from the pope. On his way he would take the opportunity to keep Pisa free from Florentine clutches. Although Maximilian had little wish either to help the Pisans or to antagonize Florence, he was motivated by two important considerations. First of all, he would receive the imperial crown, without which he could not officially call himself the Holy Roman emperor (until this coronation he was, technically
speaking, only the emperor elect). Second, and even more compelling, Lodovico promised him large sums of money.

  Thus, early in September, Maximilian set off for Italy with eight regiments of infantry. He spent several weeks in the company of Lodovico at Vigevano, banqueting and hunting with leopards. In October he traveled overland to Genoa, from where he sailed down the coast to Pisa. Here he was received with much rejoicing from the locals. Down came a statue of Charles VIII; up went the imperial eagles. But enthusiasm and adulation were short-lived. The German troops were ill provisioned and ill disciplined, and Pisa was already adequately garrisoned by the Venetians, making Maximilian’s troops redundant. He sailed for Livorno, which he promised to conquer for the Pisans, but French ships and foul weather counted against him. His fleet was scattered by a storm, some of his ships were wrecked, and during a skirmish with the French a cannonball whizzed so close that it carried away part of his imperial robe. His appetite for the enterprise rapidly began to diminish. He soon made for the friendlier environs of Pavia, in Lodovico’s domains, where yet another round of feasting was planned.

  Maximilian’s botched expedition did little for Lodovico’s reputation. A Venetian chronicler described the duke as “one of the wisest men in the world... All men fear him, because fortune is propitious to him in everything.” But he noted that no one liked or trusted Lodovico, and that “some day he will be punished for his bad faith. For he never keeps his promises, and when he says one thing, always does another.” Another Venetian likewise deplored his behavior: “His pride and arrogance are beyond description,” he fumed.49

  Lodovico was proving as faithless in his personal dealings as he was in his political machinations. In November an observer from Ferrara wrote home: “The latest news from Milan is that the duke spends his whole time and finds all his pleasure in the company of a girl who is one of his wife’s maidens. And his conduct is ill regarded here.”50 The girl was Lucrezia Crivelli, one of Beatrice’s ladies-in-waiting, and the conduct was ill regarded by, above all, Beatrice herself. Beatrice had already seen off Lodovico’s earlier mistress, Cecilia Gallerani, with whom Il Moro had tactlessly cavorted in the weeks following his marriage. But now, five years later, another rival emerged, plunging Beatrice—who was several months pregnant—into despair. Moreover, Lucrezia received the ultimate mark of affection from Lodovico: her portrait was painted by Leonardo.

  Lodovico had once hired Leonardo to paint Cecilia Gallerani. Now he contrived for Leonardo to do a portrait of his latest concubine. A series of Latin epigraphs in Leonardo’s notebooks, composed by an unknown poet, state that Leonardo, “the first among painters,” executed Lucrezia’s portrait. Lucrezia, enthused the poet, was “painted by Leonardo and loved by Il Moro.”51 When exactly this portrait was done is unclear. Nor is the identity of the painting completely evident, although the most likely candidate is the work known as La Belle Ferronière.52 This portrait of a doe-eye brunette was done in oils on a panel made from walnut—possibly from the same walnut tree, in fact, from which came the panel used for Lady with an Ermine.53 The identity of the sitter in this portrait is not definitively known, but the Latin epigrams suggest that for want of another portrait that might fit the bill, Lucrezia was the sitter.c

  As so often with Leonardo, uncertainty and equivocation reign. La Belle Ferronière exemplifies the gaps and disputes surrounding so much of his output. Not everyone agrees the work is by Leonardo: one Leonardo scholar claimed that not so much as a single brushstroke came from the hand of the master.54 It was not identified as a Leonardo until 1839; later in the nineteenth century it was attributed to his pupil Boltraffio, while in the 1920s a version owned by an American car salesman was put forward as the real Leonardo, with the resulting slander trial exposing the prejudices and drastic limitations of leading art connoisseurs such as Bernard Berenson.55 There is very little, other than the Latin epigrams, to link the painting to Lucrezia Crivelli.

  If La Belle Ferronière does represent Lucrezia, this portrait must have been painted while Leonardo worked on The Last Supper. Lodovico took Lucrezia as his mistress, at the very latest, in August 1496, in the weeks following his visit to Maximilian: that, at any rate, was when she became pregnant with his child. The liaison continued through the autumn, which may have been when the duke engaged Leonardo to execute her portrait. The date of Leonardo’s return from Brescia to Milan is—like so many of his comings and goings—uncertain. However, the altarpiece for San Francesco never materialized, and Leonardo was recorded in Milan in January 1497, back at work in Santa Maria delle Grazie.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Beloved Disciple

  How did people during the Italian Renaissance, when they looked at a painting of a biblical scene, know who they were looking at? How did they identify the often huge casts of saints and disciples with which frescoes and altarpieces teemed?

  Until about 1300, painters often identified the figures in their painting by helpfully inscribing their names underneath—giving them, in effect, name tags. By the time of Giotto, these inscriptions largely disappeared and a tradition was established whereby painters used distinctive attributes to illustrate and individuate saints and biblical characters. Peter is easily recognizable because he is often shown holding a pair of keys (“I will give to you the keys of the kingdom of heaven,” Jesus tells him in the Gospel of St. Matthew). Sometimes, in reference to his former occupation, he might be holding a fish. Mary Magdalene is identifiable because she sometimes holds the jar of ointment that she carried to Christ’s tomb. The attributes of several apostles foretell their violent and grisly fates: James the Lesser’s is the club used to beat him to death, Simon’s the saw that cut him in half, and Thaddeus’s the halberd with which pagan magicians slew him in Persia.

  Painters of Last Suppers did not bother with these symbols, which would have detracted from the pictorial effect. Even so, a number of the apostles were usually obvious to viewers because of their appearances or actions, especially the gray and grizzled Peter, the youthful John, and, of course, the villainous Judas. But artists were not always concerned to individuate the entire cast of twelve apostles. Lorenzo Ghiberti, in his bronze relief on the door of the Baptistery of San Giovanni, even depicted five of them from the rear, showing nothing but the backs of their heads and thereby making their true identities anybody’s guess.

  Art historians are confident, however, about the identities of the twelve apostles in Leonardo’s Last Supper. Their names were established when, in about 1807, an official from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, Giuseppe Bossi, discovered in the parish church of Ponte Capriasca, near Lake Lugano, a sixteenth-century fresco copy of Leonardo’s mural. Even though such inscriptions had virtually disappeared from Italian art, twelve names were carefully painted on a frieze underneath. These identifications, because they were probably made by someone who knew Leonardo and his circle, are now almost universally accepted—albeit, in one case, controversially disputed.

  Leonardo faced the same compositional problem as any painter of a Last Supper: how to range thirteen men around a dinner table such that they could interact with each other. A notable feature of his design for The Last Supper is how he arranged the twelve apostles in four groups of three, with two of these triads on either side of Christ. The most dramatic and intriguing of these groupings is the one immediately to the right of Christ, featuring—as the copy at Ponte Capriasca tells us—Judas, Peter, and John. Leonardo positioned John leaning away from Christ and toward Peter, who inclines eagerly forward to whisper in John’s ear, an action that causes Judas, seated in between, to rear back and to his right.

  Anyone familiar with the Gospel of St. John would know exactly the moment depicted. “Amen, amen, I say to you, one of you shall betray me,” Jesus announces. “The disciples therefore looked one upon another,” John reports, “doubting of whom he spoke. Now there was leaning on Jesus’s bosom one of his disciples, whom Jesus loved. Peter therefore beckoned to him and said to hi
m: Who is it of whom he speaks?” (John 13:21-4).

  Three apostles (Judas, Peter, John) to the right of Christ in Leonardo’s The Last Supper

  Jesus is speaking of Judas, of course—but who is it of whom John speaks? The disciple leaning on the bosom of Jesus is not only in a privileged position at the dinner table, in physical contact with Jesus, but he is evidently privy to special knowledge about the betrayal, or at least so Peter believes.

  The disciple leaning on Jesus—the one “whom Jesus loved”—is traditionally identified, as we have seen, as John himself. The Greek translators of the Bible had several different words for love at their disposal. Earlier in the Gospel of St. John (11:3) we are told that Jesus loves Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha whom he raises from the dead. His love for Lazarus is expressed by the Greek word philia, which refers to strong friendship or brotherly love. The Greek translation of the New Testament uses the word agape, on the other hand, to describe his feelings for John, connoting a much deeper affection—one that is, however, untouched by the sensual yearnings of eros.

  All Last Suppers portrayed John as a youthful and slightly feminine figure among his mostly bewhiskered and older companions. Virtually all of them, too, following the Gospel of St. John, showed him asleep on the bosom of Christ. From the twelfth century onward this motif was ubiquitous in Last Suppers, with Giotto in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, for example, showing Jesus cradling a sleeping John. All of the great refectory Last Suppers in Florence—by Gaddi, Castagno, and Ghirlandaio—used the motif, with Ghirlandaio featuring it in each of his three versions.