Leonardo and the Last Supper

by Ross King

  When precisely Leonardo became a vegetarian is unknown. Meat does turn up on several of his lists: one of them, from 1504, records the purchase of “good beef.”3 However, he was probably supplying it to his assistants and apprentices rather than to himself. Certain writings from his years in Milan in the 1490s clearly demonstrate that he regarded eating flesh with revulsion. “Oh! how foul a thing, that we should see the tongue of one animal in the guts of another,” he wrote of the sausage. He was disturbed by the paradox of life sustaining itself on the death of something else. “Our life is made by the death of others,” he wrote in his notes on physiology. “In dead matter insensible life remains, which, reunited to the stomachs of living beings, resumes life, both sensual and intellectual.” The image of dead animals coming back to life in our bellies is enough to give second thoughts, surely, to even the most enthusiastic of carnivores.4

  Leonardo’s writings from this period also reveal his outrage at the mistreatment of animals. He offered a horrified and gruesome litany of animals caught in traps, eaten by their owners, or treated with “blows, and goadings, and curses, and great abuse.”5 In this context we can believe the famous story told by Vasari of how Leonardo used to buy caged birds only to release them into the air, “giving them back their lost freedom.”6 Leonardo was, in this respect, different from so many other Italians. Blood sports were popular pastimes at all Italian courts, including Lodovico’s, with courtiers and visiting dignitaries regularly descending on the duke’s country home at Vigevano to slaughter stags, boars, and wolves. Even Beatrice was a dedicated participant, “always either riding or hunting,” as Lodovico boasted in a letter to his sister-in-law.7

  Leonardo’s assistant Tommaso Masini—the eccentric dabbler known as Zoroastro—was also a vegetarian: a later source claimed that he wore linen because he could not bear to wear dead animals, and that he “would not for anything kill a flea.”8 Other vegetarians in Italy at this time were members of the mendicant orders. Luca Pacioli was probably a vegetarian because the Franciscans, following the example of St. Francis, abstained from meat. St. Francis himself offered a precedent for Leonardo’s love of the animal kingdom: he was said to have freed animals from traps, preached a sermon to the birds, and tamed the man-eating wolf of Gubbio. St. Dominic likewise abstained from meat, and the Dominican Constitutions urged friars to forego flesh except in the case of serious illness.9

  That Leonardo took any inspiration for his vegetarianism from the religious orders seems unlikely. The Dominicans avoided meat not because they objected to the cruelty inflicted on animals, but because eating meat was a pleasure of the flesh that needed to be denied lest it expose a friar to other dangers and temptations: Aquinas, as we have seen, believed meat stimulated sexual appetites and produced a surplus of “seminal matter.” Nonetheless, vegetarianism was one of the few things that Leonardo and the friars of Santa Maria delle Grazie shared in common.

  Given that he was painting a dinner scene, Leonardo probably paid attention to how the friars ate their meal in the refectory—to their food and the other accoutrements of their table. After all, Last Supper scenes painted in refectories were meant to reflect the communal meal taken by nuns or friars, allowing them to identify with one of the most important episodes in the Passion. Like so many other artists, Leonardo accommodated certain features of his painting to its setting. As Goethe noted, “Christ was to celebrate his Last Supper among the Dominicans at Milan.” Visiting Santa Maria delle Grazie at the end of the eighteenth century, the German poet believed that the original configuration of tables was still evident. The prior’s table stood opposite the entrance, raised a step above the ground, while the friars’ tables ran lengthwise down either side of the room. He conjectured that Leonardo took these tables as the model for the one in his painting. There is no doubt, he wrote, “that the tablecloth, with its pleated folds, its stripes and figures, and even the knots at the corners, was borrowed from the laundry of the convent. Dishes, plates, cups, and other utensils were probably likewise copied from those which the monks made use of.”10

  Goethe’s instinct was probably right. The knots in the corner of the tablecloth are a nice touch, and it is easy to imagine the tablecloth in the mural reflecting those spread on the refectory tables. In earlier centuries, Leonardo’s depiction of the tablecloth, food, and utensils excited much comment and admiration. A French priest visiting Santa Maria delle Grazie in 1515 described Leonardo’s painting as “a thing of extraordinary excellence,” and what he singled out for special praise was the table setting: “because as one sees the bread on the table one would say that it is actual bread, not simulated. The same can be said of the wine, the glasses, the vessels, the table and tablecloth.”11 Vasari, too, reserved high praise for the tablecloth, noting that its texture “is counterfeited so cunningly that the linen itself could not look more realistic.”12 Four hundred years later, the pleasures of Leonardo’s table were what attracted Andy Warhol to the painting. The artist who made his name with soup cans and Coke bottles claimed that he “felt comfortable with the subject of food” and, excited about the opportunity to “update Leonardo’s dining scene,” went on to produce forty paintings and silk screens of The Last Supper.13

  Warhol died in 1987, a dozen years before the most recent conservation of this “dining scene” was completed. This cleaning of the painting has allowed us to appreciate, as previous generations could not, these still-life details. Prominent in the lifelike tableware is the cruet of water that sits before James the Greater: Leonardo captured not only the transparency of the glass (through which we see the plate behind it) but also the reflection of light on its bulbous surface: a truly virtuoso performance.

  If Leonardo took his models for the tablecloth and utensils from the convent, other details in the painting created a sharp contrast with the humble and spartan refectory. The walls of the room in which Christ and the apostles take their meal are hung with eight tapestries, four on each lateral wall. These tapestries have a floral design similar to the millefleurs (thousand flowers) pattern of fifteenth-century Flemish tapestries (with the finicky details no doubt left to Leonardo’s apprentices). The appearance of these tapestries introduces a contemporary courtly note into the scene, and one alien to the experience of the friars at Santa Maria delle Grazie, whose walls would have been bare of such ornate decor. Flemish tapestries were popular and prestigious decorations at Italian courts. Their beauty and expense made them conspicuous markers of wealth and magnificence. The wedding feast for Lodovico Sforza’s brother Galeazzo Maria saw the main piazza in Pavia draped with sumptuous tapestries. Without this opulent display, a courtier explained to the groom’s mother, “we would be put to great shame.”14

  In Milan, many rooms in the Castello Sforzesco were hung with tapestries. Lodovico’s father, Francesco, had brought four master weavers from Flanders to Milan, and before his death in 1466 another five had arrived to assist them. In Lodovico’s day, the tapestries in the Castello were valued at more than 150,000 ducats.15 None of the tapestries woven for the Castello survives, but Leonardo may well have taken from them the pattern for the tapestries in The Last Supper, thereby deliberately suggesting a link between his mural and the grandeur of the Sforza court.16

  One indication of the value and importance of tapestries comes from a few decades later. For his marriage in 1514, the future King François I of France was given the gift of a Flemish tapestry that in 1533 he ceremoniously presented to Pope Clement VII. The scene depicted on this tapestry was Leonardo’s Last Supper.

  Painters of Last Suppers had only a few indications from the Gospels about the food and drink served to Jesus and the apostles. These clues are sometimes ambiguous and conflicting. Matthew gave a very compressed account of the Last Supper. He stated that it was the Passover feast, from which we can assume (though he did not say) that a lamb and unleavened bread were served. Mark and Luke likewise indicated that the Last Supper took place at Passover, and so when the apostles “made rea
dy the pasch” (Luke 22:13) their preparations would have involved a lamb and unleavened bread. Like Matthew, both added the scene in which Christ shares bread and wine with the apostles.

  John’s account is, typically, rather different. He clearly stated that the Last Supper took place several days before the Passover feast, so lamb was presumably not on the menu. The only food he mentioned is the bread that Jesus dips and then offers to Judas. John did not describe the institution of the Eucharist and so there is no reference to a chalice of wine.

  What was an artist to make of these various descriptions? The Gospels were certainly rich in drama, with the startling announcement of the traitor in the midst of the apostles and the description (in Matthew, Mark, and Luke) of the institution of the Eucharist. But props were lacking for the painter, who needed to use his imagination to furnish the table with food and drink.

  Most painters depicted the Last Supper as a simple and spartan meal. These portrayals accorded with the scanty details given in the Gospels. They also mirrored the meager dinners served in refectories, especially during the frequent fasts, when friars and nuns were given only bread and water. They indicated, furthermore, how painters in the Middle Ages and Renaissance took very little interest in gastronomic details. In the fifteenth century and earlier, food was a perfunctory addition to dinner scenes rather than a celebration of conspicuous culinary consumption or a demonstration of the painter’s virtuoso abilities, as it would become in the seventeenth century when Dutch artists created sumptuous still lifes of tables adorned with exotic food. For instance, in the early 1460s the Florentine painters Filippo Lippi and Benozzo Gozzoli each painted a scene showing the Feast of Herod. The subject matter might have seemed like an opportunity for the painters to show a table groaning with exotic fare. By the standards of later centuries, however, they produced incredibly paltry spreads: a few tiny wineglasses and miniscule serving dishes. But these painters were uninterested in showcasing their skills through detailed and scrupulously realistic depictions of slabs of meat or bunches of fruit.

  Painters of Last Suppers had been equally restrained, often showing only bread and wine or, at most, a small lamb on a platter. Leonardo, however, depicted a meal that in both style and subject was very different from all his predecessors. Besides the bread rolls, tableware, and half-full glasses of red wine, he showed three large serving platters. Although the one in the center, in front of Christ, stands empty except for a section of fruit on its edge (perhaps a pomegranate), the other two are generously heaped with food. The one in front of Andrew is piled, interestingly enough, with eight or nine fish. The depiction of fish is unusual in a Last Supper, though the oldest-known version, the fifth-century mosaic in the basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, shows two enormous fish on the table. Although the Gospels say nothing about fish at the Last Supper, the image is appropriate given that a number of the apostles were fishermen and the fish was a symbol of Christ: in Greek the first letter of the words Jesus Christos Theou Uios Soter (Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior) form ichthus (iota, chi, theta, upsilon, sigma)—which happens to be Greek for fish.

  The other platter, sitting in front of Matthew, is even more interesting. Paint loss means its contents are virtually illegible, and presumably they have been obscured for many centuries because no one seems to have commented on what is a unique—and remarkable—contribution to a Last Supper. Luckily, thanks to the recent restoration of the mural we can see from several small serving dishes (including the one beneath Christ’s right arm) exactly what Leonardo imagined Jesus and the apostles to be eating: chunks of eel garnished with slices of orange.17

  Eels were certainly an interesting choice. Leonardo has provided the apostles with a vegetarian—or at least a pescetarian—meal. He may have been alluding to the meals served in Santa Maria delle Grazie, since eels could be caught in the rivers around Milan. However, eels were a delicacy associated more with courtly banquets than refectory suppers. The Greek poet Archestratus, author of the world’s earliest cookbook, declared eels “superior to all other fishes,” and for centuries they were prominent on royal bills of fare.18 Eels featured conspicuously in the festivities when Lodovico Sforza’s father-in-law, Ercole d’Este, married Eleanor of Aragon in 1473. In a letter to a friend, Eleanor described how during the entertainments five plates of eels were served “wrapped in crust.” This course was followed by an intermezzo during which actors playing Perseus and Andromeda recited lines of poetry. Then the next course arrived: “Five plates of roasted eels with yellow sauce.” A second intermezzo was performed, this time with the goddess Ceres appearing on a chariot drawn by two eels.19

  Detail of slices of eel and orange

  Because of their ubiquity at feasts of this sort, eels came to be associated with luxury and overindulgence. Eels certainly seemed to bring out the gluttony in diners. In 1491, Galeazzo Sanseverino described in a letter how he and Beatrice, Lodovico’s young wife, caught eels in the river north of Milan and, after retiring to one of Lodovico’s nearby villas, “proceeded to dine off them until we could eat no more.”20 This sort of overindulgence sometimes had fatal effects. Surfeits of eels were blamed for the deaths of both King Henry I of England in 1135 and, 150 years later, Pope Martin IV, who liked his eels marinated in Vernaccia wine. His gluttony won him a place, according to Dante, among the sinners in purgatory.

  Leonardo probably enjoyed eels at Lodovico’s table in the Castello. The kitchen in the Castello may even have prepared them, as he showed, with orange slices. However, a recipe for eels and oranges is found in a story by a fifteenth-century writer named Gentile Sermini, whose tales were collected together in about 1424. The recipe involves skinning the eel, boiling it in water, chopping it into chunks, and then roasting the chunks on a skewer before marinating them in the juice of six pomegranates and twenty oranges. Coincidentally or not, Leonardo appears to have included pomegranates on the table.21

  Sermini came from Siena, and he may have been describing a recipe well-known to Tuscans like Leonardo. But Leonardo, with his fondness for funny stories such as those by Poggio Bracciolini, may actually have known Sermini’s tale. No doubt it would have appealed to him. Like many Italian storytellers of the fifteenth century, Sermini had a strong anticlerical bias, and in his story the eel is a symbol of greedy self-indulgence. His tale involves a priest who cannot wait to finish his sermon so he can return home to eat a fat and juicy eel given to him by a dirt-poor parishioner and prepared by his cook using the special orange-and-pomegranate recipe. His gluttony outrages another parishioner, Lodovico, who, in the middle of a tirade against the priest, grabs his breviary: “It was full of recipes for every possible dish,” Lodovico finds to his disgust, “every possible treat: how to cook them, what sauces to accompany them with, what time of year to prepare them.”22

  Sermini’s story is a satire on ecclesiastical corruption in general and epicurean priests in particular. Leonardo voiced strong anticlerical sentiments of his own, finding the religious orders hypocritical insofar as they made themselves “acceptable to God” by—in his opinion—enjoying great wealth and living in “splendid buildings.” His depiction of a dinner of eels, a food associated with gluttony, could have been a mischievous commentary on what he regarded as priestly corruption. On the other hand, Leonardo clearly placed a plate of half-eaten eels in front of Christ, and it is unlikely in the extreme that he intended any sort of blasphemy. Since he used Milanese courtiers for his models, and since the painting was meant to be, among other things, a glorification of Lodovico’s regime, he may simply have wished to show the scrumptious food enjoyed at the duke’s table.

  Another possibility is that Leonardo was perpetrating a joke on the friars of Santa Maria delle Grazie. The French priest who saw the mural in 1515 commented on the astonishingly lifelike appearance of the food, and although he did not mention the eels, there can be no doubt that Leonardo painted them with the same attention to detail as everything else on the table: following the res
toration, we can see the fat chunks with their juicy white flesh over which the apostles will drizzle the slices of orange. The oranges have been painted with such detail that the pith is visible. Given the traditional ambivalence of Italian artists toward gastronomic details, there was no precedent in the 1490s for the sight of food so scrupulously and scrumptiously depicted, especially by someone with Leonardo’s prodigious talents. Whatever his intentions might have been, Leonardo succeeded in painting a famously mouthwatering delicacy for a group of friars who for much of the year fasted on bread and water, and who at all other times were obliged to observe strict culinary frugality.

  Virtually all paintings of the Last Supper showed bread and wine on the table. Occasionally a chalice of wine would be depicted in front of Christ, as for example by Cosimo Rosselli in his fresco on the wall of the Sistine Chapel. More often the painters simply showed several beakers of wine distributed across the table, with half-filled glasses in front of each apostle. The painter of the Last Supper fresco in the church of San Andrea a Cercina, a few miles north of Florence, was particularly generous: he made no fewer than thirteen beakers of wine available to the apostles, including choices of both red and white.

  There was, of course, a scriptural justification for showing bread and wine: they were necessary for the sacrament described in the synoptic Gospels. But in showing bread and wine on the table, painters were duplicating conditions not only in refectories but on Italian dinner tables in general. Bread and wine were the two staples of the Italian diet in the fifteenth century: the provisions on which the most household money was spent. Bread accounted for 40 percent of a family’s total food bill and 60 percent of its total caloric intake, which explained why the harvest was literally a matter of life and death, and why biblical verses such as “Give us this day our daily bread” or “I am the bread of life” resonated so powerfully with people in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The Dominicans lived by begging, quite literally, for their bread, and the difficulty of obtaining enough bread to eat was a regular refrain in early Dominican literature.23