Leonardo and the Last Supper Read online

  Salai is an unlikely model for the Mona Lisa, but the androgynous qualities of the sitter have been noted by others, such as the French artist Marcel Duchamp, who in 1919 added a goatee and mustache to a reproduction of the painting to create his work L.H.O.O.Q., turning Mona Lisa into that hermaphroditic cliché of the fairground freak show, a bearded lady.d Yet another male model has even been claimed for the Mona Lisa—Leonardo himself. In 1987 the American artist Lillian Schwartz used a computer program to align the face in the Mona Lisa with the supposed self-portrait of Leonardo in the Biblioteca Reale in Turin. She discovered that their eyes, eyebrows, nose, and chin matched so closely that the mirroring could not be coincidental—meaning the Mona Lisa was really Leonardo’s self-portrait in drag. She pointed to the painting’s apparently hermaphroditic quality by calling her resulting image Mona/Leo. Her theory is undercut by the fact that the sketch in Turin is not Leonardo’s self-portrait, but if the two faces do indeed mirror one another, then the Mona Lisa may well have been based at least in part on a male model.17

  Another of Leonardo’s ambiguously gendered figures is the erotic drawing known as Angelo Incarnato, or the Angel Made Flesh, which appears to be Leonardo’s obscene caricature of his own smiling androgyne in St. John the Baptist. To the feminine features of the latter painting (the soft features and corkscrew hair) the sketch adds not merely the “hint of a bosom” but a round pubescent breast with a large nipple. However, Leonardo’s angel also proudly sports a large erection. Leonardo’s most recent biographer describes the sketch as “a kind of specialist transsexual pornography” in which an angel is given the features of “an unsavoury-looking catamite fished up from the lower reaches of the Roman flesh-market.”18

  According to Carlo Pedretti, Leonardo was “playfully intrigued first and then dangerously fascinated by the idea of having one sex merge into the other.”19 Leonardo was not alone: he came out of an artistic tradition that relished this kind of gender-bending. Florentine art over the previous generations had produced numerous images of beautiful young boys, often androgynous and lithely sensual. Most notable was Donatello’s bronze David, commissioned by Cosimo de’ Medici for the courtyard of his Florentine palazzo. The statue’s combination of masculine and feminine elements may have been intended to evoke the mythical figure of the hermaphrodite, celebrated in obscene verse by Antonio Beccadelli in The Hermaphrodite around the time Donatello cast his sculpture. Also around the same time, an ancient Roman statue uncovered in Florence, Sleeping Hermaphrodite, showing a beautiful young creature with female breasts and male genitalia, was much admired.20 In the fifteenth century the hermaphrodite did not have negative connotations: its androgyny was understood to be a sign of the unity and perfection of the self. A member of Cosimo de’ Medici’s circle, the scholar Marsilio Ficino, wrote in his commentary of Plato’s Symposium that the androgyne reconciled the masculine virtue of courage with the feminine one of temperance. The hermaphrodite was, in this view, the perfect being: someone whole and complete. Leonardo’s last patron, King François I of France, therefore did not object when the painter Niccolò da Modena represented him as an androgyne: he was shown to combine the warrior qualities of the male with the productive and creative powers of a woman.21

  Leonardo was less interested in the philosophical underpinnings of the androgyne than he was in its erotic charge. He was interested in faces of every type, but his ideal of physical beauty was a young man, an adolescent or even a prepubescent boy, with curly hair and feminine features—someone encompassing both childhood and adulthood, and masculinity and femininity. Salai best represented this style of beauty for him, and Leonardo no doubt tolerated the boy’s errant behavior for the sake of his angelic face and mass of ringlets.

  It would have been natural for Leonardo to consider Salai as a model for The Last Supper: not for one of the older apostles, obviously, since Salai was still an adolescent when Leonardo began work, but rather for one of the younger ones. He may have been the model for St. Philip, the apostle in the orange-colored robe who, standing three figures to Christ’s left, seems to be protesting his innocence. The model for Philip, sketched by Leonardo in a study done in black chalk, was thought for many years to be a young woman, not only because of the delicate features but also because the model seemed to be wearing a ribbon or hair band. However, the “hair band” proved on further investigation to be nothing more than a crease in the paper, and it is equally possible that the model was actually a young man or an adolescent. However, the gender of the model was complicated even more when a drawing was discovered beneath the paint of one of Leonardo’s other works, the London version of The Virgin of the Rocks. The sketch is of the Virgin Mary, and her features exactly match those of Philip in The Last Supper, indicating that Leonardo used the same drawing—and the same model—for both Mary and the apostle. The gender of the model remains an open question.22

  The black chalk drawing of Philip bears undeniable similarities to a Salai-type sketch dating from about 1495: Leonardo gave large eyes and a Greek nose to both of them, and the pair, crucially, seem to be the same age. Leonardo made Philip look somewhat older in the finished painting but nonetheless emphasized his youth by depicting him, along with John and Matthew, as one of the three beardless apostles. Salai-like features can also be read into those of Matthew, another of the younger-looking apostles, and one whose mop of curls has been sadly obscured by paint loss. In any case, the matching Greek noses, the downturn of the mouths, and the slightly bulbous chins—all suggestive of the “Salai-type profile”—indicate that Leonardo used the same model for both Philip and Matthew.

  No sketch or study has ever been found for the figure traditionally identified as John, and the paint loss in the finished work (only one tenth of John’s original flesh tones have survived) has left only a shadow of what the true features would have been.23 He appears even more youthful even than Philip or Matthew. It is more difficult to read Salai’s features into John since, unlike the two others, he is not shown in profile (which is how Leonardo usually chose to draw the ringleted adolescent for which Salai was an exemplar). But he is dreamy and demure, another of Leonardo’s angel-faced androgynes. If there is no hint of a bosom, there is, however, the hint of a sphinxlike smile: the same riddling smile seen on the lips of Leonardo’s other hypnotic androgynes such as Uriel and John the Baptist.

  Leonardo’s drawing of the apostle Philip

  The apostle Matthew

  A figure in a Leonardo painting with feminine features does not therefore automatically, easily, or unambiguously qualify as a woman. In fact, the figure in The Last Supper is not a woman: only the most partisan reading can place Mary Magdalene in the scene. Viewers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries would have read the painting quite differently.

  As we have seen, a well-established tradition gave John, the beloved disciple, a feminized appearance and sat him beside Christ—or often placed him asleep on Christ’s breast—at the Last Supper. He was traditionally understood to be the youngest of the apostles, and painters made much of his youthfulness. The earliest known image of him, in the St. Tecla catacomb in Rome, dating from the late fourth century, shows him as slim and beardless, little more than a boy. Painters of the Last Supper invariably depicted him as a handsome, beardless, and often effeminate youth with long hair. Leonardo preserves this feminine appearance but otherwise his depiction departs from the tradition: John sits next to Jesus, on his right side, but leans toward St. Peter, who beckons him and anxiously asks his question. There was a clear compositional reason for this change: Leonardo wanted to isolate Jesus in the middle of the scene, a pose that the figure of John asleep on his breast would have weakened.

  None of the three synoptic Gospels mentions the special relationship between Jesus and John, and the Bible itself provides only a few details of John’s life and character. John is not even mentioned in his own Gospel beyond several cryptic references to the disciple whom Jesus loved most. From the synoptics it can be
determined that he was the brother of James the Greater and the son of a fisherman named Zebedee. Called by Christ as they were mending their father’s nets, John and James left their boat to follow him.

  Some of the gaps in John’s life story were eagerly but unreliably filled by various legends composed and transmitted after his death. These accounts underscored and expanded his role as the disciple whom Christ loved. The Apocryphal Acts of John, in particular, stressed the closeness of their relationship. Written in the third or fourth century to supplement the skimpy details given in the Bible about the lives (and also the deaths) of John, Andrew, Paul, Peter, and Thomas, the Apocryphal Acts were lively and popular accounts that featured talking animals, flying magicians, and melodramatic episodes of self-castration and necrophilia. In them, the apostles performed exciting feats such as reviving a dead fish and baptizing a lion, and the Acts of John included the charming story of how John, while bedding down at an inn, successfully ordered the bedbugs to leave him alone so he could get a good night’s sleep.

  In the fifth century, Pope Leo the Great condemned the Apocryphal Acts as “a hotbed of manifold perversity” and ordered them to be burned.24 Such was their enduring appeal, however, that they were still being copied in the fourteenth century, and artists often turned to them for inspiration, as for example when Giotto painted the raising of Drusiana by St. John or Filippino Lippi the upside-down crucifixion of St. Peter.

  The Acts of John provide much information about John’s close relationship with Jesus. John is depicted as someone whom Jesus must rescue from marriage and a love of women (making him a salutary example for young men entering the priesthood). The text includes a long speech in which John describes how Jesus made sure that he, John, was “untouched by union with a woman.” When he wished to marry in his youth, Jesus appeared to him and declared, “John, I need thee.” John remained determined, however, and so with the wedding fast approaching Jesus struck him down with a “bodily sickness” that prevented the union. On another occasion when John was preparing for his nuptials, Jesus told him: “John, if thou wert not mine, I should have allowed thee to marry,” whereupon he blinded him. When John finally regained his sight, Jesus disclosed to him “the repugnance of even looking closely at a woman.” The apostle was thereby saved from “the foul madness that is in the flesh.”25

  The tradition of John as the beloved disciple later caused suspicious comment, particularly in England. The Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe was accused of calling John a catamite, a “bedfellow to Christ” who “leaned alwaies in his bosome,” and who was used “as the sinners of Sodoma.” A few decades later, in 1617, King James I cited the relationship as a justification for his love of George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, when he told the Privy Council: “Christ had His John and I have my George.”26 In 1967, Hugh Montefiore, later bishop of Birmingham, read a paper at the annual conference of modern churchmen at Oxford speculating that Jesus was a homosexual, citing as evidence his relationship with John and the other apostles. Other theologians have recently developed the idea further, with one of them outlining the “possibly homosexual behaviour” of Jesus in his relations with John.27

  The master-disciple relationship has a long history in the Mediterranean world. The intense connection between an older teacher and his younger pupil was celebrated by the ancient Greeks, for whom young men were initiated into society through what has been called “educational homosexuality.” Such attachments were equally well-known to Renaissance Italy, especially in Florence, where in 1469 Marsilio Ficino, the translator of Plato, celebrated what he called “Socratic Love”: boys who were “nearly adults” should be instructed in the ways of society, he argued, through “personal and pleasing intimacy” with older men.28 Such intimacy no doubt sometimes existed in the workshop between masters and their apprentices. “Botticelli keeps a boy,” snarled a denunciation of the painter and one of his young helpers.29 A similar intimacy existed between Leonardo and Salai (and before that, possibly, between Verrocchio and Leonardo).

  Jesus cradling John on his bosom was therefore an evocative image in fifteenth-century Italy. But this particular master-disciple relationship was understood to exist on a higher plane. As we have seen, rather than philia or eros, the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures characterizes Jesus’s love for John with the noun agape, which elsewhere describes God’s redeeming love for the world. Many religious texts therefore emphasized the spiritual rather than earthly or carnal nature of the relationship. A case in point is the popular medieval text, Meditations on the Life of Christ, composed in about 1300 by an anonymous author, a Franciscan friar known to posterity as the Pseudo-Bonaventure. Here John is identified as the bridegroom at the Marriage Feast at Cana, the episode (described in John 2:1–11) in which Jesus performed the first of his miracles, turning water into wine. The Pseudo-Bonaventure elaborated the story of the wedding with a detail not mentioned in John’s Gospel: “When the feast was over the Lord Jesus called John aside and said, ‘Leave this wife of yours and follow me for I shall lead you to a higher wedding.’ And he followed him.”30

  This “higher wedding” is the whole point of the close relationship between Christ and John: a union of the soul with God in a kind of “mystic marriage.” The pair of them became, in fact, a symbol of religious mysticism, their higher wedding illustrated through numerous depictions (in sculpture as well as painting) of John leaning on Christ’s bosom and sometimes holding his hand. There was no nudging and winking for the fourteenth-century Dominican nun who wrote, “When I remembered how St. John rested on the sweet heart of my Lord Jesus Christ I was moved by such a sweet grace that I could not express it in words.”31 Many writers stressed that John was not merely leaning physically on Jesus. St. Augustine claimed that John took divine inspiration for his ministry and his Gospel from this posture because “he drank...from the Lord’s Breast.”32 Likewise the hymn composed at the turn of the tenth century by a monk named Notker Balbulus, who succinctly summed up John’s career: “You rise to renounce the breast of marriage, follow the Messiah, and from his breast drink of the sacred streams.”33

  These descriptions of John drinking from the Lord’s breast were developed in the Middle Ages into the cult of the Sacred Heart, which regarded Jesus’s heart as the symbol of his love for humanity and a source from which devotees could imbibe grace and wisdom. Its most famous expression is found in The Herald of Divine Love by the Benedictine nun Gertrude of Helfta. Gertrude’s work describes a vision she received during Holy Week in 1289, when she rested her head on Jesus’s left arm, near the wound in his side, and heard the “loving pulsation” of his heart. The Sacred Heart was represented in art by the image of a beardless and youthful St. John leaning on Jesus’s breast. The pair was sometimes shown holding hands like a bride and bridegroom: an image of contented mystical matrimony.34

  Painters of Last Supper scenes during the Renaissance had the cult of the Sacred Heart in mind when they showed Jesus and John seated intimately together at the table. Many portrayed John sitting to Christ’s left, with his head over Christ’s heart. Equally, the cult of the Sacred Heart could have been influenced by images of the Last Supper, since the earliest known work of art to feature John leaning on Jesus’s bosom at the Last Supper (on the bronze door of the basilica of San Zeno in Verona) predated Gertrude by some two centuries.

  The marriage hinted at in The Last Supper is therefore not a secret one between Jesus and Mary Magdalene but rather the much-celebrated mystical union between Jesus and the beloved disciple. As we have seen, one of Leonardo’s sketches experimented with the idea of placing John asleep on Christ’s breast (in the same way that it experimented with—and finally abandoned—the idea of placing Judas on the opposite side of the table). His description of how to paint a Last Supper makes no mention of this tableau, offering instead a scenario much closer to what he actually painted: “Another speaks into his neighbour’s ear and he, as he listens to him, turns towards him to
lend an ear.” Ever concerned with action and movement, Leonardo chose to depict the scene that occurred a second or two later than that portrayed by all the other representations: not the still vignette that finds John asleep on the bosom of Christ, but rather John awake—albeit barely—and in the act of listening to Peter’s importunate question, “Who is it of whom he speaks?”

  CHAPTER 13

  Food and Drink

  Leonardo was, famously, a vegetarian. In 1516 an Italian traveler to India wrote home to Giuliano de’ Medici, the son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, that the Indians were a “gentle people ... who do not feed on anything that has blood, nor will they allow anyone to hunt living things, like our Leonardo da Vinci.”1 Leonardo’s shopping lists attest to an apparently vegetarian diet: kidney beans, white and red maize, millet, buckwheat, peas, grapes, mushrooms, fruit, and bran. “Have some ears of corn of large size sent from Florence,” reads a note written around the time he painted The Last Supper. Corn was a completely new food in Italy, having been introduced to Europe from the Americas only a few years previously. Leonardo had evidently developed a taste for this exotic new import.2