Leonardo and the Last Supper (15 page)

The charge was repeated two months later—this time in elegant Latin—but Leonardo was never charged because the anonymous accuser failed to come forward, and no other witnesses corroborated the story. The charges were eventually dropped and the case was dismissed. Most biographers and art historians are quick to convict. A husband-and-wife team, authors of a widely used textbook, claimed the accusation “was almost certainly true” before adding—bizarrely—that Leonardo’s homosexuality explained “his proneness to abandon things half done.”
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Questions of procrastination aside, Leonardo was almost certainly homosexual by the standards of later centuries. Freud was no doubt correct when he stated that it was doubtful whether Leonardo ever embraced a woman in passion.
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Two years after the Saltarelli affair, Leonardo wrote a partially legible declaration in his notebook: “Fioravante di Domenico at Florence is my most beloved friend, as though he were my...”
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A nineteenth-century editor of Leonardo’s writings hopefully filled in “brother,” but the relationship may well have been more intimate.

Within a year or two of the Saltarelli affair, Leonardo appears to have been involved in one more scandal in Florence. In a letter to Lorenzo de’ Medici composed early in 1479, the ruler of Bologna, Giovanni Bentivoglio, raised the issue of a young apprentice recently exiled from Florence and then jailed in Bologna because of the “wicked life he had followed” during his time in Florence. Details of the youth’s crimes are unspecified, though he had fallen into what Bentivoglio called
mala conversatione
—bad company. He may have been little different from the many unruly young toughs, who, as one Florentine lamented, “threaten barkeepers, dismember saints, and break pots and plates.”
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What made him distinctive, however, was the name by which Bentivoglio
referred to him: Paolo de Leonardo de Vinci da Fiorenza. This formulation—with its use of the patronymic “de Leonardo de Vinci”—might suggest that Paolo was Leonardo’s son. That scenario is impossible, however, since if Paolo was, say, sixteen years old in early 1479—the very youngest he is likely to have been—the maths require Leonardo to have been eleven when his “son” was born. If Paolo was older than sixteen, then Leonardo would have been even more startlingly precocious.
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A far more plausible scenario is that Paolo was an apprentice who began working and studying under Leonardo after he struck out on his own following his long apprenticeship with Verrocchio. Apprentices often adopted (or were referred to by) the names of their masters. Verrocchio was a case in point: born Andrea Michele di Cioni, he dropped his father’s name and used that of his masters, the goldsmiths Francesco and Giuliano Verrocchio. Less certain is whether Leonardo was in any way involved in Paolo’s “wicked life,” or indeed whether Paolo’s wicked life involved “that vice of Sodom and Gomorrah.” Banishment to Bologna was not the usual punishment for sodomites, though the moral tone of the letter suggests that sexual misconduct of some variety was among Paolo’s transgressions. In any case, Paolo’s malfeasance, whatever it involved, no doubt redounded to his master’s discredit, and the young miscreant’s example may lurk in the background of Leonardo’s advice about keeping oneself from bad company.

The Corte dell’Arengo would have been a scene of intense activity at the end of 1494, as Leonardo’s work on the gigantic horse gave way to the project for Santa Maria delle Grazie. Before painting either a panel or a mural, an artist needed to make dozens if not hundreds of drawings. These ranged from
primi pensieri
—the artist’s brainstorming “first thoughts”—to full-scale drawings that served as templates for the final work. Work on the mural therefore involved Leonardo in vast and intensive labors with paper, pen, and ink as he worked out the details of his composition and then prepared to begin work on the wall itself.

Leonardo was a superb draftsman. One look at his adolescent doodlings supposedly convinced Verrocchio to hire him on the spot. A century later, Giorgio Vasari would marvel at Leonardo’s “beautiful and detailed drawings on paper which are unrivalled for the perfection of their finish.”
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At a
time when other artists merely saw drawings as a means to an end, Leonardo evidently took pride in his sketches. At some point in the 1480s, probably soon after his arrival in Milan, he drew up a list of the drawings in his possession. They made for a varied collection, encompassing “a head of the Duke” (presumably Lodovico), three Madonnas, multiple drawings of Saint Sebastian and Saint Jerome, compositions featuring angels, portraits of women with braided coiffures, men “with fine flowing hair,” and the head of a gypsy girl.
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According to one source, Leonardo used a stylus when he sketched in the little notebook he kept at his belt.
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A stylus was a metal-tipped drawing instrument widely used by artists before the invention of the pencil (graphite was not discovered until in 1504, and the wooden-cased graphite pencil appeared only in the second half of the seventeenth century). For drawing with a stylus, artists used paper specially coated with a ground made from, among other things, powdered bone. One fifteenth-century recipe recommended incinerated table scraps, such as chicken wings, whose ground-up ashes were sprinkled thinly on the paper or parchment and then brushed off with a hare’s foot.
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With the paper thus prepared, the artist went to work on its granular surface with his stylus, which was usually made from silver and sharpened to a point, and which, as it was drawn across the surface, left particles behind; these traces quickly oxidized, producing delicate lines of silvery gray.

Leonardo also used various other media for his drawings: chalk, pen and ink, lead point, and charcoal. Characteristically, he experimented with various drawing techniques. He advised wetting the tip of the stylus with spittle, and his notes record that he tried treating his paper with such things as powdered gall nuts, candle soot, and the herb calves’ foot.
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How Leonardo developed his pictorial ideas through countless drawings can be seen in the case of his
Adoration of the Magi
, for which he produced numerous sketches in the early 1480s, both of individual figures and others gathered in groups. Many of his drawings for this work were done with a stylus but then, in a technique rare in Florentine workshops, touched up with a pen: that is, with a goose quill dipped in ink.
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Working rapidly on small leafs of paper, he created a series of drawings exploring possible poses for Joseph, Mary, the Christ Child, and the Three Kings. He probably had models (such as his apprentices) strike a variety of postures for him in his studio, or else he quickly dashed off likenesses of Florence’s most animated bench sitters. The figures in his sketches clasp their hands, kneel on the floor, tilt their heads, shade their eyes, cross their arms or ankles, and jackknife their bodies. Leonardo once wrote that there were “18 actions of man,” which included running, reposing, standing, sitting, kneeling, lying down, and “carrying or being carried”—and he seemed determined to fit all eighteen into his
Adoration
.
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Leonardo’s sketch for
The Adoration of the Magi

These sketches for the
Adoration
culminated in a remarkable metal point sketch over which Leonardo traced with a pen and in places—in order to embellish the work still further—gave a wash of ink. Though done on a piece of paper only six and a half inches high by a little less than eight inches wide, the sketch imagines in the Bethlehem manger an entire frenetic world. The Holy Family and the Three Kings are nowhere to be seen. Instead, Leonardo devoted himself to the creation of a frenzied background: spectral figures scrambling up staircases and hanging over archways, horses rearing and bucking, and even a seated dromedary surveying the action. These squirming figures are contained within a grid of perspective lines that explode outward from an off-center focal point at the nose of one of the rearing horses.

Leonardo proceeded in exactly the same way as he began designing his mural at Santa Maria delle Grazie. One of his earliest drawings for the project was done on a sheet of paper roughly eight inches by ten inches. The flurry of pen strokes at the top of the page shows very little detail, merely conjuring a line of ghostly figures in cursory outline—but the figures are recognizably Christ and the apostles seated at a long table. Leonardo’s take on the subject in this
primo pensiero
was fairly conventional, since he followed painters like Castagno and Ghirlandaio in placing Judas on the near side of the table, opposite the others. Also like Castagno and Ghirlandaio—and like virtually all other artists tackling a Last Supper—he placed John asleep in the bosom of Christ.

Leonardo’s sketch for
The Last Supper

This positioning indicates that Leonardo, like so many of his predecessors, was at that point following the Gospel of St. John rather than the synoptics. To the right and lower on the sheet, he sketched on a slightly larger scale a detail of the central motif of Christ, John, Judas, and one other apostle, exploring how Judas would reach across the table to take the sop of bread from Christ. This gesture by which Christ announces his betrayer, given in three of the four Gospels, is a common feature of Last Suppers, evident from Giotto and Duccio through Castagno and Ghirlandaio. At this point, then, Leonardo was thinking along traditional lines, but his vision would gradually change as he worked and reworked his composition.

Leonardo’s drawings survive in a far greater profusion than those of any other artist of his age. Even so, fewer than a dozen studies for
The Last Supper
survive from the scores he must have created during the winter of 1494–95.
Unquestionably the finest—and one of the finest of all Leonardo’s drawings—is a head and shoulders sketch of one of the apostles, St. James the Greater.