Leonardo and the Last Supper (36 page)

Leonardo would have seen numerous images of Mary Magdalene during his youth in Florence. Most striking was Donatello’s wooden statue in the baptistery, a harrowing portrait that shows her with a gaunt face, sunken eyes, a protruding sternum, and long, matted hair covering her emaciated body. Donatello was basing his depiction on a life of Mary Magdalene composed by a Dominican friar in the middle of the fourteenth century. Emphasizing her extreme penitence, this biography described how she physically abused herself after giving up prostitution, clawing her face and legs until they bled, tearing out clumps of hair, and striking her face with her fists and her breasts with a stone. At the end of this violent self-laceration she cried, “Take the reward, O my body, of the vain pleasures thou has frequented.”
⁹

Donatello’s version was extreme, but the dominant image of Mary Magdalene in the fifteenth century was as a penitent.
¹⁰
She was the patron saint of prostitutes, and her image often adorned the charitable institutions in Florence and elsewhere that gave refuge to reformed prostitutes. She was also, as a completely rehabilitated sinner, an image for all sinners to contemplate, not just reformed prostitutes—an example of how even the most degraded could recover purity of heart and find salvation. Such was her rehabilitation that she was regarded by the church (perhaps unexpectedly given her career as a prostitute) as one of the virgin saints. The Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas explained this transformation: “A person who has lost virginity by sin recovers by repenting, not the matter of virginity but the purpose of virginity.” A Luca Signorelli fresco in the cathedral in Orvieto,
Retinue of Chaste Virgins
—a project on which Dominican friars served as theological advisers—duly depicted her as the leader of the virgin saints. A far cry from Donatello’s haggard penitent, she has golden hair and a rose-colored gown.
¹¹

The Communion of the Apostles
by Fra Angelico, with Mary Magdalene kneeling in the lower left

By the 1490s, then, Mary Magdalene had a rich history and a wide range of meanings: prostitute, close companion of Christ, “apostle of the apostles,” patron saint of the Dominicans, miracle worker, virgin saint, and, most of all, reformed sinner—an example of how fallen humanity could redeem itself, and how even the most lowly and despised could be called by Christ to an apostolic mission. She was prolifically represented in frescoes and altar-pieces. There could be nothing controversial or theologically untoward about her appearance in a painting showing Christ and his apostles.

That much said, did Leonardo in fact omit John from his
Last Supper
and substitute Mary Magdalene in his place? Does the figure traditionally identified as John betray, as Sophie Neveu exclaims, the “hint of a bosom” and—perhaps—other female features that require us to identify her as a woman, not a man?

One reason for the supposed cameo by Mary Magdalene was removed, under oath, during a corruption trial in a French court, where Leonardo’s role as grandmaster of the shadowy “Priory of Sion” was revealed as a crude hoax. The Priory of Sion was supposedly a secret society founded in Jerusalem in 1099 to safeguard documents proving that Mary Magdalene gave birth to Christ’s baby. The descendants of Christ went on to found the Merovingian dynasty of Frankish kings, who ruled most of what is now
France (and large chunks of Germany) between the fifth and eighth centuries. In fact, the Priory of Sion was invented in the 1950s by Pierre Plantard, an anti-Semite, hoaxer, and fantasist who believed himself to be the true king of France and the latest in a long line of descendants of Christ and Mary Magdalene. Leonardo got dragged into the tale because his name—along with those of Sir Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, and a corrupt French businessman named Roger-Patrice Pelat—was inscribed on a list of “grandmasters” that Plantard composed and then stashed in the Bibliothèque nationale. In 1993, Plantard admitted his forgery in French court before an unamused judge.
¹²

If Leonardo is not the custodian of insider knowledge about Mary Magdalene’s secret nuptials, Christ’s Gallic descendants, or Pierre Plantard’s right to the French throne, what reason might he have had to show her in
The Last Supper
? Or, if indeed he depicted her, why disguise her? He could, like Fra Angelico, simply have shown her—the apostle of the apostles—among the others. If the Dominicans at San Marco in Florence did not object to her appearance in Fra Angelico’s depiction, why should the Dominicans at Santa Maria delle Grazie protest, especially given their veneration of her?

A clue to the identity of the mysterious figure beside St. Peter is undoubtedly his or her gender. In
The Da Vinci Code
, she is unambiguously a woman. “Leonardo was skilled at painting the difference between the sexes,” a character explains to Sophie.
¹³
On the contrary: Leonardo was skilled at blurring the differences between the sexes. He was fond of producing mysteriously androgynous figures: not only the beautiful adolescent (probably based on Salai) who appears almost obsessively in his sketches, but also figures such as Uriel, the angel kneeling on the right in his
Virgin of the Rocks
. For this painting Leonardo drew on a fourteenth-century biography of John the Baptist by Domenico Cavalca that described how as a child John was living under the protection of the angel Uriel when he met the Christ Child in the wilderness. Leonardo’s Uriel is a gloriously enigmatic creature who defies easy gender categorization. Judging from the beautiful silver-point drawing of Uriel’s head, Leonardo’s model was almost certainly female. In the two versions of
The Virgin of the Rocks
he heightened and emphasized the angel’s feminine qualities with golden curls and delicate features. The end result is head-scratchingly ambiguous: a young woman or androgynously beautiful adolescent male? Leonardo was deliberately coy about “the difference between the sexes.”

Equally ambiguous is the figure in one of his last paintings,
St. John the Baptist
. The subtle shading of the Baptist’s features gives soft tones to his smooth, feminized face, with its wide, come-hither eyes and the sphinxlike smile. Many viewers have been disturbed by this remarkable-looking figure. “Is it even a man?” asked Hippolyte Taine. “It is a woman, the body of a woman, or the body of a beautiful ambiguous adolescent.”
¹⁴
Perhaps most alarmed by this she-male was Bernard Berenson. The great connoisseur could not understand “why this fleshy female should pretend to be the virile sun-dried Baptist... And why did it smirk and point up and touch its breasts?”
¹⁵

Leonardo’s
St. John the Baptist

The model for this mysteriously leering
séducteur
may have been Salai, then in his thirties and still, apparently, possessed of powers of both attraction and repulsion. Salai has been advanced as the model for another of Leonardo’s bewitching portraits: the art investigator Silvano Vinceti claims he was the model for the
Mona Lisa
. Vinceti, the man who discovered Caravaggio’s remains in 2010, based his theory on supposed similarities between the faces of the Baptist and the subject of the
Mona Lisa
, noting that Leonardo often used Salai as a model, and that he “certainly inserted” some of
Salai’s characteristics into Lisa’s features.
¹⁶
Vinceti’s theory is seriously undermined by a lack of visual evidence: we do not actually know exactly what Salai looked like. There are no certain sketches of him, merely drawings of a ringleted youth that it is reasonably assumed were modeled by the young man. However, it should be noted that ringleted youths appear in Leonardo’s sketches
before
Salai’s arrival in his studio.

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