Leonardo and the Last Supper (40 page)

In front of Christ there is, besides the half-finished plate of eels, a glass of wine, a roll of bread, and a pomegranate (or perhaps an apple). While Leonardo was interested, like no one before him, in the meticulously realistic depiction of natural objects, he was not above using natural objects symbolically. One of his Madonna and Child paintings, known as the
Benois Madonna
, shows the infant Christ holding some kind of cruciferous plant, an obvious symbol of the Passion. Another,
Madonna of the Yarnwinder
, shows the Christ Child holding his mother’s cross-shaped distaff: another allusion to the Passion.
The Virgin of the Rocks
, meanwhile, is rich in botanical symbols, with Mary’s grace and purity emphasized by flowers such as violets and lilies, and Christ’s Passion foreshadowed by the palm tree and (in the left foreground of the Paris version) the anemone, the red of whose flowers was said to have come from Christ’s dripping blood. Symbolic elements have even been read into the
Mona Lisa
. Despite the portrait’s apparent naturalism, a scholar has convincingly argued that it represents the triumph of Virtue over Time.
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Leonardo used some of the food on the table in
The Last Supper
in a similarly symbolic fashion. The bread and wine allude, obviously, to the body and blood of Christ. The apple (if it is indeed an apple) would indicate that Christ is the “new Adam.” If the fruit is a pomegranate, the iconography is equally appropriate. Pomegranates made frequent appearances in Italian art: in Botticelli’s 1487
Madonna of the Pomegranate
, the Christ Child holds a pomegranate that is split open and oozing seeds. The numerous red seeds symbolize not only the blood of Christ but also the many people who come together under the unity of the church.

Leonardo shows Christ’s hands on the table, near his servings of bread and wine. He appears to be simultaneously indicating with his left hand and reaching for something with his right. This double gesture seems simple and natural, but how are we to interpret it? More to the point, how would the Dominicans have interpreted it? Is Christ about to dip his hand in the dish with Judas, thereby identifying him as the traitor? Or is he reaching for the bread and wine to institute the Eucharist?

Matthew described the institution of the Eucharist: “And whilst they were at supper, Jesus took bread and blessed and broke and gave to his disciples and said: Take and eat. This is my body. And taking the chalice, he
gave thanks and gave to them, saying: Drink all of this. For this is my blood of the new testament, which shall be shed for many unto remission of sins” (Matthew 26:26–8). Mark gave almost the same description, but Luke reversed the order: the wine is taken first, then the bread. The synoptic Gospels also disagree about the exact point in the meal when the institution of the Eucharist takes place. In Matthew and Mark, Christ’s announcement of the impending betrayal precedes the sharing of the body and blood of Christ; for Luke, the sacrament comes first, or perhaps—in a moment of high drama—Jesus actually institutes the Eucharist at the same time as he announces the betrayal: “But yet behold,” says Jesus as he shares out the wine from the chalice, “the hand of him that betrays me is with me on the table.” The statement that he is about to die for his companions is immediately followed, in other words, by the startling declaration that a traitor sits among them.

A painter of a Last Supper needed to decide how to juggle these varying accounts. Some followed the versions describing Christ sharing the bread and wine in order to show a Last Supper subgenre known as the
Communion of the Apostles
. The best example is probably the one by Fra Angelico at San Marco: the table has been cleared and Jesus is on his feet, chalice in hand, offering bread to John while the other apostles sit more or less imperturbably in their places or else kneel on the floor (with Mary Magdalene among them), awaiting their turn to take Communion.

Tellingly, Fra Angelico’s scene was painted not in a refectory but in a monk’s cell. Such scenes, with their obvious sacramental associations, were far more common in chapels than in refectories. Painters of Last Suppers in refectories often followed the Gospel of St. John, which, as we have seen, makes no mention of the institution of the Eucharist. Therefore they emphasized the literal food and wine rather than the body and blood of Christ—so much so that no holy chalice appears in a refectory version of a Last Supper before the seventeenth century.
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Hence the famous “lack” of a chalice in Leonardo’s
Last Supper
(“There was no chalice in the painting,” declares
The Da Vinci Code
. “No Holy Grail”).
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Rather than the apostles taking Communion, painters of refectory Last Suppers might show John asleep on Christ’s bosom or, less often, Jesus offering a sop of bread to Judas. This latter gesture fixes the narrative at a very specific point: the revelation of Judas as the traitor. This way of proceeding was more common in earlier centuries, especially in illuminated manuscripts.
It was likewise popular among Sienese painters in the fourteenth century, with Duccio, Pietro Lorenzetti, and Barna da Siena all showing how Christ identified the guilty party by handing a sop of bread to Judas. Yet by the fifteenth century the exact moment in the narrative became more ambiguous and less dramatic as painters such as Castagno and Ghirlandaio dispensed with the motifs of both the dipped bread and the sharing of bread and wine. They merely showed the company assembled at the table for dinner, with John resting on Christ’s breast and Judas seated on the opposite side of the table.

Leonardo was adamant that a figure’s actions and expressions needed to convey a clear and specific meaning to the spectator: “A picture or representation of human figures,” he wrote in his treatise on painting, “ought to be done in such a way as that the spectator may easily recognise, by means of their attitudes, the purpose in their minds.”
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What, then, is the purpose of Christ’s mind?

Many earlier viewers of the painting were in little doubt about which particular moment Leonardo depicted. One of the first copies of Leonardo’s
Last Supper
ever made, an engraving done about 1500 and attributed to the Milanese artist Giovanni Pietro da Birago, tried to remove any confusion. The engraving boldly added to Leonardo’s scene a caption—a kind of early speech bubble—that reads, “
Amen dico vobis, quia unus vestrum me traditurus est
.” That is, “Amen I say to you that one of you is about to betray me” (Matthew 26:21).
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For Giovanni and many who followed, the subject of the painting was Jesus’s announcement of the betrayal and the subsequent agitation among the apostles. Goethe gave his considerable authority to this interpretation, noting that “the whole company is thrown into consternation” by Jesus’s words: “There is one among you that betrays me.”
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Goethe, whose essay appeared in 1817, was influenced by a book on
The Last Supper
published seven years earlier by Giuseppe Bossi, who restored the painting after it was badly damaged in a flood. For Bossi, the painting was all about human emotion: Leonardo “wished to engage the spirits of all men capable of feeling, men of all times and of every creed.” Bossi was eager to discount the possibility of any religious dimension to the painting. In
The Last Supper
, he insisted, Leonardo
sacrificed nothing to “private opinions or religious ceremonies, which are neither as eternal nor as universal as human feelings.” The universal human feelings in question were, according to Bossi, “friendship and the horror of treason.”
³⁶
Leonardo becomes, in this reading, a Shakespeare of the paintbrush, raising ethical questions and capturing universal emotions in a scene of tense drama that has little, if anything, to do with a religious ceremony.

Readings that emphasized the painting’s secular qualities at the expense of the religious prevailed for many years, particularly in the classrooms of American colleges and universities. A textbook published in the United States in 1935 confidently reassured students that “this celebrated religious painting is not fundamentally religious in character. It represents the psychological observations of the profoundest scientist of his century.”
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In other words, Leonardo was ignoring the religious hocus-pocus of the Gospels and simply using their narrative to offer a scientific and psychological exploration of human behavior that might have done credit to Freud or a good novelist. A generation later, in 1969, the scholar Frederick Hartt published a survey of Italian art in which he likewise argued that Leonardo was “not in the least concerned with the institution of the Eucharist...but with a single aspect of the narrative—the speculation regarding the identity of the betrayer.”
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The appeal of these sorts of readings is obvious. For one thing, the puzzled reactions to Christ’s announcement are (unlike the institution of the Eucharist) described in all four Gospels. Also, not only do these readings commonsensically explain the twisting bodies, protesting gestures, and surprised expressions in
The Last Supper
; they also allow the painting to take as its subject one of the most suspenseful and dramatic passages in the entire Bible. Further, these readings fit with our impression of how the Italian Renaissance witnessed painters and sculptors depicting human emotion rather than religious symbolism. There is also the added benefit—especially attractive for a lapsed Protestant like Goethe, who did not consider himself a Christian, let alone a Catholic, or for twentieth-century American educators who needed to keep religion off the curriculum—of doing away with the sacramental component and burnishing the image of Leonardo as “the profoundest scientist of his century.”
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This consensus eventually began to break down, mainly due to the scholarly exertions of the American art historian Leo Steinberg. In 1973, Steinberg
wrote a 113-page article in
Art Quarterly
advancing erudite and dizzyingly intricate arguments for recognizing the sacramental component.
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Meanwhile other art historians had also begun looking more closely at Christ’s hands, at the bread and wine on the table, and perhaps even at their Bibles, and then reevaluating the action of the painting. The bestselling university textbook on any subject in the last decades of the twentieth century was H. W. Janson’s
A History of Art: A Survey of the Major Visual Arts from the Dawn of History to the Present Day
. The Russian-born Janson made room for the Eucharist by acknowledging that Leonardo was doing more than simply showing one particular moment in a psychological drama, and by viewing Christ’s hand gestures as an indication of “his main act at the Last Supper, the institution of the Eucharist.”
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Likewise another widely used textbook found in Leonardo’s painting a “brilliant conjunction” of the dramatic “one of you shall betray me” and the liturgical ceremony of the Eucharist.
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By 1983 an art historian and Leonardo expert could write that most authorities on the subject agreed that
The Last Supper
was “an amalgam of two consecutive situations”—that is, the announcement of the betrayal and the institution of the Eucharist.
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A number of different things, then, are happening in the work, whose complexity of detail earlier viewers overlooked in their haste to purge the work of religious content. Through both dramatic gestures and subtle feints and allusions Leonardo captured the interweaving of successive events as they unfolded in the chamber in Jerusalem (and in the varying versions given in the Gospels). The announcement of the betrayal is only the most obvious. Jesus has evidently spoken (“Amen I say to you that one of you is about to betray me”) but has now fallen silent. The other apostles react with astonished puzzlement. Leonardo gave the full range of responses provided in the Gospels’ accounts: he showed them asking, “Is it I, Lord?” (as in Matthew and Mark), inquiring “among themselves” (Luke), and looking “upon one another, doubting of whom he spoke” (John). He included, as we have seen, the incident from the Gospel of St. John where Peter beckons John, who, rousing himself from Jesus’s bosom, leans to his right to hear the question: “Who is it of whom he speaks?”