Leonardo and the Last Supper (43 page)

One of the simplest hand gestures in Leonardo’s
Last Supper
is performed by John, who clasps his hands on the table, fingers interlaced. As de Jorio pointed out, this gesture, which he called
mani in pettine
(“comb hands”), can be used to indicate sorrow. Leonardo himself noted that the gesture could be used by painters to indicate sorrow and weeping: “As to types of weeping,” he wrote, “one shows despair, another is moderate; some are tearful, some shout, some weep their face to heaven with their hands held low, their fingers intertwined.”
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Leonardo’s study for the hands of the apostle John

John was often shown by painters in postures of grief, standing or kneeling at the foot of the cross with his hands clasped together. For example, Masaccio depicted him performing exactly these gestures in his
Holy Trinity
in the Dominican basilica of Santa Maria Novella, a work certainly known to Leonardo (and probably to many of the Dominicans in Santa Maria delle Grazie). According to the Gospel of St. John, the beloved disciple was one of the few who, with Mary and Mary Magdalene, “stood by the cross of Jesus” (19:25) in his time of dying. Scenes of the Crucifixion therefore showed John in a posture of mourning, usually with his hands clasped and fingers intertwined in the
mani in pettine
. That, in fact, is exactly how Giovanni da Montorfano depicted him on the opposite wall of the refectory in Santa Maria delle Grazie: a blond, beardless figure who stands beside the cross with his brow knit and his fingers interlaced. His head is tipped to his left, making him a kind of mirror image of Leonardo’s John on the opposing wall. Anyone in doubt about the figure sitting beside Christ in Leonardo’s painting need only to turn around to see his double in Montorfano’s
Crucifixion
.

A number of the other gestures in Leonardo’s mural likewise allude to forthcoming episodes in the Passion. Perhaps the most obvious is the one performed by Peter, whose right arm is held akimbo in the posture de Jorio calls the
mano infianco
—a gesture of indignation.
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In his hand Peter holds a knife, a weapon whose pointed blade is a good eight inches long. Ghirlandaio showed Peter with a similar knife in his
Last Supper
in the church of Ognissanti, finished in 1480 while Leonardo was still in Florence. In both cases the knife foretells the event that occurred later that same evening when Peter, defending Jesus from “a great multitude with swords and clubs,” sliced off the ear of Malchus, the servant of the high priest (Matthew 26:47). In placing the knife in Peter’s hand, Leonardo revealed his familiarity not only with the Gospels—all four of which tell the story of the severed ear—but also with Ghirlandaio’s painting.

Peter’s knife points, quite literally, to something else: its tip is aimed at Bartholomew, the apostle who stands at the left end of the table.
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As we have seen, saints were often identified by the symbols of their martyrdom. Montorfano, for example, gave clues to help identify the various saints in his fresco: St. Peter of Verona (who was murdered by Cathars) has a bloody sword buried in his skull, while St. Catherine of Siena (who took out her “stony” heart and exchanged it for Christ’s loving one) is identifiable by the
disembodied heart she holds in her right hand. Bartholomew’s attribute was the knife with which he was flayed alive by Armenian barbarians (a martyrdom that explains why he is the patron saint of both Armenia and skinners). Michelangelo would later depict Bartholomew on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel clutching both a knife and his own flayed skin. Leonardo, by showing the knife, foretold not only Bartholomew’s gruesome death but also the agonies and tribulations that awaited the apostles (many of whom would be martyred) as they witnessed to Christ “in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and Samaria, and even to the uttermost part of the earth” (Acts 1:8).

Another hand gesture that anticipates future events is the one performed by Thomas, who, as he leaves his place at the table and appears from behind James the Greater, points his right index finger into the air. In Leonardo’s art a pointing finger is often, like the smile, an enigmatic gesture. Uriel in
The Virgin of the Rocks
(Louvre version) and the mysterious creature in his
John the Baptist
both point with their index fingers. Uriel directs our gaze to the infant John the Baptist, while in the latter painting the Baptist points upward, presumably an allusion to his recognition of the Messiah foretold in prophecy.

Thomas’s finger in
The Last Supper
, likewise pointing upward, is more clear-cut, because if any man in history is defined by his finger, it is surely Thomas. Informed by the other apostles that they had seen the risen Christ, Thomas demanded empirical proof. “Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails,” he informed them, “and put my finger into the place of the nails, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” Eight days later, Christ entered the same room as Thomas and closed the door behind him. “Put in your finger hither,” he instructed him (John 20:25, 27). Such was the importance of Thomas’s finger that in the fourth century its relic was brought from Jerusalem by St. Helena and placed in the basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in Rome.

Leonardo knew very well the story of Thomas’s doubt and his probing finger. For the entirety of the time that he studied and worked with Verrocchio, the master was designing and casting the life-size bronze sculpture group
The Incredulity of Saint Thomas
for a niche in the exterior wall of Orsanmichele in Florence. Around the time Leonardo entered his workshop, Verrocchio received the commission from the Università della Mercanzia, the commercial tribunal that presided over all of the Florentine guilds. Leonardo’s father, Ser Piero, who rented rooms from the Mercanzia and served as their notary, may even have negotiated the contract. The Mercanzia’s motto—“No judgment should be given until truth is tangibly manifest”—meant that Thomas, the apostle who wanted truth to manifest itself, seemed the saint most appropriate to represent the inquisitorial members of the tribunal, and indeed Tuscan town halls often used Thomas as a symbol of justice.
¹⁹
Verrocchio’s entire sculpture is about a hand gesture, and he showed Thomas, encouraged by Christ, about to probe the wound with his finger.

The apostle Thomas

If Thomas was an appropriate saint for the Mercanzia, he was likewise, as someone who demanded ocular and tactile proof, and who “anatomized” the resurrected Christ with his finger, an apt saint for Leonardo, who accepted nothing on faith, who needed to probe and feel and see for himself. For Leonardo as for Thomas, seeing was believing. “All our knowledge has its foundation in our sensations,” he declared in one manuscript. In another: “All science will be vain and full of errors which is not born of experience, mother of all certainty. True sciences are those which experience has caused to enter through the senses.”
²⁰

“Every painter paints himself”: if Leonardo used his own features in
The Last Supper
, as Gasparo Visconti claimed, then Thomas, in terms of personal identification, would have been the most attractive candidate. Visconti claimed that Leonardo represented not only his own features but also his own “actions and ways”—that is, his gestures and expressions. The pointing
finger was such a well-known Leonardo trademark by 1511 that Raphael included it in the supposed portrait of the painter as Plato in
The School of Athens
(which features Bramante as Euclid and Michelangelo as Heraclitus). This Vatican fresco shows a bearded and balding Plato replicating the gesture of Leonardo’s Thomas by pointing skyward with his index finger. Raphael was certainly playful with his portraits and allusions. His fresco gently mocked the gloomy, truculent Michelangelo by means of the figure of Heraclitus—a famously cantankerous philosopher—while at the same time paying tribute to his talents by imitating his powerful new style. In similar fashion he may have been self-consciously duplicating both Leonardo’s style (the total conception of
The School of Athens
, according to Janson, “suggests the spirit of Leonardo’s
Last Supper
”) and one of the signature gestures of his art.
²¹

The difficulty of ascribing Leonardo’s features to Thomas is that no drawing exists that would allow us to see the original conception, which often differed (as the example of Bartholomew shows) from the end result on the wall of the refectory. Also, while Thomas is far from ugly, revealing large eyes and a fine Greek nose, he is hardly the paragon of beauty rhapsodized by later writers—though neither, it must be said, is the solemn old codger in
The School of Athens
. Thomas is one of Leonardo’s nutcracker men, arguably toothless, complete with a down-turned mouth, beetling lower lip and protuberant jaw. However, the paint loss in the mural makes it difficult to determine the finer details of his original appearance. Earlier restorers of the painting were guilty of coarsening and exaggerating the features of several of the apostles, and recent conservation of the mural found that one of them altered the contours of Thomas’s mouth, giving it a downward turn.
²²
By contrast, some of the earliest copies of the mural, such as a copperplate engraving done in about 1500 or the version done in oil by Leonardo’s student Giampietrino, reveal a version of Thomas whose mouth and jaw are far less grotesque.

The apostle James the Lesser, reversed, opposed to Francesco Melzi’s portrait of Leonardo

Thomas appears to have been modeled by the same person Leonardo used for James the Lesser, the apostle second from left, beside Bartholomew. James’s features, likewise in profile, are less caricatured and therefore perhaps allow us to appreciate Leonardo’s appearance in the mid-1490s. Difficult as it is to compare the James of the ravaged mural with the beautiful and highly detailed red chalk profile portrait, apparently of Leonardo, the two subjects do bear certain similarities: both have Greek noses and long hair worn parted in the middle. Also, both wear beards, and the beards in
The Last Supper
may help explain Visconti’s claim about Leonardo’s self-portraiture. He would have detected the painter’s lineaments in both Thomas and James the Lesser even more readily if Leonardo wore a beard in the 1490s: a rare sight, as we have seen, on the chins of fifteenth-century Italians.
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