Leonardo and the Last Supper (10 page)

Paintings done on the walls of chapels or refectories were generally done not in tempera but in the special technique known as fresco. Despite his versatility, Verrocchio never painted in fresco and therefore, presumably, never passed along its secrets to Leonardo. Nor had Leonardo ever worked in fresco. Patrons commissioning frescoes during Leonardo’s time in Florence in the 1470s and early 1480s had turned to painters such as Sandro Botticelli and Domenico Ghirlandaio. The latter was an especially enthusiastic and prolific frescoist. A report prepared by an agent for Lodovico Sforza, who tried to hire Ghirlandaio to paint at the Certosa di Pavia, declared that he was “a good master on panels and even more so on walls... He is an expeditious man and one who gets through much work.”
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The word “expeditious” could not be used to describe Leonardo. His lack of experience in fresco—as well as, perhaps, a reputation for not finishing what he started—may have been a factor in his absence from the team of young painters sent to Rome by Lorenzo de’ Medici in the summer of 1481 to fresco the walls of the newly constructed Sistine Chapel. The members of this team, which included Botticelli and Ghirlandaio, had far more experience in fresco than Leonardo.

Fresco was renowned as the most difficult painting technique to master. Vasari claimed most painters could become adept in tempera or oil, but only a select few mastered fresco, which was, he declared, “the most manly, most certain, most resolute and durable of all the other methods.”
²⁰
The word “fresco” comes from the Italian
affresco
, whose root,
fresco
, means “fresh”: an allusion to the fact that the frescoist, rather than mixing his pigments with binders, ground them in water and added them to wet plaster, which absorbed them as it dried, uniting with them chemically and thereby sealing them in a vitreous layer on the wall’s surface.

The technique was ingenious and, as Vasari pointed out, durable. However, it presented many logistical difficulties, not least because the frescoist often worked on a large scale, sometimes high up in a building and in an awkward location. Also, the frescoist had only a very limited number of hours to apply his paints to his daily patch of fresh plaster before it dried, which forced him to work quickly. Finally, he was restricted in his range of
colors, able to use only those pigments that could withstand the alkalinity of the plaster. Many of the brightest blues and greens—ultramarine, azurite, malachite—could be added only if they were mixed with binders and then applied to the plaster after it dried. This supplementary technique, known as painting
a secco
, had the disadvantage that tempera added to dry plaster was much less durable than water-based pigments added to a wet surface. Most patrons therefore preferred artists to avoid painting
a secco
. Filippino Lippi’s contract with the banker Filippo Strozzi for a fresco cycle in the Strozzi Chapel in Santa Maria Novella, begun in 1487, had stipulated, for example, that the artist work exclusively in fresco.

Not only did Leonardo have no experience in the exacting technique of fresco, but he also had never worked on such a large painting. After abandoning several altarpieces unfinished, he was suddenly charged with covering the north wall of the refectory with a painting fifteen feet high by almost twenty-nine feet wide.

Painting the wall of the refectory was a major commission, especially because (as seems to be the case) it came from the duke. Yet it seems possible that Leonardo balked at this commission. His fragmentary letter of frustration to Lodovico—in which the staccato phrases included “things assigned,” “not my art,” and “if any other commission”—may well have concerned this new assignment at Santa Maria delle Grazie. Although he complained in the letter about his expenses and a lack of payment, his protests were actually less about the equestrian monument (“Of the horse I will say nothing”) than about some other matter that distressed him. In another fragmentary letter, written to Lodovico a short time later, Leonardo complained of being compelled to do lesser jobs for the duke rather than another commission, evidently more important, presumably the equestrian monument. “It vexes me greatly,” he wrote, “that having to earn my living has forced me to interrupt the work and to attend to small matters, instead of following up the work which your Lordship entrusted to me.”
²¹

Was decorating the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie one of the “small matters” Leonardo found himself obliged to execute in lieu of either the bronze horse or another commission? His disappointment at forfeiting the bronze horse would have been compounded by the fact that he was suddenly given a project for which he lacked the necessary specialist expertise. On top of that, the mural commission was a poor replacement. It is unclear where Lodovico intended the equestrian monument to stand, but it would
certainly have been placed in a highly prominent location, possibly the piazza in front of the Castello: somewhere, in any case, where everyone in Milan (and everyone who visited Milan) would see it. But with that project withdrawn, Leonardo was presented with the task of decorating a tucked-away room where a band of friars ate their dinner.

If Leonardo’s angry letters represented attempts to avoid the mural project, they were unsuccessful. He must soon have realized that keeping favor with the devious Il Moro meant acquiescing to his wishes. He probably also recognized that the mural represented an opportunity to exercise his talents in painting on a grander scale than ever before.

The year 1494—the “most unhappy year for Italy”—ended with King Charles VIII and his French troops inside the gates of Rome. Charles had stayed for eleven happy days in Florence, occupying the Medici palace and making a series of architectural modifications, adding various passageways so he could slip discreetly away to visit his latest mistress. After leaving Florence, he had moved south to Siena and then Viterbo. From there he turned his attentions to Rome, issuing a proclamation in the middle of November stating that he merely wished for free passage through Roman territory. But he was “every day becoming more insolent,” according to Guicciardini, “as a result of successes much greater than he had ever dared to hope.”
²²
Even the king’s allies were chastened by his effortless triumphs, with both Lodovico Sforza and the Venetian Senate fearing French ambitions in Italy would not be satisfied with the conquest of Naples.

Rome and its surrounding territories, known as the Papal States, were ruled by the pope, who was not only a spiritual leader but also a secular ruler with powers of taxation and legislation over a million people. Charles made strong hints that he would depose the reigning pope, Alexander VI, a worldly man with a well-earned reputation for corruption and dissipation, should His Holiness not accommodate his requests for the keys to castles and the crown of Naples. As the French began their march on Rome, Alexander began suffering fainting fits. He had originally declared for Naples in the conflict, stating that he was bound to Alfonso “by the closest ties of blood and friendship” and vowing to defend him against the invaders.
²³
But now he vacillated between defiantly resisting the French—he claimed he would rather
die than become the slave of the French monarch—and then meekly pondering whether he should seek terms. He remained undecided as French troops entered Roman territory and began overrunning one town after another. They even captured his fleeing mistress, Giulia Farnese, on the road outside Rome.

In Rome itself, the people, anxious for the pope to appease the French, were in a state of terror and rebellion. Rome was threatened with starvation as the French fleet, blockading the Tiber, prevented the provisioning of the city. The privations were especially hard on the priests, who, according to a cynical Venetian observer, were “accustomed to every delicacy.”
²⁴
The pope, closeted in the Vatican with his Spanish bodyguards, began preparing to flee the city, even packing up his bed linen and dinner service. Finally, “observing this young prince advance so briskly” (as one of Charles’s ambassadors wrote), the pope decided to open the gates of Rome.
²⁵

Charles originally planned to enter Rome on the first of January, but when his astrologer informed him that a more favorable conjunction of the planets would occur one day earlier, he rode through Rome’s northern gate, the Porta del Popolo, on the last day of 1494. It took six hours for the French soldiers, along with Swiss and German mercenaries, to stream through the gate behind him. They were followed over the cobbles and through the puddles by thirty-six bronze cannons: a deadly reminder of what awaited the Romans should they try to resist.

The barbarians were within the gates of Rome. “In all the memory of man,” lamented an envoy from Mantua, “the Church has never been in such evil plight.”
²⁶

CHAPTER 4
Dinner in Jerusalem

Leonardo would have known the story of the Last Supper from various painted versions of it in Florence. He would also have known it from the Bible, a copy of which appeared in a list of books in his possession that he made in the mid-1490s. Intriguingly, this was probably the copy that he bought, according to another of his memoranda, in late 1494 or early 1495, at exactly the time when he was starting his work in Santa Maria delle Grazie. His Bible was almost certainly the well-known and widely available Italian translation, Niccolò di Malermi’s
Biblia volgare historiata
, first published in Venice in 1471 and available in ten editions (complete with hundreds of woodcut illustrations) by the early 1490s. Leonardo appears to have acquired this Bible with the express purpose of making a study of the Gospel accounts of the Last Supper.
¹

Leonardo could have read in his new Bible four individual versions of the Last Supper, including two eyewitness accounts. The authors of the four Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—each provided his own narrative.
As with other episodes in the life of Christ, there are strong parallels in the first three accounts, whose works are known as the synoptic Gospels. They include many of the same events, often told in the same order and with similar phrasing—resemblances that lead scholars to believe they were composed interdependently. Although differences exist between and among the authors of the synoptic Gospels on specific details of the Last Supper, Matthew, Mark, and Luke are more in accord with one another than they are with John, whose Gospel offers considerably more information on various points. There are no real contradictions, only a difference in emphasis, levels of detail, and the orders of certain events.

The two eyewitnesses who wrote accounts of the Last Supper were Matthew and John. Matthew’s was consistently regarded as the earliest of the four Gospels, hence its position at the beginning of the New Testament. Matthew was one of the select group of followers known as the apostles: the twelve men whom Christ, after climbing a mountain in Syria, called to a special mission to preach with him. “And he gave them power to heal sicknesses,” reports the Gospel of Mark, “and to cast out devils” (Mark 3:15). The apostles were present during Christ’s triumphant entrance into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey, and they were not only participants in the Last Supper but also witnesses to both the Resurrection and, forty days later, the Ascension, when Christ rose through a cloud into heaven. Christ’s last words to his apostles were an injunction: “But you shall receive the power of the Holy Ghost coming upon you, and you shall be witnesses unto me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and Samaria, and even to the uttermost part of the earth” (Acts 1:8). Writing the Gospels was part of this mission of witnessing to the wider world.

In the synoptic Gospels, accounts of the Last Supper begin immediately after Judas goes to the high priest and strikes the deal to betray Christ, whose powers the priests and the Pharisees resent and fear.
²
Matthew alone enumerates Judas’s fee as thirty pieces of silver, with Mark and Luke merely noting that the high priest and his cronies agreed to give him an unspecified sum. John, on the other hand, makes no mention of a financial motive. Instead, he provides Judas with quite another reason for betraying Christ.

Passover is approaching: the festival in which the Jews ritually slaughter and eat a male lamb to commemorate their deliverance from the avenging angel and their liberation from captivity in Egypt. The apostles ask Christ where they should prepare for the feast. According to Matthew, Christ
instructs them to locate “a certain man” in the street in Jerusalem and say to him: “The master says, My time is near at hand.” Mark and Luke add the detail that this stranger can be recognized because he will be carrying a pitcher of water. “Follow him,” Mark reports Christ as telling them. “And wherever he shall go in, say to the master of the house, The master says, Where is my refectory, where I may eat the pasch with my disciples? And he will show you a large dining room furnished.”