Leonardo and the Last Supper (34 page)

Back in Milan, Lodovico’s secretary wrote to the archbishop of Milan, requesting that he secure the services of Pietro Perugino—a reliable painter if ever there was one—to finish the work in Beatrice’s apartments. No mention was made of what would become of the half-finished mural in Santa Maria delle Grazie.
⁴⁶

Lodovico Sforza had more pressing concerns in the summer of 1496 than merely the plight of his mercurial painter. Since the beginning of the year he had been busying himself with yet another risky plot. This time, instead of inviting the French into Italy as protection against the Neapolitans, he invited Maximilian into Italy as protection against the French. As before,
there would be far-reaching consequences for virtually every principality and republic in Italy.

During his invasion of Italy, Charles VIII had signed a treaty with the Florentines promising to return Pisa as soon as he captured Naples. However, restitution had not been forthcoming, partly because the Pisans complained to the French that the Florentines had “treated them very barbarously.”
⁴⁷
Florence was therefore attempting to recover her valuable possession by force. Lodovico, meanwhile, hoped to take advantage of the situation and capture Pisa for himself. The Pisans welcomed his overtures, which came in the form of military and financial assistance for the battle against Florence. The Venetians were also offering aid to Pisa, and Lodovico’s fears that the city might fall into the hands of Venice led him to appeal to Maximilian, the husband of his niece Bianca Maria.

Besides helping him secure Pisa, the arrival of Maximilian on Italian soil would have the added benefit of providing a buffer against any future French invasion, another of which seemed likely in 1496. The Neapolitans were steadily recapturing all of their lost territories, and a large French force under Gian Giacomo Trivulzio—the Milanese mercenary captain who had switched sides to serve the king of France—was stationed at Asti, poised to descend into Italy once again. Faced with this threat, Lodovico found himself, according to a chronicler, “in a state of the greatest anxiety.”
⁴⁸

In July, Lodovico met with Maximilian at a Benedictine abbey on the German frontier. Under the cover of hunting and feasting, they hatched a plan whereby Maximilian would enter Italy on the pretext of going to Rome and receiving the imperial crown from the pope. On his way he would take the opportunity to keep Pisa free from Florentine clutches. Although Maximilian had little wish either to help the Pisans or to antagonize Florence, he was motivated by two important considerations. First of all, he would receive the imperial crown, without which he could not officially call himself the Holy Roman emperor (until this coronation he was, technically speaking, only the emperor elect). Second, and even more compelling, Lodovico promised him large sums of money.

Thus, early in September, Maximilian set off for Italy with eight regiments of infantry. He spent several weeks in the company of Lodovico at Vigevano, banqueting and hunting with leopards. In October he traveled
overland to Genoa, from where he sailed down the coast to Pisa. Here he was received with much rejoicing from the locals. Down came a statue of Charles VIII; up went the imperial eagles. But enthusiasm and adulation were short-lived. The German troops were ill provisioned and ill disciplined, and Pisa was already adequately garrisoned by the Venetians, making Maximilian’s troops redundant. He sailed for Livorno, which he promised to conquer for the Pisans, but French ships and foul weather counted against him. His fleet was scattered by a storm, some of his ships were wrecked, and during a skirmish with the French a cannonball whizzed so close that it carried away part of his imperial robe. His appetite for the enterprise rapidly began to diminish. He soon made for the friendlier environs of Pavia, in Lodovico’s domains, where yet another round of feasting was planned.

Maximilian’s botched expedition did little for Lodovico’s reputation. A Venetian chronicler described the duke as “one of the wisest men in the world... All men fear him, because fortune is propitious to him in everything.” But he noted that no one liked or trusted Lodovico, and that “some day he will be punished for his bad faith. For he never keeps his promises, and when he says one thing, always does another.” Another Venetian likewise deplored his behavior: “His pride and arrogance are beyond description,” he fumed.
⁴⁹

Lodovico was proving as faithless in his personal dealings as he was in his political machinations. In November an observer from Ferrara wrote home: “The latest news from Milan is that the duke spends his whole time and finds all his pleasure in the company of a girl who is one of his wife’s maidens. And his conduct is ill regarded here.”
⁵⁰
The girl was Lucrezia Crivelli, one of Beatrice’s ladies-in-waiting, and the conduct was ill regarded by, above all, Beatrice herself. Beatrice had already seen off Lodovico’s earlier mistress, Cecilia Gallerani, with whom Il Moro had tactlessly cavorted in the weeks following his marriage. But now, five years later, another rival emerged, plunging Beatrice—who was several months pregnant—into despair. Moreover, Lucrezia received the ultimate mark of affection from Lodovico: her portrait was painted by Leonardo.

Lodovico had once hired Leonardo to paint Cecilia Gallerani. Now he contrived for Leonardo to do a portrait of his latest concubine. A series of Latin epigraphs in Leonardo’s notebooks, composed by an unknown poet, state that Leonardo, “the first among painters,” executed Lucrezia’s portrait. Lucrezia, enthused the poet, was “painted by Leonardo and loved by
Il Moro.”
⁵¹
When exactly this portrait was done is unclear. Nor is the identity of the painting completely evident, although the most likely candidate is the work known as
La Belle Ferronière
.
⁵²
This portrait of a doe-eye brunette was done in oils on a panel made from walnut—possibly from the same walnut tree, in fact, from which came the panel used for
Lady with an Ermine
.
⁵³
The identity of the sitter in this portrait is not definitively known, but the Latin epigrams suggest that for want of another portrait that might fit the bill, Lucrezia was the sitter.
^c

As so often with Leonardo, uncertainty and equivocation reign.
La Belle Ferronière
exemplifies the gaps and disputes surrounding so much of his output. Not everyone agrees the work is by Leonardo: one Leonardo scholar claimed that not so much as a single brushstroke came from the hand of the master.
⁵⁴
It was not identified as a Leonardo until 1839; later in the nineteenth century it was attributed to his pupil Boltraffio, while in the 1920s a version owned by an American car salesman was put forward as the real Leonardo, with the resulting slander trial exposing the prejudices and drastic limitations of leading art connoisseurs such as Bernard Berenson.
⁵⁵
There is very little, other than the Latin epigrams, to link the painting to Lucrezia Crivelli.

If
La Belle Ferronière
does represent Lucrezia, this portrait must have been painted while Leonardo worked on
The Last Supper
. Lodovico took Lucrezia as his mistress, at the very latest, in August 1496, in the weeks following his visit to Maximilian: that, at any rate, was when she became pregnant with his child. The liaison continued through the autumn, which may have been when the duke engaged Leonardo to execute her portrait. The date of Leonardo’s return from Brescia to Milan is—like so many of his comings and goings—uncertain. However, the altarpiece for San Francesco never materialized, and Leonardo was recorded in Milan in January 1497, back at work in Santa Maria delle Grazie.

CHAPTER 12
The Beloved Disciple

How did people during the Italian Renaissance, when they looked at a painting of a biblical scene, know who they were looking at? How did they identify the often huge casts of saints and disciples with which frescoes and altarpieces teemed?

Until about 1300, painters often identified the figures in their painting by helpfully inscribing their names underneath—giving them, in effect, name tags. By the time of Giotto, these inscriptions largely disappeared and a tradition was established whereby painters used distinctive attributes to illustrate and individuate saints and biblical characters. Peter is easily recognizable because he is often shown holding a pair of keys (“I will give to you the keys of the kingdom of heaven,” Jesus tells him in the Gospel of St. Matthew). Sometimes, in reference to his former occupation, he might be holding a fish. Mary Magdalene is identifiable because she sometimes holds the jar of ointment that she carried to Christ’s tomb. The attributes of several apostles foretell their violent and grisly fates: James the Lesser’s is the
club used to beat him to death, Simon’s the saw that cut him in half, and Thaddeus’s the halberd with which pagan magicians slew him in Persia.

Painters of Last Suppers did not bother with these symbols, which would have detracted from the pictorial effect. Even so, a number of the apostles were usually obvious to viewers because of their appearances or actions, especially the gray and grizzled Peter, the youthful John, and, of course, the villainous Judas. But artists were not always concerned to individuate the entire cast of twelve apostles. Lorenzo Ghiberti, in his bronze relief on the door of the Baptistery of San Giovanni, even depicted five of them from the rear, showing nothing but the backs of their heads and thereby making their true identities anybody’s guess.

Art historians are confident, however, about the identities of the twelve apostles in Leonardo’s
Last Supper
. Their names were established when, in about 1807, an official from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, Giuseppe Bossi, discovered in the parish church of Ponte Capriasca, near Lake Lugano, a sixteenth-century fresco copy of Leonardo’s mural. Even though such inscriptions had virtually disappeared from Italian art, twelve names were carefully painted on a frieze underneath. These identifications, because they were probably made by someone who knew Leonardo and his circle, are now almost universally accepted—albeit, in one case, controversially disputed.

Leonardo faced the same compositional problem as any painter of a Last Supper: how to range thirteen men around a dinner table such that they could interact with each other. A notable feature of his design for
The Last Supper
is how he arranged the twelve apostles in four groups of three, with two of these triads on either side of Christ. The most dramatic and intriguing of these groupings is the one immediately to the right of Christ, featuring—as the copy at Ponte Capriasca tells us—Judas, Peter, and John. Leonardo positioned John leaning away from Christ and toward Peter, who inclines eagerly forward to whisper in John’s ear, an action that causes Judas, seated in between, to rear back and to his right.

Anyone familiar with the Gospel of St. John would know exactly the moment depicted. “Amen, amen, I say to you, one of you shall betray me,” Jesus announces. “The disciples therefore looked one upon another,” John reports, “doubting of whom he spoke. Now there was leaning on Jesus’s bosom one of his disciples, whom Jesus loved. Peter therefore beckoned to him and said to him: Who is it of whom he speaks?” (John 13:21-4).

Three apostles (Judas, Peter, John) to the right of Christ in Leonardo’s
The Last Supper

Jesus is speaking of Judas, of course—but who is it of whom John speaks? The disciple leaning on the bosom of Jesus is not only in a privileged position at the dinner table, in physical contact with Jesus, but he is evidently privy to special knowledge about the betrayal, or at least so Peter believes.