About Leonardo's Last Supper

The following are excerpts from the interview with Robert Randolf Coleman, associate professor of art history at Notre Dame, from the documentary, Jesus Decoded.

I.  LAST SUPPER – BACKGROUND

The Last Supper is located in the refectory attached to the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan which is a monastic dining hall.  Most monastic complexes will have dining halls for the monks to eat. “Last Suppers” are traditionally placed on the walls of such places.  Now this refectory is part of a larger complex, run by the Dominicans, that was sponsored by the Duke of Milan.  He intended this church complex to be a memorial to his dynasty and in fact intended to have himself and his duchess buried there. So it’s a very, very important commission.

The painting is a mural.  Leonardo was the kind of artist who is never satisfied.  He did not paint it in the traditional “buon fresco” or true fresco, that is the painting of water color paint in wet plaster, so when the plaster dries, the painting becomes the wall.  As a consequence, the painting, probably 20, 30 years after it was painted began to fall apart. There have been something on the order of maybe ten interventions.  The most recent being this rather radical restoration that began I believe in 1979 and was finished in 1999.

 I think they tried to take away as much of the subsequent interventions as possible, to leave the original paint, what they believe is original. It’s a very complicated business.

Because of these various interventions, many of the figures were altered because they didn’t quite know exactly where the contours were. And for a long time, the best way to understand what we think the “Last Supper” would have looked like would have been to go to the drawings.  There are a number of finished drawings, for example, the heads of the apostles, showing them in the positions that Leonardo intended.  Some of the faces are gone – I mean completely gone. There’s just nothing there. I think St. Bartholomew is one of those examples where there’s just a blank space.

About Leonardo's Last Supper continued

II. LAST SUPPER – ABOUT THE PAINTING/FIGURE OF CHRIST

The Last Supper was probably on the wall opposite where the head of the monastic order sat at probably a long table under the crucifixion fresco on the opposite wall. And then on the side walls, there would have been long tables for the Dominican monks to sit, and so they would have been able to look at the “Last Supper”” and could contemplate it. The perspective in this painting, which assumes that the viewer is watching an extension of his or her own space, in effect, is not quite that way, because the table is actually seen from above, slightly, so there are two points of view in this picture, one looking up, and one looking down. The figures in the composition are so idealized and grandiose that there’s actually no way viewers of the painting could believe this upper room that he’s created is in fact a real extension of our own space. It’s a place that’s beyond our experience.

The windows, on one level, are focal points, certainly, for the vanishing point of the composition; it’s going to take us through the painting, past Christ, out into the outside world.  There are many ways you can read those windows symbolically. They may represent the Trinity itself; Christ’s body, in effect, is pyramidal; that, too, might be Triune in its theology.  At the same time, the central window behind Christ could be also seen as a kind of “mandorla,” a body-halo, that one finds around sacred images particularly in the late Gothic period and into the Renaissance period.  Here, I think, Leonardo is using the natural light of the window as a kind of a natural mandorla, surrounding Christ’s body so that we understand that this is, in fact, God made man.  And so it’s using the natural world to explain something that’s supernatural or spiritual. 

When I saw the painting after the restoration had been completed I was amazed at the color of Christ’s garments in particular – the richness of his red and blue is quite astonishing.  I don’t recall the colors of the other apostles in my mind’s eye, but Christ stands out as being quite unique.  And that’s one of the things that the restoration did that we’re very fortunate to have is that it does give us some sense of Leonardo’s color.  But there’s not much paint left in this picture.

We have a good idea what that lower portion of the painting actually looked like because there are very early prints that show the Last Supper with the full array of feet below the table.  That portion of the mural was apparently so badly damaged that the Dominicans felt that it was okay to cut a doorway in that lower area so Christ’s feet are missing, which is really quite unfortunate, because Christ’s hands and Christ’s feet mirror the hands and feet of Christ crucified on the opposite wall in the crucifixion painting; and so from a symbolic and iconographic point of view, one misses that connection.

There is no chalice in the painting, and that is also based on tradition.  If one turns to earlier Florentine representations of the Last Supper, you will never find a chalice on the table.  Leonardo paints very beautiful still-life objects on that table: the glasses, the bread and so forth.  They’re lovely.  There are a number of ways to represent the Last Supper.  And it depends on what the artist or their patrons want you to understand.  Sometimes the Last Supper is the representation of the communion of the apostles.  In Leonardo’s case, it’s not that at all, he’s concerned about these multiple reflexes, multiple moments and so forth, giving us a very different kind of Last Supper. 

About Leonardo's Last Supper continued

III. LAST SUPPER – ABOUT THE PAINTING/THE APOSTLES

Leonardo is following tradition long-established, since, perhaps, the sixth century, with the apostles gathered around the table. And it goes through a variety of permutations, as you might imagine over the course of those centuries. He adopts a Florentine tradition, basically, of assembling the apostles on the opposite side of the table, and there are well known examples that we can cite. Others had painted these last suppers that are not dissimilar, but it’s the way in which Leonardo arranged his figures that’s quite novel, because the twelve apostles are grouped in three’s, and each group becomes kind of an independent unit on either side of Christ, so Christ himself, is a pivotal unit, triangular in his positions with his hands down, blessing and so forth, and then you have the apostles on either side in their units, responding to what is happening.

Some people say that the apostles are responding to Christ’s words: “One of you will betray me.”  There are a number of other possibilities as well.  As a consequence of this statement you have a twelve-fold reflex, kind of like a fugue, “Lord, is it I?, Lord is it I? Lord is it I?” and they gesture and they move and they talk and Peter leans forward, “What’s going on?”  All of that kind of thing is happening; it’s very, very complicated and no one had ever done that before.  And so he’s thinking about the individual personalities; every apostle is a person, and each person responds differently, and this is quite novel and remarkable, actually, for the year 1498 when it was finished.

The figure of John the Evangelist in traditional representations of the Last Supper  show him usually leaning on Christ’s shoulder.  That had been the tradition for quite some time, but Leonardo changes that and, as I said earlier, the groupings of apostles are now placed in these groups of three’s so John isn’t leaning against Christ. He’s leaning a bit off to the side.  And he’s identifiable by the androgyny of his character. 

Peter is leaning forward and pulling John by the shoulder and probably asking him, “What did he say?”  I think that’s what’s happening, and – which is unusual –  Leonardo is considering the independent actions of every individual and each one responds to his own way of experiencing that moment.

There are a number of possibilities about what Peter might be asking, and it’s pure speculation. One can ask of each of the apostles, “What are they really saying?” since the gospels don’t tell us what they’re saying.  It leaves it up to us do decide how we want to interpret the actions of the apostles and what they might be saying.

The gesture that Peter makes is two gestures actually, one is clutching the knife in one hand, the other hand reaches over to the shoulder of John the Evangelist.

Peter is shown as he had been since probably the 12th century, clutching a knife because the knife is now identifying him, an attribute Peter had when the apostles and Christ were in the garden and Christ was being captured to be taken away by the soldiers, Peter grabs a knife to cut off the ear of Malchus and that is the way to identify Peter.  It would be foolish to identify Peter with a set of keys in his hand as he’s often shown because it’s out of the context of the Passion of Christ.  So that’s the reason for the connection of the knife.

In The Da Vinci Code novel, as I recall, Peter is clutching a knife as if he’s going to attack Mary Magdalene because he loses his primacy as the first of the apostles.  From an iconographic point of view that doesn’t make any sense in the context of the narrative.

I think St. Andrew is one of the most beautiful figures in the composition. He is holding his hands up and responds with absolute astonishment. It’s a very elegant figure.   

It’s interesting the way Leonardo does characterize these various gestures because everyone is moving except Judas.  Judas, grabbing his bag of silver, identifying him as the betrayer, the traitor, actually leans his body back so that he’s shown to be not responding as the others are and that’s an interesting way of doing it, in fact, a most unusual way because in early representations, Judas is always shown on our side of the table so that he’s separated out from the other apostles and we clearly understand that this is the betrayer.  Leonardo includes him in that compositional group [with Peter and John] but his body pulls back. That too is a very beautiful idea. 

About Leonardo's Last Supper continued

IV. THE LOOK OF JOHN THE EVANGELIST? IS IT MARY MAGADALENE?

If you look at most representations in the Renaissance of John the Evangelist, he’s always shown as a very pretty young man.  With long or short hair, it doesn’t really matter.  It’s easy for someone to want to make this into a woman, but it’s not possible for a number of reasons.  First of all, this is a Dominican church.   They’re not about to allow on their wall a painting that represents something as unorthodox as the position of Mary Magdalene in the Last Supper.

The Duke of Milan commissioned Leonardo to make this painting.  He enlarged and decorated this conventual complex, on one level, as expiation for sin; it’s not the first time this has happened in the history of the West, or anywhere.  It’s unlikely, highly unlikely, that the Duke would sponsor an unorthodox representation of the Last Supper in a conventual church that he was planning for his own resting place. It just doesn’t make any sense.  It would not fit, and  Leonardo was painting for Dominicans, and Dominicans as we well know  gave us much of Catholic theology. 

If one looks at other works by Leonardo, and there are not that many paintings by Leonardo that are extant, two come to mind.  One is the Louvre St. John the Baptist. There’s a variation of that in Milan, as well, which shows a rather unusually idealized, beautiful young man with long tresses and so forth.  There’s another example of Leonardo’s making of an image of a handsome or beautiful young man.

Renaissance painting wants to paint ideal types whether they are beautiful men or beautiful women. This is a goal. It’s not until you get into the 17th century where you’re starting to think more or less about the way people really look in nature.  The Renaissance artists intend to remake nature, make it better than it is.

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