Leonardo and the Last Supper (39 page)

Most painters depicted the Last Supper as a simple and spartan meal. These portrayals accorded with the scanty details given in the Gospels. They also mirrored the meager dinners served in refectories, especially during the frequent fasts, when friars and nuns were given only bread and water. They indicated, furthermore, how painters in the Middle Ages and Renaissance took very little interest in gastronomic details. In the fifteenth century and earlier, food was a perfunctory addition to dinner scenes rather than a celebration of conspicuous culinary consumption or a demonstration of the painter’s virtuoso abilities, as it would become in the seventeenth century when Dutch artists created sumptuous still lifes of tables adorned with exotic food. For instance, in the early 1460s the Florentine painters Filippo
Lippi and Benozzo Gozzoli each painted a scene showing the Feast of Herod. The subject matter might have seemed like an opportunity for the painters to show a table groaning with exotic fare. By the standards of later centuries, however, they produced incredibly paltry spreads: a few tiny wineglasses and miniscule serving dishes. But these painters were uninterested in showcasing their skills through detailed and scrupulously realistic depictions of slabs of meat or bunches of fruit.

Painters of Last Suppers had been equally restrained, often showing only bread and wine or, at most, a small lamb on a platter. Leonardo, however, depicted a meal that in both style and subject was very different from all his predecessors. Besides the bread rolls, tableware, and half-full glasses of red wine, he showed three large serving platters. Although the one in the center, in front of Christ, stands empty except for a section of fruit on its edge (perhaps a pomegranate), the other two are generously heaped with food. The one in front of Andrew is piled, interestingly enough, with eight or nine fish. The depiction of fish is unusual in a Last Supper, though the oldest-known version, the fifth-century mosaic in the basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, shows two enormous fish on the table. Although the Gospels say nothing about fish at the Last Supper, the image is appropriate given that a number of the apostles were fishermen and the fish was a symbol of Christ: in Greek the first letter of the words
Jesus Christos Theou Uios Soter
(Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior) form
ichthus
(iota, chi, theta, upsilon, sigma)—which happens to be Greek for fish.

The other platter, sitting in front of Matthew, is even more interesting. Paint loss means its contents are virtually illegible, and presumably they have been obscured for many centuries because no one seems to have commented on what is a unique—and remarkable—contribution to a Last Supper. Luckily, thanks to the recent restoration of the mural we can see from several small serving dishes (including the one beneath Christ’s right arm) exactly what Leonardo imagined Jesus and the apostles to be eating: chunks of eel garnished with slices of orange.
¹⁷

Eels were certainly an interesting choice. Leonardo has provided the apostles with a vegetarian—or at least a pescetarian—meal. He may have been alluding to the meals served in Santa Maria delle Grazie, since eels could be caught in the rivers around Milan. However, eels were a delicacy associated more with courtly banquets than refectory suppers. The Greek poet Archestratus, author of the world’s earliest cookbook, declared eels “superior to all other fishes,” and for centuries they were prominent on royal bills of fare.
¹⁸
Eels featured conspicuously in the festivities when Lodovico Sforza’s father-in-law, Ercole d’Este, married Eleanor of Aragon in 1473. In a letter to a friend, Eleanor described how during the entertainments five plates of eels were served “wrapped in crust.” This course was followed by an intermezzo during which actors playing Perseus and Andromeda recited lines of poetry. Then the next course arrived: “Five plates of roasted eels with yellow sauce.” A second intermezzo was performed, this time with the goddess Ceres appearing on a chariot drawn by two eels.
¹⁹

Detail of slices of eel and orange

Because of their ubiquity at feasts of this sort, eels came to be associated with luxury and overindulgence. Eels certainly seemed to bring out the gluttony in diners. In 1491, Galeazzo Sanseverino described in a letter how he and Beatrice, Lodovico’s young wife, caught eels in the river north of Milan and, after retiring to one of Lodovico’s nearby villas, “proceeded to dine off them until we could eat no more.”
²⁰
This sort of overindulgence sometimes had fatal effects. Surfeits of eels were blamed for the deaths of both King Henry I of England in 1135 and, 150 years later, Pope Martin IV, who liked his eels marinated in Vernaccia wine. His gluttony won him a place, according to Dante, among the sinners in purgatory.

Leonardo probably enjoyed eels at Lodovico’s table in the Castello. The kitchen in the Castello may even have prepared them, as he showed, with orange slices. However, a recipe for eels and oranges is found in a story by a
fifteenth-century writer named Gentile Sermini, whose tales were collected together in about 1424. The recipe involves skinning the eel, boiling it in water, chopping it into chunks, and then roasting the chunks on a skewer before marinating them in the juice of six pomegranates and twenty oranges. Coincidentally or not, Leonardo appears to have included pomegranates on the table.
²¹

Sermini came from Siena, and he may have been describing a recipe well-known to Tuscans like Leonardo. But Leonardo, with his fondness for funny stories such as those by Poggio Bracciolini, may actually have known Sermini’s tale. No doubt it would have appealed to him. Like many Italian storytellers of the fifteenth century, Sermini had a strong anticlerical bias, and in his story the eel is a symbol of greedy self-indulgence. His tale involves a priest who cannot wait to finish his sermon so he can return home to eat a fat and juicy eel given to him by a dirt-poor parishioner and prepared by his cook using the special orange-and-pomegranate recipe. His gluttony outrages another parishioner, Lodovico, who, in the middle of a tirade against the priest, grabs his breviary: “It was full of recipes for every possible dish,” Lodovico finds to his disgust, “every possible treat: how to cook them, what sauces to accompany them with, what time of year to prepare them.”
²²

Sermini’s story is a satire on ecclesiastical corruption in general and epicurean priests in particular. Leonardo voiced strong anticlerical sentiments of his own, finding the religious orders hypocritical insofar as they made themselves “acceptable to God” by—in his opinion—enjoying great wealth and living in “splendid buildings.” His depiction of a dinner of eels, a food associated with gluttony, could have been a mischievous commentary on what he regarded as priestly corruption. On the other hand, Leonardo clearly placed a plate of half-eaten eels in front of Christ, and it is unlikely in the extreme that he intended any sort of blasphemy. Since he used Milanese courtiers for his models, and since the painting was meant to be, among other things, a glorification of Lodovico’s regime, he may simply have wished to show the scrumptious food enjoyed at the duke’s table.

Another possibility is that Leonardo was perpetrating a joke on the friars of Santa Maria delle Grazie. The French priest who saw the mural in 1515 commented on the astonishingly lifelike appearance of the food, and although he did not mention the eels, there can be no doubt that Leonardo painted them with the same attention to detail as everything else on the
table: following the restoration, we can see the fat chunks with their juicy white flesh over which the apostles will drizzle the slices of orange. The oranges have been painted with such detail that the pith is visible. Given the traditional ambivalence of Italian artists toward gastronomic details, there was no precedent in the 1490s for the sight of food so scrupulously and scrumptiously depicted, especially by someone with Leonardo’s prodigious talents. Whatever his intentions might have been, Leonardo succeeded in painting a famously mouthwatering delicacy for a group of friars who for much of the year fasted on bread and water, and who at all other times were obliged to observe strict culinary frugality.

Virtually all paintings of the Last Supper showed bread and wine on the table. Occasionally a chalice of wine would be depicted in front of Christ, as for example by Cosimo Rosselli in his fresco on the wall of the Sistine Chapel. More often the painters simply showed several beakers of wine distributed across the table, with half-filled glasses in front of each apostle. The painter of the Last Supper fresco in the church of San Andrea a Cercina, a few miles north of Florence, was particularly generous: he made no fewer than thirteen beakers of wine available to the apostles, including choices of both red and white.

There was, of course, a scriptural justification for showing bread and wine: they were necessary for the sacrament described in the synoptic Gospels. But in showing bread and wine on the table, painters were duplicating conditions not only in refectories but on Italian dinner tables in general. Bread and wine were the two staples of the Italian diet in the fifteenth century: the provisions on which the most household money was spent. Bread accounted for 40 percent of a family’s total food bill and 60 percent of its total caloric intake, which explained why the harvest was literally a matter of life and death, and why biblical verses such as “Give us this day our daily bread” or “I am the bread of life” resonated so powerfully with people in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The Dominicans lived by begging, quite literally, for their bread, and the difficulty of obtaining enough bread to eat was a regular refrain in early Dominican literature.
²³

Along with bread, wine was regularly (and copiously) served with meals, both in the refectory and in the family home, in part because its alcoholic
content meant that, unlike water, it was free from bacteria and other pathogens. The average Florentine household went through seven barrels (or more than 2,800 liters) of wine per year, and the annual per capita consumption of wine across the whole of Italy during the Renaissance is estimated to have been between 200 and 415 liters (compared to a paltry 60 liters in present-day Italy).
²⁴
Leonardo was certainly careful to keep his own house well stocked with wine: his shopping lists record frequent purchases. One of his notes observed that a particular wine cost one
soldo
a bottle, and at that rate his household, over the course of three days in 1504, must have downed at least twenty-four bottles. Wine was even on the menu at breakfast chez Leonardo since a note from 1495 proclaimed, “On Tuesday I bought wine for morning.”
²⁵

The clergy drank as abundantly as the rest of the population. The Dominicans, in particular, were well-known for their love of wine. St. Dominic took his wine “austerely diluted,” but his follower and successor, Jordan of Saxony, was more enthusiastic, noting that “wine brings delight and puts a man at his ease.” Soon Dominicans began acquiring a reputation for enjoying too much of this delight. One master of the order complained that in the refectories—where silence was supposed to reign—the friars discussed the merits of their wines through “almost an entire meal,” saying, “This one is like that and the other like that, and so on.”
²⁶
These oenophiles could at least console themselves that Aquinas declined to classify sobriety as a virtue and proclaimed “sober drinking” to be good for both body and soul.
²⁷

Leonardo placed at least twelve glasses of wine on the table in
The Last Supper
, all of them at varying levels (the one sitting in front of Bartholomew is nearly drained: another reason, perhaps, to see the famously high-living Bramante as his model). Like most painters he gave Jesus and the apostles red wine, the better to allude to the blood of Christ. He also showed numerous rolls of bread distributed across the table. No cutlery appears except for several bread knives and the dangerous-looking knife in Peter’s hand, more weapon than utensil. The lack of cutlery is in keeping with the dining habits of the day. Leonardo’s own inventory of his kitchen listed such items as a cauldron, a frying pan, a soup ladle, a jug, glasses and flasks, saltcellars, and a single knife, but no other cutlery.
²⁸
The fork was not yet widely in use, though by the Middle Ages the Italians had invented a single-pronged fork for eating lasagna. People therefore ate with their fingers, often from communal plates. A poem on etiquette composed by a Milanese
friar reminded them: “The man who is eating must not be cleaning / By scraping with his fingers at any foul part.”
²⁹