A parody of Leonardo’s “Last Supper” shows Jesus delivering this message to his astonished disciples: “Separate checks

AR102: ART HISTORY 2

The Many Veils Of Meaning Left By Leonardo

BY: Sarah Boxer

The New York Times, July 17, 2001

parody of Leonardo's "Last Supper" shows Jesus delivering this message to his astonished disciples: "Separate checks." Heretical, yes. But the cartoon parody shares something with what most interpreters, particularly modern interpreters, have seen in the "Last Supper": a single emotional moment, a frozen picture of expressions and gestures, a narrative full of clear meaning.

The original "Last Supper," as Leonardo painted it on the refectory wall of Santa Maria delle Grazie between 1495 and 1498, has not existed for 500 years. "Leonardo was still alive when his masterpiece began its inexorable decline," writes Pinin Brambilla Barcilon, who has been the chief conservator of the "Last Supper" for two decades and who has just completed, with Pietro C. Marani, a sort of surgeon’s report on the newly restored painting, "Leonardo: The 'Last Supper'" (University of Chicago).

The years have been cruel to the supper scene. Although Mr. Marani writes that during the cleaning "Leonardo’s brushstroke was discovered on almost every temple, cheekbone, the profile of every nose, and every eyelid bathed with light," he adds, the fresco "is not the one Leonardo consigned to history." As the art historian Leo Steinberg writes in his new book, "Leonardo's Incessant 'Last Supper'" (Zone Books), "the work lives in no authentic definitive image." But not for want of trying. In Leonardo’s day, many artists, fearing the fresco's demise, copied it. And numerous restorers tried to stave off its disappearance. But those copies and restorations have obscured almost as much as they have revealed.

Now Ms. Barcilon and Mr. Steinberg are trying, in opposite ways, to see what Leonardo really did on the refectory wall. Ms. Barcilon's work has removed layers of well-intentioned but often ham-handed restoration, revealing the real state of the paint. And Mr. Steinberg has laid one interpretation on top of another and another to embrace them all in a comprehensive new interpretation.

According to Mr. Steinberg, the reputation of the "Last Supper" has suffered from an "aversion to ambiguity" and a lust for simplicity, which began shortly after it was painted and reached a fever pitch in the late 19^th century. Leonardo's positivist interpreters, Mr. Steinberg writes, felt that his creation "must be as forthright in meaning as his anatomical drawing or his didactic prose." Thus the copiers and interpreters of the "Last Supper" have tried "to clarify and to simplify and even to rectify what Leonardo had done," he writes. They believed he had painted one clear moment in time.

The copiers did not keep the table the way Leonardo set it. They rearranged feet and hands, they moved plates and glasses around to simplify the scene. Interpreters, too, seem to have felt "the need to pare down." They were bent on seeing one narrative moment in the painting.

But if the dramatic moment represented is supposed to be so crystal clear, Mr. Steinberg asks, then why can't anyone agree on what that moment is? Some say it represents Jesus saying, "One of you shall betray me." Some say it shows the moment just after. Some say that it represents Jesus pointing out his betrayer, Judas. Others say it depicts the institution of the Eucharist. Mr. Steinberg suggests that all of them are wrong and right. Leonardo intended everything. The "Last Supper" is a kind of meaning machine.

Mr. Steinberg devotes two chapters on the "multiplex" meanings of the hands and feet alone. In one of them, he outlines the "seven functions of the hands of Christ." First, "Christ lowers his arms in resignation," showing that he is "about to submit to the Passion." Indeed, "the droop of the shoulders" is, Mr. Steinberg writes, a "hieroglyph of submission."

Second, Christ's body forms a triangle, with the hands at the two bottom corners and the head at the top corner. "Christ's arms, aligned with the falling hair, form a nearly regular, three-sided figure—a Jesus geometrized." He makes with is body "the sign of the Trinity."

The third function of the hands is to point to the betrayer, to make it clear who Jesus is talking about when he says, "he that dips his hand with me in the dish, the same shall betray me." This is done by having Jesus's right hand reaching for the same dish at the table as Judas's hand. (Bad manners in the service of iconography.)

Jesus's accusing gesture does not stop this same hand, the right one, from also instituting the Eucharist. The very hand that reaches toward Judas's dish is also on a collision course with a glass of wine. (It's a huge hand with its fingers splayed "like a pianist's striking an octave," Mr. Steinberg writes.) Meanwhile, the other hand, the left one (which is right under doubting Thomas's heaven-pointed finger), goes for the dinner roll. The two hands suggest that the wine and bread are the blood and body of Jesus, Mr. Steinberg says.

But "Leonardo is irrepressible," he writes. So the meanings don't stop there. Because one palm points up and the other down, the figure also prefigures the Last Judgment, showing that some people will be raised up and some will be cast down. (Never mind that here it is the right hand, which is supposed to be the good hand, that is doing the shoving down and the left, the bad, that is doing the raising up. It turns out that the hands point respectively to the light and dark sides of the room.)

The sixth purpose of the hands is to point to the church dome. Thus, Mr. Steinberg says, it "extends the promise of life to the dead."

The seventh function of the hands is the hardest to explain. Look at "the flare of Christ's arms," Mr. Steinberg says, and you will notice that they reach out into the space of the room. They "clear a site for themselves." If you follow the course that they suggest, moving out from the painting and into the room, they seem to create the room. Jesus, Mr. Steinberg writes, is sanctifying perspective itself.

What about the feet? Unfortunately, in the 17^th century, the monks who worked in Santa Maria delle Grazie wanted to make space for a gigantic Baroque door right where the "Last Supper" was. So a hole "was rammed through the wall of the mural," destroying Jesus's feet. Thus, those who now want to peek under the tablecloth at the fancy footwork there must turn to copies of Leonardo's work. The main oddity they will find, Mr. Steinberg says, is that Jesus's feet are close together, suggesting that he is already on the cross while still at supper.

"It is a tribute to Leonardo's success that every multivalency in the painting earns praise for being straightforward." In other words, every critic can and has argued that the painting clearly supports his or her argument. Every moment that looks as if it is depicted is depicted. But that raises the question: why didn't anyone before Mr. Steinberg believe that all interpretations might live together in harmony?

Mr. Steinberg blames Leonardo: "Leonard's writings betray a mentality very different from what my reading of the picture implies." Leonardo wrote, "A picture or representation of human figures ought to be done in such a way that the spectator may easily recognize, by means of their attitude, the intent in their minds." And his followers believed him.

But Leonardo was wrong. His painting tells us so. This is certainly a strange state of affairs. The new cleaning and restoration of the "Last Supper" has "forced us to confront the painful truth that much of Leonardo's original work is irrevocably lost," Ms. Barcilon writes. There is "almost nothing" left of Leonardo's hand, Mr. Steinberg says, only tiny islands of original pigment "afloat in flat washes of pale removable watercolor." But its meanings are multiplying. The ratio of meaning to pigment is high, and growing.