Edith Wharton first saw Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper during a trip to Milan when she was 17. It was to be almost four decades before she finally gave vent to the passion it had aroused. During that long interval, she said, she had "wanted to bash that picture's face". It wasn't the most edifying contribution to art history and she was careful not to broadcast it. Rather, she confessed her loathing privately in a letter to the art historian Bernard Berenson, who, as "the most authorised fist in the world", had just done her pugilistic business for her.
The Study and Criticism of Italian Art (Third Series, 1916) in which he revealed that, as a boy, he had "felt a repulsion" for The Last Supper. "The faces were uncanny, their expressions forced, their agitation alarmed me," he recalled feverishly. "They were the faces of people whose existence made the world less pleasant and certainly less safe." This description of the most famous narrative painting in the world as resembling a Neapolitan marketplace drew great opprobrium. One American newspaper compared it to an act of war, claiming Berenson had "torpedoed" Leonardo's reputation (this at a time when German U-boats were sinking allied ships). Another review argued that he had shown "such want of sympathy with Leonardo's work as is generally considered to place a critic's estimate out of court".
The Last Supper is inscribed with a double sacredness: the sacredness of Christ's passion, the entire story of which it summarises; and the sacredness of Leonardo da Vinci's legend as "the one artist of whom it may be said with perfect literalness: nothing that he touched but turned into a thing of eternal beauty". This was Berenson in 1896, before he came to repudiate his own judgment as symptomatic of a slavish habit of overpraising Leonardo.
Goethe once said that one must not censure a Leonardo except on one's knees. Berenson's refusal to genuflect insulted a tradition of veneration whose origins date back to Giorgio Vasari's "Life" of Leonardo, published in 1550. "Many men and women are born with remarkable talents," Vasari wrote. "But occasionally, in a way that transcends nature, a single person is marvellously endowed by heaven with beauty, grace and talent in such abundance that he leaves other men far behind, all his actions seem inspired and indeed everything he does clearly comes from God rather than from human skill. Everyone acknowledged that this was true of Leonardo da Vinci …who cultivated his genius so brilliantly that all problems he studied he solved with ease."
Vasari's Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects is the Ur-text, the coping stone of art history, and his legend of Leonardo as the Ur-artist – superhuman, favoured by God, unravelling the mysteries of creation – persisted unchallenged for centuries. Scrutinised for accuracy, very little of his account survives as reliable fact, as first demonstrated in Carlo Amoretti's 1804 biography of Leonardo. Since then, such evidence as exists – legal, contextual, pictorial and, of course, Leonardo's own copious writings – has been rigorously marshalled and analysed, giving the corrective to some of the more fantastic accretions that grew up around his name and the works attributed to him. (WhenCharles Lamb wrote from Blenheim that only two of the nine pictures there by Leonardo pleased him, none of them was actually by Leonardo at all. There are only an estimated 16 extant panel paintings, of which half have been corralled from across continents for the National Gallery's forthcoming exhibition, Leonardo da Vinci, Painter at the Court of Milan).
But no fact-finding enterprise can ever provide an empirical basis for the "true" or "real" Leonardo. Even as we consciously expose the fictive exaggerations of Vasari, we continue subconsciously to incorporate the myths and enlarge them. Leonardo's prodigious experimental and investigative output, as witnessed by his notebooks, his non-acquiescence ("he won't take yes for an answer," as Kenneth Clark put it), contributed to the belief that he is an indispensable instrument of man's search for meaning. Just as he chased down the "proofs" for his theories on the laws of nature, energy, motivation and emotion ("moti"), so, with a kind of mimetic restlessness, we rifle his work for the key to decode our intellectual and existential DNA. In his Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci (1895), the poet Paul Valéry confessed that "knowing very little" about him, he had "invented a Leonardo of my own". Leonardo thus becomes "Leonardo", an allegory, a fulcrum for human consciousness.
Valéry's essay (written in prose as dense as a traffic bollard) was less a manual for interpreting Leonardo's method than a pretext for the creation of a "universal man" for the modern age, a man capable of harnessing vast synthetic conceptions to the mastery of himself. Dismissing Leonardo's "personality" as irrelevant, an "encrustation", Valéry co-opted him as the impersonal genius, a kind of hyper-conscious filter for the verification of knowledge, knowledge that could then be pressed into service as action and power.
This idea of the exceptional man who not only discovers but improves upon the world had considerable traction at a time when the renaissance was being reframed as an ideological, and not solely an aesthetic, movement. "La découverte du monde, la découverte de l'homme". This was how the historian Jules Michelet, writing in 1855, defined it – as a liberating, indeed a liberation movement whose historical function was the delivery of Europe from the political, religious and intellectual servitude of the middle ages. In that movement, for which Leonardo (alongside Filippo Brunelleschi) was the vox clamantis, man had "plumbed the deep foundations of his nature" and "begun to take his stand on Justice and on Reason". The Last Supper, with its protean, Faustian figures, was no longer a theological or liturgical phenomenon, a religious feast, but a council of political action (an interpretation that played out well in contemporary Russia, where Christ was reconfigured as a revolutionary and a democrat, a symbol of social and political opposition to Tsarist rule).
Michelet was deeply entangled in the culture wars of his time. Republican and staunchly anti-clerical, he conducted a bruising polemic against the Catholic church in France. His lectures on the renaissance, a high-octane mix of rhetoric and call-to-arms, so angered the government that his lecture hall was closed down in 1848 for three months. Michelet needed a secular, humanist figure to stand for political and intellectual emancipation, and this is what he delivered. His Leonardo tells us less about the nature of man than about the nature of European man in the turbulent mid-19th century. This is Leonardo as usable past, as a viable element in the creation of an historical meaning that expresses and confirms the values of a particular group.
Indeed, "Leonardo" has become an adjective to describe what survival in history is. And as records of survival go, his is pretty much unbeatable. He even survives Sigmund Freud, whose psychoanalytic study of 1910 depended heavily on invented episodes, supplied by a Russian novel, from Leonardo's childhood. From this flimsy premise, the Viennese mind-doctor proposed that Leonardo had a frustrated erotic relationship with his mother that developed into a repressed or idealised homosexuality that in turn was sublimated into artistic creation and scientific investigation, much of which was uncompleted due to the absence of his father.
A century on, Freud's grammar of the subconscious has become so familiar as to be easily dismissed as cliché. But clichés only become clichés because they are good enough in the original. His monograph on Leonardo was the first psychosexual history to be published, and the vehicle for the first full emergence of the concept of narcissism, which Freud didn't fully elaborate until a paper in 1914. It introduced a new model for the development of the human personality: Leonardo was the first Freudian archetype.
Freud's intervention was significant in another way. He was very attracted to the romance of modern archaeology, collecting artefacts and archaeological field reports, carefully posing an array of Egyptian figurines on his desk. The job of psychoanalyst, he claimed, was similar to that of the archaeologist: both must "uncover layer after layer of the patient's psyche, before coming to the deepest, most valuable treasures". Goethe had claimed that the key to Leonardo's genius lay in his ability to penetrate beyond superficial appearances to what lay beneath: "He began to be aware, that behind the outside of objects … there still lay concealed many a secret, the knowledge of which it would be worth his utmost efforts to attain."
Freud's evocation of the concealed space – the tomb as well as the womb – and the suggestion that its long-buried arcana could be accessed through methodical deduction, like the Rosetta stone (whose decoder Jean-François Champollion Freud greatly admired), unleashed a mania for finding hidden clues in Leonardo's work. A disciple of Freud claimed in 1913 to have discovered a vulture – a maternal symbol in ancient Egypt – in the drapery of Saint Anne's clothing in the London cartoon of The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne. In the 1940s, a foetus was "identified" in the rock just below the virgin's right foot. When Dan Brown unleashed The Da Vinci Code in 2003 (which, incidentally, marked the renaming of Leonardo as a place rather than a person), he was simply bringing this obsession with esoterica into the mainstream.
Is it possible that Leonardo himself connived, in his lifetime, in his own legend? We know that within a single generation after his death he was construed as a magus or sage, "the Druid Hermes, his beard so long", as one admirer wrote. That beard, essential accessory for a prophet, appears in every likeness of Leonardo, even in the drawing in Turin that is widely thought to be a self-portrait. Did the living figure assimilate himself to the type?
It's a tantalising possibility, but of a kind unpopular with many contemporary critics. Perhaps reflecting a broader mood of austerity, such speculative exuberance has been curtailed in favour of what Martin Kemp calls the "sober counterweight to the accumulation of legend". Charles Hope suggests that Leonardo has been credited "with an originality which is largely unjustified", time and again circling mathematical and philosophical questions that had been studied before but which he was ignorant of replicating because he hadn't taken "adequate account of observations and arguments available in standard Classical sources". We should not, argue these critics, look to everything Leonardo produced as taking us over the threshold into some final mystery.
If we want to know why Mona Lisa smiles, we should remind ourselves that this is a portrait of the wife of Francesco del Giocondo ("jocund" in Italian). The documentation tells us so. Even Vasari got this right. The facts have been known for a long time, but somehow we strain for other, less prosaic answers. When Marcel Duchamp mischievously suggested in his 1919 readymade that Mona Lisa smiles because "she's got a hot ass", he was parodying the obsession with Leonardo's enigma and poking fun at the mystifications, the purple prose, the sheer dreariness of "aesthetics".
Duchamp's readymade was a postcard of the Louvre portrait (to which he added a goatee and his infamous inscription) and it spoke to the familiarity of Leonardo's work through reproduction. Along with the Mona Lisa, the most widely distributed image was that of The Last Supper, at first through engravings and later photographs. Familiarity breeds contempt, and there is a long history of inversion for comic and satirical purposes. Hogarth repeatedly used its compositional structure to mocking effect, notably in The Cockpit, where Christ has become a gambler. Later, filmmakers such as Buñuel and Pasolini played havoc with its sacred associations by relocating it to secular and seedy settings. In Buñuel's Viridiana, a film condemned by the Vatican, violently drunk beggars re-enact the tableau over a table of stolen food while a nun is molested. This is the reverse compliment paid to icons: they are defaced for their virtue.
We mustn't lick all the paint off our gods, as Virginia Woolf once warned, and indeed The Last Supper, as if by miracle, has survived all attempts to loosen the hold it has on us. Ironically, it suffered first at the hands of Leonardo himself, who experimented with the technique of fresco to disastrous effect. By applying oils to the surface he trapped moisture in the wall: he literally left the paint unable to breathe. Twenty years after completing the mural he returned to the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie to retouch it, but the man who had dreamed of turning back rivers could do nothing to reverse his own technical failure. Vasari, in the 1568 edition of The Lives described it as "so badly effected that nothing is visible but a mass of blots".
In 1652 it was further damaged when an existing door beneath it was widened and heightened. Bashed out with hammers and pickaxes, the mural's crust was loosened in many places. In 1770 it was scraped with iron instruments by a restorer behaving like a sawbone surgeon ("a true bungler", said Goethe). Napoleon's troops used the refectory as a dormitory and amused themselves by throwing stones and horse dung at it before Napoleon intervened with an edict to have the room bricked up and sealed. And in August 1943 an allied a bomb tore off the roof, leaving The Last Supper exposed to the elements under a tarpaulin for three years, "the saddest painting in the world" (Aldous Huxley).
The Last Supper still exists, in great part, due to the romance with its crumbling patina, the drama of its self-effacement. It is this, as much as the theatricality, the élan vital of its composition, that secures it a place outside of, as well as within, the Christian story it narrates. Like the man who created it, we can never know it fully. Both are metaphors for the way we construct meaning – they hold on to their secrets, but they also reveal that the history of what we know is only ever the history of what we desire to know.
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