Leonardo Da Vinci: The Flights of the Mind by Charles Nicholl

Author:Charles Nicholl [Nicholl, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780141944241
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2005-04-06T23:00:00+00:00

Pacioli’s description is interesting because of his close connection with Leonardo at this time: it contains, perhaps, a refraction of Leonardo’s own statements – on the quality of ‘attentiveness’ and ‘wonder’ which racks the dramatic intensity of the focus on Christ, and the sense of interplay among the apostles. This is how the painting works: the figures not in a row, but intertwined, speaking ‘l’uno a l’altro e l’altro a l’uno’.

And then there is Judas: the villain of the piece, and yet in the preparatory profile study at Windsor (page 294) a man more ugly than evil – almost a grotesque, but with hints of remorse and self-disgust which touch the profile with tragedy, or indeed with Christian forgiveness. (The recent restoration of the painting has recovered subtleties in the faces lost beneath later retouchings; Judas is an example of a face now nearer to the preparatory drawing than it was before the restoration.) He recoils from the words of Christ even as his hand moves irrevocably towards the piece of bread he will dip in the dish.

Of the face of Judas in Leonardo’s Last Supper there is a well-known anecdote in Vasari: how the prior of the Grazie constantly badgered Leonardo ‘to hurry up and finish the work’, and complained of the artist’s dilatoriness to the Duke. In response Leonardo told Ludovico he was still searching for a face evil enough to represent Judas, but that if he did not succeed ‘he could always use the head of that tactless and impatient prior’ as a model. At this the Duke roared with laughter, and ‘the unfortunate prior retired in confusion to worry the labourers working in his garden.’ This is one of those Vasarian anecdotes that proves to have a kernel of truth, or at least of contemporary witness. The story is lifted from the Discorsi of Giambattista Giraldi Cintio, published in 1554, and Cintio in turn had it from his father, Cristoforo Giraldi, a Ferrarese diplomat who knew Leonardo personally in Milan. The Giraldi version of the story purports to be a record of Leonardo’s own words:

It remains for me to do the head of Judas, who was the great betrayer, as you all know, and so deserves to be painted with a face that expresses all his wickedness… And so for a year now, perhaps more, I have been going every day, morning and evening, down to the Borghetto, where all the base and ignoble characters live, most of them evil and wicked, in the hope that I will see a face which would be fit for this evil man. And to this day I have not found one… and if it turns out I cannot find one I will have to use the face of this reverend father, the prior.94

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