Da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’: eternal image, perpetual change

It would take nearly 15 centuries for an artist to come along and create an image synonymous with the Last Supper, the final meal Jesus shared with his disciples.

Leonardo da Vinci’s “L’Ultima Cena,” as it was originally known, was far from the first depiction, but none of the works that came before it embodied the Christian mystery as fully.

In the five centuries since, the mural, painted on the end wall of a dining hall in Milan where monks gathered to eat in silence, has proliferated to a degree that even da Vinci, with his famous powers of imagination, could not have envisioned.

“The Last Supper” has become one of the most universally recognized artworks, hanging in countless dining rooms the world over.

It is also one of the most perpetually imitated and copied works of art.

In it, Jesus is seated in resigned sadness at the center of the long table, having just uttered the news: “I tell you the truth, one of you will betray me” (John 13:21).

Emotion jars the disciples to either side of Christ, emanating outward from that core of calm in uniquely human waves of confusion, shock, outrage, fear, denial, rage, heartbreak.

Almost immediately upon its completion in 1498, it was clear that something was singularly numinous about this artwork.

As if trying to come to grips with its potency, painters and draughtsmen began scrutinizing and copying it, with the artists influenced as varied as Rubens, Tintoretto, Rembrandt, Poussin, Dali, Warhol and a spate of contemporary artists.

More recently subsumed into popular culture and kitsch, the image can be found on lunch boxes and bread plates, in needlework kits and jigsaw puzzles, on lacquered wood and velvet, and in films such as Robert Altman’s “M(ASTERISK)A(ASTERISK)S(ASTERISK)H” and Luis Bunuel’s “Viridiana.”

What would Leonardo have thought of the dusty men in leather vests, with bare chests and feet, sitting in the grass imitating his composition in the rock opera “Jesus Christ Superstar” before singing, “What’s that in the bread, it’s gone to my head”?

His painting has endured indignities, much like his “Mona Lisa,” with Jesus and the apostles flippantly or satirically swapped out for Hostess Twinkies, feminist icons, the cast of “The Sopranos,” a Homer Simpson Pez dispenser paired with “Star Wars” action figures, comic book superheroes, Israeli soldiers, corporate icons such as Mrs. Butterworth and Tony the Tiger and portraits of Mao Tse-tung, among many—many—other things.

It has also been recast in salt and sand, carved from butter and chocolate, and assembled from spools of thread and Legos.

With such unceasing attention, the question warrants asking: Why this “Last Supper”? Why has it become so fixed in our collective imagination?

Some seek to solve this art-historical stumper with a secret key, like the cryptograms in Dan Brown’s adventure novel, “The Da Vinci Code,” which places da Vinci’s composition at the heart of a grand conspiracy.

That Leonardo is thought of as a sort of mad genius, because of his highly inventive mind, only adds to the aura of impenetrability. Freud didn’t help matters much, either, with his essays that unravel meanings based on the artist’s—what else?—tortured childhood.

As for the “Last Supper” itself, so much is literally left open for conjecture since much of the artwork has literally vanished, part of a bit-by-bit disappearing act that began in the artist’s lifetime because he tinkered with a technique that proved unstable.

By 1550, artist and biographer Giorgio Vasari described the mural as, loosely translated, a “mess of blots.” A century or so after that, the monks thought so little of the work that they punched a door through the wall, which, though later bricked back up, left Christ forever feet-less.

What ultimately may be responsible for the masterpiece’s resonance is quite simple: da Vinci’s devotion to the richness of Christian mystery. And isn’t it like those art historians to miss something so obvious?

Centuries of misconceptions have been peeled away in recent years, revealing layers of meaning nestled into the mural’s spatial and pictorial ambiguities and inconsistencies that have puzzled and vexed scholars for some time.

“The impoverishment of its content down to pure psychodrama is our legacy from the Age of Enlightenment,” writes Leo Steinberg, the eminent da Vinci scholar who brought so much of this to light, particularly in his book “Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper” (Zone Books, 2001).

In other words, a simple assumption was made: A man with such a scientific mind would make something secular, something psychological.

However, with spatial and pictorial illusions, da Vinci appears to have created what’s been called a “sublime pun,” the entwined realities of Christian belief and mystery—Jesus being both man and God, the Eucharist being both bread and body, the scene being both temporal and eternal.

The architectural space, for example, appears to be an extension of the dining hall in Milan, but a subtle discrepancy at the seam of actual and virtual space visually rearranges the scene. The dining hall shifts slightly to a higher plane and is reshaped into a narrowing chamber, like the sacramental space in the apse of a church.

The Christ figure also appears at first glance to be of human stature, similar to the apostles around him, though through a similar disturbance in perception he seems to rise to a larger scale and to bring his hand physically into the refectory space, as if to bless the friars.

“He moves his hands,” Steinberg writes, “no more than that; and at their motion, the very order of space, the laws governing visibility, are received as an emanation.”

That the painting is a powerful theological and even mystical expression may also explain why it has attracted such reverent replications and such vehement satire and parody.

Anna Mae Gibbons, born on a farm in Portage County, Wis., transformed herself into Artoria, a famous tattoo lady, a living exhibit of masterpiece artworks in human flesh. It was, in the 1920s, a way for her to make a decent wage and lead an interesting life on the road.

She allowed her husband, Charles “Red” Gibbons, a tattoo artist she met at a department store soda counter, to ink Leonardo’s “Last Supper” into a place of honor across her shoulders and back.

“She was very devout,” said Amelia Klem Osterud, a librarian at Carroll College who wrote about Gibbons for Wisconsin Magazine of History last year.

“All of her tattoos she selected herself, and I know that she liked classical artwork,” said Klem, who has done extensive research on the tattoo ladies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. “They were mostly religious because she was a very religious woman ... it meant a lot to her.”

For some, da Vinci’s “Last Supper” is the symbol of male dominance in both organized religions and art history. It is also, of course, a flank of white men, as the tradition in the Renaissance was to put contemporaries into religious scenes.

Leonardo based his figures on real people he saw in Milan’s streets, taverns, bathhouses and perhaps even brothels. Looking for a Judas, Leonardo may even have visited jails, it’s believed.

Some contemporary artists have inserted people of color or non-Western cultures into the composition. In Rene Cox’s controversial “Yo Mama’s Last Supper,” Cox, an African-American woman, places herself into the center of the artwork, naked and in supplication, standing in the place traditionally held by Jesus. Black men are at her sides.

Contemporary Israeli photographer Adi Nes set his “Last Supper” in the Holy Land as a reminder of the sacrificial acts made by young Israeli soldiers for their country. The young man seated at the center of a makeshift table in a bullet-pocked barracks possesses a sense of exhaustion, presumably from the ongoing violence around him, an ironic twist on the calm resignation of the Christ figure in Leonardo’s work. The photograph sold at Sotheby’s auction for $264,000 late in February, more than three times what was projected.

Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party,” recently placed on view at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, where it has found a permanent home after a long hiatus, offers a sort of alternative, communal godhead, a take on Leonardo that does not slavishly copy his composition.

In it, 39 place settings, with handmade table runners and plates painted with imagery that intimates feminine physiology, are set out on a triangular banquet table. It is like Leonardo’s long table tripled. There is no head of the table, no hierarchy, only equality. The triangle shape, which recurs in da Vinci’s work, often refers to the Trinity.

Each place is a tribute to a woman who has contributed to Western civilization, and each wing is dedicated to a different era in time. The figures saluted include Hildegarde of Bingen, Christine de Pisan, Artemisia Gentileschi, Susan B. Anthony, Margaret Sanger, Virginia Woolf and Georgia O’Keeffe.

O’Keeffe takes the place of Jesus in Mary Beth Edelson’s “Some Living American Women Artists” from 1972, in a more direct quotation of da Vinci with similar feminist aims.

Whether you agree with the beliefs or politics of some of these contemporary renditions or not, one thing is unfortunate about them. The parade of copies has become so common that the uncommon nature of the original becomes largely blunted and obscured.

Out of force of habit, da Vinci’s “Last Supper” can seem little other than the inspiration for all of these incessant reinterpretations. We’re accustomed to seeing the 13 figures lined up just so and the gestures pantomimed.

But little else of the original—the nuance of meaning, the conceptual use of space, the unique embodiment of Christian faith—is carried forward. We may suffer Leonardo fatigue, or so it would seem, never taking the time to truly look at the image that started it all.

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For a narrated tour through Last Suppers in art, ancient and contemporary, reverent and irreverent: www.jsonline.com/links/lastsupper.