Point of balance

Unity and drama, these are the essential qualities by which Leonardo's Last Supper is distinguished from earlier representations of the subject. It is worth analysing the means by which these qualities have been achieved. To begin with the setting: we notice that there is nothing to distract the eye from the main theme. "In history painting", says Leonardo in the Trattato, "do not ever make so many ornaments on your figures or their setting as will confuse the form and attitudes of the figures or the essential character of the setting." Instead of the fanciful, decorative architecture which earlier interpretations of the subject include, the scene of Leonardo's Last Supper is so bare and severe that most copyists felt bound to invent a more attractive setting. There are no incidental motives--no flying birds, nor gossiping disciples. The vanishing point of the perspective is the principal figure. Every form and every gesture is concentrated. The problem of dramatic and formal concentration, always difficult, is almost insoluble when the subject is thirteen men sitting at a table. The earlier painters, except perhaps Castagno, did not attempt to subordinate their figures to a single motive, but relied on a purely decorative arrangement. The painters of the Baroque, to whom unity of composition was essential, solved the problem by ingenious tricks of lighting and foreshortening, but in so doing they sacrificed the quietness and clarity of statement suitable to the subject, sometimes turning it, as Tintoretto in S. Paolo, into a scene of violence and confusion in which the Apostles reel and struggle among the servants and unknown onlookers.

Leonardo's solution is in some respects the same as that used in the Adoration, two dynamic masses united and kept in repose by a single point of balance. This seemingly simple arrangement involved the feat of composing the twelve Apostles into two groups of six: which groups should be perfectly coherent, and yet have sufficient movement to give them an interesting relation to the centre. The steps by which Leonardo arrived at his final solution are lost to us. We have very few drawings for the Last Supper, and for the composition only two studies. The more elaborate of these, a red chalk drawing in the Venice Academy, is one of the most puzzling of all Leonardesque relics. It is badly drawn--the Christ's right arm and hand are childish; and in spite of the factitious animation of the figures they lack the inner life which redeems Leonardo's most careless scribbles: they are stiff, almost archaic. For these reasons some of the best judges have doubted its authenticity. I am forced to accept it. The writing above the figures done in the same chalk as the drawing seems to me perfectly genuine. I can only explain its defects by supposing that Leonardo was interested solely in noting down the order and characteristics of the Apostles. The sheet was more of a reminder than a drawing. It tells us nothing about the composition, except that although the drawing must date from about 1495 Leonardo has not yet begun to think of the two groups as wholes, and Judas is still placed on the near side of the table. This last motive also appears on the other surviving study, a pen and ink drawing at Windsor; but here Leonardo is already aiming at dramatic unity, and in a subsidiary sketch on the same sheet he considers the almost unbearably dramatic subject of Our Lord giving the sop to Judas.

Between these sketches and the final composition what immense labour must have intervened! It is perhaps a criticism of the Last Supper that in the groups of Apostles the evidence of this labour is still too apparent. We can see how Leonardo has varied each action, calculated each interval, balanced every change of direction. He has given us the ideal demonstration of his treatise on painting. What could be more in keeping with his theories than the two groups of Apostles on either side of Christ, turned inwards so that their axes form a kind of echelon of perspective around the central figure: or the way in which, having made the three Apostles on the extreme left look eagerly inward, he makes two on the right look outward, but point inward, so that their intention, meeting the formidable glare of St Simon, seems to ricochet back along the line of their hands? The building up of such sequences is, no doubt, one of the greatest manifestations of intellectual power in art, but, seen through the medium of copies it remains an intellectual achievement, stupendous, but cold and academic. The centre of the composition upon which these two masses rest, the figure of Christ, springs from a deeper source. It is the unfathomable mystery of Leonardo that with all his apparent coldness, his aloofness from ordinary human feelings, his essential strangeness, he could yet create this figure so simple, so touching, and so universal in its appeal.

Evidently one cannot look for long at the Last Supper without ceasing to study it as a composition, and beginning to speak of it as a drama. It is the most literary of all great pictures, one of the few of which the effect may be largely conveyed--can even be enhanced--by description. It is the opposite of a picture by one of the great decorative artists, by Paul Veronese, for example, where the actions, distractions, costumes and expressions of the actors may be quite unsuitable to the subject and simply chosen for their pictorial effectiveness.