The gestures in the Last Supper are not spontaneous

I need hardly describe, what has been described so often, the variety of gesture which Leonardo has given to the disciples, and the way in which the effect of these gestures is enhanced by contrast. How, for example, the rough impetuous Peter, pugnaciously eager to declare his innocence, contrasts with the resigned St John, content to sit quietly, because he knows that no one will suspect him: and how St Peter's hand, forming a bridge between the heads of St John and Judas, underlines the contrast between innocence and villainy--le bellezze con le bruttezze, says Leonardo, paiono piú potenti l'una per l'altra. All these penetrations, these dramatic inventions, have been analysed once and for all by one of the few men who by the scale of his genius was in a position to judge Leonardo --by Goethe. His essay on Bossi's Cenacolo remains the best literary interpretation of the Last Supper. Nearly always in reading the interpretation of a picture we feel that what the writer takes to be a stroke of dramatic genius is an accident of which the painter was quite unaware. With Leonardo this is not the case. We know from his notebooks and his theoretical writings on art how much thought he gave to the literary presentation of his subject. He is continually advising the painter to study expressive gestures and suitable actions, and to combine them with effects of variety and contrast. "That figure is most praiseworthy", he says, "which, by its actions, best expresses the passions of the soul." With unusual good fortune we have in one of his pocket-books a note of the dramatic gestures suitable to the Last Supper.

One who was drinking has left his glass in its position and turned his head towards the speaker. Another twists the fingers of his hands together and turns with a frown (con rigide ciglia) to his companion. Another with hands spread open showing the palm, shrugs his shoulders up to his ears and makes a grimace of astonishment (fa la bocca della maraviglia). Another speaks into his neighbour's ear and the listener turns to him to lend an ear, while he holds a knife in one hand and in the other the loaf half cut through by the knife; and in turning round another, who holds a knife, upsets with his hand a glass on the table.

In the note these gestures are, so to say, unallotted, and it is interesting to see which ones Leonardo has retained. There is no difficulty in recognising in St Andrew the man who shrugs his shoulders and makes the bocca della maraviglia; and St Peter, who speaks into his neighbour's ear, still holds the knife. The gesture of the man twisting his fingers together did not sufficiently add to the movement of the composition and has been dropped out; and so has the man with his glass half-way to his lips. Leonardo's note was made from observation, and as the conception of the Last Supper grew more heroic, these everyday gestures became too trivial. But the man who turns round suddenly and upsets a glass has suffered a curious transformation. The motive has been given to Judas, only instead of a knife he holds the bag, and instead of a glass he upsets the salt, an accident still commemorated by the superstitious.

This abundance and variety of gesture on which Leonardo expended so much thought is not the characteristic of the Last Supper which appeals most strongly to modern sensibility. Nor do I believe that our lack of appreciation springs solely from a Northern embarrassment in face of the more expressive manners of the South. We feel no uneasiness before the Uffizi Adoration. In part this may be due to the fact that the Adoration is unfinished. The movement of the figures is communicated by the still perceptible movements of the painter's brush. In the Last Supper the movement is frozen. There is something rather terrifying about all these ponderous figures in action; something of a contradiction in terms in the slow labour which has gone to the perfection of every gesture. And beyond this is a deeper cause. The whole force of gesture, as an expression of emotion, lies in its spontaneity: and the gestures in the Last Supper are not spontaneous. Leonardo, as we have just seen, consciously excluded those motions which approached the nature of genre. Fare una finzioni, che significhera cose grandi. Leonardo intended the whole scene to be carried through in the highest mood of classical art. Let me confess that this imposition of classicism on his innate feeling for life always disturbs me. The Apostles are too vital to be heroic, too large to be so animated.

Perhaps if I could see their heads, this slight feeling of uneasiness would be lost. To judge from two drawings at Windsor, St James the Greater and St.Philip, they must have been extraordinarily beautiful; and I can imagine that in the original the pathos and dramatic intensity of the heads gave the key to the composition, and that the gestures, in a subsidiary role, lost their flavour of artifice.