The Enigma of Genius

Not only is Leonardo da Vinci alive and well nearly 500 years after his death, arguably he has never been better. Twentieth-century scholarly careers were dedicated to him, as were specialized journals and entire libraries. He has made the rounds of exhibitions, lectures, scholarly symposiums and the auction house.

More, he is also in the artist’s studio, recycled by Warhol, Rauschenberg and many others. And lest we forget: Leonardo is in the mother’s milk of pop culture. You want Leonardo? You got him: T-shirts, popular songs, jigsaw puzzles and paint-by-number kits, novels, New Yorker covers, sundry ad campaigns, bawdy party cards and shower curtains.

Why this fascination with Leonardo and his works? There is no simple answer; indeed complexity of response to him is of the essence. The various ingredients of his attraction seem clear enough taken one by one but, when mixed, volatile and ever-changing.

It helps to have your posthumous career launched by a good biography, written in Leonardo’s case by a Florentine, Giorgio Vasari, in his “Lives of the Artists� (1550, revised and expanded 1568). Vasari’s Leonardo possessed an excellence that could only be accounted as a gift from God. Beauty and surpassing grace characterized the man and his art. His brilliant mind ranged over art, anatomy, music, mechanics and much more.

But perfection and goodness are, in the end, boring. Vasari’s encomium to an Olympian is offset by alleged flaws that bring Leonardo down to the imperfections of the rest of us. He was the great procrastinator, chronically unable to finish what he started. In the end, Vasari has it, Leonardo turned away from art to dabble in fruitless investigations and childlike pranks.

Leonardo might have been written off as an anomalous curiosity had he not been hailed as a harbinger. For Vasari, the revival of the arts in Italy after centuries of medieval torpor culminated in a final phase, the “modern,� whose pioneer was Leonardo. In the 19th century, when some of Leonardo’s manuscripts were first studied, his notes were combed for anticipations of modern science, be it in cosmology, geology, anatomy or mechanics: hence, a Leonardo who not only was an artistic pioneer but also a precursor of modern thought.

However, until the late 19th century Leonardo remained a famous name with precious little tangible product to back up the reputation. There was scant agreement on just what paintings he did. The extent and significance of the notebooks (some 7,000 sheets) were still not well understood. A huge reputation, a fragmentary product: This was the situation over the first three centuries of Leonardo’s afterlife. Where facts are scarce and in dispute, storytellers, often with an ax to grind, rush in.

So it was that Leonardo spawned imaginative literature but bad history. Masterpieces were often the highlights of these stories, and Leonardo inarguably painted two, “Mona Lisa� and “The Last Supper.� A masterpiece is a work deemed of compelling importance that lays claim to perpetual relevance through the ages.

An object achieves masterpiece status through the words spoken and written about it, words that become an integral part of how we think about it. Usually a masterpiece is perceived as complex, a challenge to the imagination that invites continuing interpretation. Its mystery is never solved, and such is its resilience that it can even sustain interpretations that are contradictory.

Leonardo scholarship is a heavy industry. In the last four years alone, three books have appeared on “The Last Supper,� some 1,400 pages weighing 15 pounds. One, by art conservator Pinin Brambilla Barcilon and art historian Pietro Marani, offers a text and color photographs that document the results of a 20-year conservation project recently completed. Pleasure at revelations of Leonardo’s hand are overwhelmed by a sense of sadness at how much is irretrievably lost. As long suspected, “The Last Supper� is a ghost, more an idea in the mind buttressed by old copies than it is a living, physical presence.

Their book is a highly recommended companion to the sparkling intellectual performance of Leo Steinberg’s “Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper.� The argument, first published in 1973 as a long article in the now-defunct journal the Art Quarterly, is fine-tuned to take into account more recent work and to further clarify the author’s thought. The book is especially welcome, for now a new generation can read him in a radically different critical climate, in which complexity, ambiguity and the multivalent prevail.

It was just these qualities that Steinberg identified in the 1960s in artists such as Jasper Johns and which have characterized his scholarship since. “The Last Supper� that Steinberg inherited, a few anticipatory voices notwithstanding, had several characteristics. The mural was thought to represent a clear narrative moment: when the apostles react to Christ’s charge that one of them shall betray him.

Though the image has always been recognized for its pictorial complexity, that complexity was read as at the service of an overall unity intended to drive home the narrative moment. The picture meant what it obviously said, a psychodrama that expressed very human emotions. Beyond a gospel account, the compelling congenial, secular explanation was a betrayal among friends.

Steinberg writes that this is an impoverished reading of what he describes as the “world’s most thought-out painting.� There is no contract for the commission, no revealing contemporary theological text from which to draw. Most of the material for interpretation lies in the ruin of a mural painted in the years 1495 through ’97 in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazia in Milan, supplemented by clues offered by many copies/adaptations/variants of various dates.

Steinberg’s analysis therefore must be rigorously visual, his arguments based on what can be seen. In writing that is as taut as a medieval scholastic text, he constructs his chapters so that each builds inexorably on ones that have gone before. Nowhere, he writes, is the mural unambiguous, and just about any proposition made about it is reversible.

Meanings are layered, polysemantic, the visual means double-functioning at a minimum. For Steinberg, earlier scholarly disagreement is a strong clue that Leonardo habitually had several things in mind when a given scholar usually pointed out only one.

Steinberg’s argument is complex, but its flavor can be suggested. The moment represented in “The Last Supper� for centuries was understood to be one, even if the particular moment of choice differed: announcement of betrayal; reaction of the apostles; Christ’s subsequent announcement that “he that dips his hand with me in the dish, the same shall betray me�; reaction to that. But why, asks Steinberg, might it not be that these and still other moments are intended, yielding an extended temporal duration? If this is the case, then the title “The Last Supper� lacks nuance.

So what is the painting’s subject? Drawing on a Polish predecessor who wrote in 1904, Steinberg argues that the subject is at once the gospel narrative and the liturgical event of the institution of the Eucharist, the sacrament of communion. He sees the apostles to the left of Christ as responding in the announcement of betrayal, those on the right as anticipating the gift of communion. Conflation of the scriptural narrative with the ritual sacrament suggests the dual human-divine nature of Christ.

A crucial detail for the interpretation is the part of the table just to Christ’s right. The outstretched hands of Christ and Judas bracket a dish and glass of wine. The question is whether Christ’s right hand reaches for the dish (in which Judas and Christ will dip their hands) or for the wine (a eucharistic element). Steinberg argues that hand, dish and wine read in space can indicate both, assuming that Christ’s hand is “transitive,� that is, motion in progress that denotes two actions. The hand would be the nexus where the dramatic and sacramental converge “... as the person of Christ unites a man and God, so his right hand summons the agent of his human death even as it offers the means of salvation.�

The postures of the apostles, their proportions and gestures, all are fraught with multiple possibilities. The fictive perspective describes a room whose very shape and purpose are unclear, the viewing point some 15 feet above the refectory floor. Is this space an annex of the actual room, an allusion to “the upper room� mentioned in the gospels, or a mysterium of inaccessible grandeur? Is it not true that the lines of perspective recede to describe illusionistic space and yet seem also to push outward toward us? “Again and again, whether addressed to a part or the whole, Leonardo converts either/or into both.� Steinberg pushes his argument to the limit, for instance reading the hands of Christ as having seven functions. He seems defiant and pleased that a seven-fold interpretation will drive his critics nuts. Steinberg’s position is clear: Great works of art are ill-served by simplistic under-interpretation. The historian’s job is to make suggestions that are probable, if not provable, based on what is seen.

One can already hear the criticisms of this book. The Renaissance hated ambiguity; if Steinberg is correct, then Leonardo failed, for why has no one figured out the significance of the mural for more than 400 years? If one wants to suggest the institution of the Eucharist, why not get on with it and just put a chalice on the table? Perhaps a better question: What do we expect of interpretations of works of art? Clearly they should not be contradicted by what one can see. But because an image in the end cannot be translated into words, a writer on art is not in the business of “proving� anything rather offers persuasive language whose purpose is to extend our imaginative capacity. Writing in the humanities is conversational and those conversations are cumulative. The humanities pass on tradition but fail in that task if they do not also reassess tradition in terms of current needs and interests.

So, “right� and “wrong� are simply misguided criteria for judging a book like Steinberg’s. We should ask rather whether our ability to see new things and think new thoughts have been enhanced. I believe they have. After all, nothing ventured, nothing gained. What sort of reader is this book for? Beware the attractive format and beguiling cover (a black-and-white photo of a billboard on Route 3 in New Jersey with a color photo of an early copy of “The Last Supper� superimposed on it). This is not a book for intellectual sissies; it is tough-minded scholarship funded in part by the Getty Trusts and distributed by The MIT Press. Yet it is clearly written, accessible to a general reader (if such a creature still exists) interested in Leonardo and/or wider issues of interpretation. It will fascinate people with a high tolerance for ambiguity, who relish intricate puzzles and appreciate the art of a tightly knit argument. Steinberg on Leonardo is an intellectual tour-de-force and worth every minute, even if you find yourself in disagreement and lose sleep trying to figure out why.