Leonardo and The Last Supper ROSS KING Contents Map of Italy in 1494 Sforza-Visconti Family Tree The Last Supper with Apostles Identified CHAPTER 1: The Bronze Horse CHAPTER 2: Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Man CHAPTER 3: The Cenacolo CHAPTER 4: Dinner in Jerusalem CHAPTER 5: Leonardo’s Court CHAPTER 6: The Holy League CHAPTER 7: Secret Recipes CHAPTER 8: “Trouble from This Side and That” CHAPTER 9: Every Painter Paints Himself CHAPTER 10: A Sense of Perspective CHAPTER 11: A Sense of Proportion CHAPTER 12: The Beloved Disciple CHAPTER 13: Food and Drink CHAPTER 14: The Language of the Hands CHAPTER 15: “No One Loves the Duke” EPILOGUE: Tell Me If I Ever Did a Thing Color Insert Acknowledgments Notes Footnotes Selected Bibliography Illustration Credits A Note on the Author Also by Ross King For my father-in-law Sqn. Ldr. E. H. Harris RAF (Rtd) I wish to work miracles. —LEONARDO DA VINCI Map of Italy in 1494 HOUSE OF VISCONTI-SFORZA The Last Supper with Apostles Identified CHAPTER 1 The Bronze Horse The astrologers and fortune-tellers were agreed: signs of the coming disasters were plain to see. In Puglia, down in the heel of Italy, three fiery suns rose into the sky. Farther north, in Tuscany, ghost riders on giant horses galloped through the air to the sound of drums and trumpets. In Florence, a Dominican friar named Girolamo Savonarola received visions of swords emerging from clouds and a black cross rising above Rome. All over Italy, statues sweated blood and women gave birth to monsters. These strange and troubling events in the summer of 1494 foretold great changes. That year, as a chronicler later recounted, the Italian people suffered “innumerable horrible calamities.”1 Savonarola predicted the arrival of a fierce conqueror from across the Alps who would lay waste to Italy. His dire prophecy was fulfilled soon enough. That September, King Charles VIII of France entered an Alpine pass with an army of more than thirty thousand men, bent on marching through Italy and seizing the throne of Naples. The scourge of God made an unprepossessing sight: the twenty-four-year-old king was short, myopic, and so ill proportioned that in the words of the chronicler Francesco Guicciardini, “he seemed more like a monster than a man.”2 His ungainly appearance and agreeable nickname, Charles the Affable, belied the fact that he was equipped with the most formidable array of weapons ever seen in Europe. Charles VIII’s first stop was the Lombard town of Asti, where, after pawning jewels to pay his troops, he was greeted by his powerful Italian ally, Lodovico Sforza, the ruler of Milan. Savonarola may have prophesied Charles’s expedition, but it was Lodovico who had summoned him across the Alps. The forty-two-year-old Lodovico, known because of his dark complexion as Il Moro (the Moor), was as handsome, vigorous, and cunning as the French king was feeble and ugly. He had turned Milan—the duchy over which he had become the de facto ruler in 1481 after usurping his young nephew Giangaleazzo—into what the Holy Roman emperor, Maximilian, called “the most flourishing realm in Italy.”3 But Lodovico’s head lay uneasy. The fatherin-law of the feckless Giangaleazzo was Alfonso II, the new king of Naples, whose daughter Isabella deplored the usurpation and did not scruple to tell her father of her sufferings.