The Last Supper

Cafe Society
1

In The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown makes a (seemingly) persuasive argument that the figure to Jesus Christ’s right in Leonardo’s famous painting is in fact Mary Magdalene. A look at the painting seems to confirm that this is indeed a woman, rather than one of the twelve apostles as most casual observers would presume.

In Dan Burnstein’s Secrets of the Code, he quotes several art historians who say that Brown is full of crap, and that the figure to Christ’s right is John the Baptist, who was traditionally depicted as having very feminine features.

Fine. My question is: what was John the Baptist doing at the Last Supper? ** HE WASN’T AN APOSTLE. **

I can’t find a Bible to check this, but I assume it names the guests. If there were thirteen present (as in the painting), and one of those was John the Baptist, who was the unlucky apostle who missed out on an invite?

2

Either you or Burnstein have got the wrong end of the stick. That isn’t John the Baptist, but the apostle John, whose portrayal is similar to that of John the Baptist in other da Vinci paintings:

3

Hmmm. OK, I feel pretty stupid.

I could have sworn Burstein’s argument was that it was John the Baptist. Has anyone else read the book?

4

Well, one of the few Scriptural details on seating arrangements (as opposed to Jesus’s teaching and giving First Communion to the apostles) at the Last Supper is in John 13:21ff. Rather than quoting what’s going on here, it can be quickly summarized as Peter asking John to ask Jesus something, because John (referred to by his own standard euphemism for himself in his Gospel) is sitting in the place of honor right next to Jesus. John is traditionally regarded as being in his mid- to late teens, the youngest of the Twelve, with what historical validity I don’t know. As for effeminateness, that was (if true, and I’m not an expert on daVinci) daVinci’s gimmick, AFAIK not either true in fact or a common usage in religious art. John would be portrayed as an adolescent in some depictions, especially when contrasted with Peter or Matthew, who were represented as older men.

5

DaVinci isn’t the only artist who put a woman next to Christ in a painting of The Last Supper.

There was a Dutch forger, Hans van Meegeren, who did the same thing in his faked Vermeer of The Last Supper, in which the figure to Christ’s left is clearly a woman - not an effeminate John.

Go to…

http://www.sniggle.net/artforg.php

…click on Hans van Meegeren and then on FORGERIES. You’ll see a list of Vermeers this guy whipped up, which you may then view by simply clicking on each title.

van Meegeren’s story is interesting (and familiar to many Dopers, I’m sure). As you will learn at the website, he

**"…was arrested after World War II and charged with having sold a Dutch national treasure, in the form of a Vermeer painting, to the Nazi Hermann Göring. Van Meegeren defended himself in court by demonstrating that he had painted the “Vermeer” himself and had conned Göring with the fake. He managed to avoid a treason conviction, but ended up doing time for forgery - alas, Göring wasn’t the only person who’d been duped by his fake Vermeers.

Before the forgeries were uncovered, in 1937, the art historian Abraham Bredius saw one of van Meegeren’s fake Vermeers - Christ at Emmaus - and wrote:

It is a wonderful moment in the life of a lover of art when he finds himself suddenly confronted with a hitherto unknown painting by a great master, untouched, on the original canvas, and without any restoration, just as it left the painter’s studio! And what a picture! …[W]hat we have here is a - I am inclined to say - the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft."
**

And maybe some doper can find the URL that shows the orginal DaVinci, in all its decrepitude, above “an exact copy” copy done a few hundred years or so
after DaVinci. In the copy, the Apostle John is plainly a woman.

6

No, it’s not. It’s John the Beloved.

The Da Vinci Code is a work of fiction.

7

As others have said, nobody thinks it’s John the Baptist. I would add that the Gospels tell us that John the Baptist was killed well before the Last Supper.

8

I agtree with you 50%.

Of course, The Da Vinci Code is a work of fiction. But isn’t The Last Supper a figment of Da Vinci’s imagination, as well?

For example, do you really think they all sat on one side of a long table so that one day, Da Vinci and others coud compose wonderfully inspiting views of the proceedings? If the artist takes that liberty, why not others - like putting a woman into the scene?

I’m an ardent Christian (as I suspect your are, as well), but it doesn’t bother me in the least that Leonardo may have placed Mary Magdalene to Christ’s right in The Last Supper.

If I understand things correctly, Mary Magdalene was not a former whore as some may think. In fact, she is profoundly respected in Catholic theology for her purity and all-consuming love of Jesus…

9

This is true BUT, . . .

The Catholic Church has a long tradition (in literary fashion, not in Doctrine), of conflating various women named Mary who appear in the Gospels, Catholic Encyclopedia: St. Mary Magdalen, a view from which they have only begin backing away in the last few years under the impetus of scriptural scholarship. While there were a lot of different views of Mary Magdalen in the early days of the Church, Pope Gregory I, preached (and pubished) a sermon making all the Marys other than the mother of Jesus into one person and the Church hung onto that theme for the next 1300 years.

However, since the actual question concerns art rather than theology, I think we’ll give the folks in Cafe Society a crack at this.

[ /Moderator Mode ]

10

As I understand it, John the Beloved (I’ve never heard it as John the Baptist, a completely different man, who was dead by then) was traditionally portrayed as a youth. I’m not sure how scripturally accurate that is, but it was always done in the Renaissance, just like Peter is always bald and short-tempered.

And the Renaissance ideal of male youth is, to our eyes at least, quite feminine. Long ripply hair, soulful eyes, and so on. But that wasn’t unmasculine to people back in the 1500’s; we’re imposing our cultural definitions of masculinity and femininity on the painting when we say John looks feminine, so it must be Mary. And the cultural definitions have changed in the last 500 years. A woman would have looked different; I’m no expert, but her hair would be bound up and her dress would be different. That figure perfectly illustrates the Renaissance ideal of a young male student, and if you look at the Leonardo painting titled John the Beloved, you will see exactly the same sort of image.

Not addressed to me, but–No, of course they didn’t sit on one side of the table. It’s a painting, a highly symbolic image of the event. But that’s still not Mary Magdalene. I don’t personally care whether Mary is pictured in the Last Supper painting or not, but that idea is not supported by the facts or by history and is simply not true. It’s only convincing to people who don’t know anything about the symbolism and conventions of Renaissance art–a lot of people, admittedly.

One book that you can probably find at the bookstore to peek in is The Da Vinci hoax, published by Ignatius Press; it has a print of John the Beloved as well as The Last Supper for comparative purposes.

11

No, but Da Vinci was actually the first person to paint them ALL on one side of the table. Prior to this work, Judas was always portrayed as seated on the near side of the table, on the opposite side from Christ. To put him on the same side of the table as Christ was considered blasphemous. Da Vinci took quite a bit of heat for it, actually.

And let’s be real- nobody thinks they all sat on the same side.

There is abundant historical research to indicate that the figure next to Jesus is the adolescent John the Beloved. There is little or no historical research to indicate it is any woman.

12

Gah! This will teach me to say things off the top of my head instead of looking them up. I was wrong; the painting I spoke of is a young John the Baptist, not John the Apostle, which explains why I couldn’t find an image of it online. Anyway, the point is that if you look at the painting, you’ll see someone who, to your 21st-century eyes, looks like a pretty girl. But to a Renaissance painter, it’s a young man. Because our definitions of these things have changed. And so that’s John the Beloved at the Last Supper, not Mary Magdalene.

13

Hence a favorite joke of mine…

Q: What was the last thing said at the Last Supper?

A: Anyone who wants to get in the picture, get on this side of the table!

14

Except that van Meegeren himself identified the figure in his forged Last Supper as John the Beloved. In the early stages of his career as a forger, the person he used as an unwitting front to present the paintings to dealers without having to use his own name was a Dutch MP called Dr. G.A. Boon. An undated letter - quoted at length in Kilbracken’s Van Meegeren (Nelson, 1967, p121-2) - has survived from van Meegeren to Boon explaining that he has “discovered” a Vermeer Last Supper. In this letter, he describes the painting as follows:

Boon, or anybody else familiar with the iconography of the subject, would take this as van Meegeren explicitly referring to the figure in question as St. John. Of course, the letter is itself part of the hoax, but it’s as clear a piece of evidence as one could hope for as to how he intended viewers to read this figure. He expected us to see this as St. John.
Granted, as with everything to do with van Meegeren, there is a complication in that Lord Kilbracken, for one, hypothesied that the letter actually refers to an earlier version of this fake. Basically, there are minor inconsistencies between some of the reports about the origin of the fake Last Supper and the version as sold (not via Boon) to van Beuningen in 1941. He therefore suggested that there was an earlier version, but that this was never really seen by anyone. I’m not overly convinced by his argument on this point and, because this hypothesied version was presumably destroyed, the issue is largely irrelevant to art historians anyway.
Of course, the St. John does look very effeminate. But, aside from the standard tradition, this may partly be because van Meegeren was in the habit of recycling faces from both real Vermeers and his own earlier work in his fakes, often without regard to gender. Kilbracken both suggested that the face of St. John partly derives from the Girl with a Pearl Earing and that the third face from the left is based on the woman in his own Mother and Child (it doesn’t appear to be online). The latter is the more interesting comparison: the face in the Last Supper is hardly obviously female - and was presumably intended as just another male disciple - yet does reasonably resemble the earlier van Meegeren woman. More than anything else, van Meegeren could get lazy.

As a rather more explicit illustration of the point, there’s Leonardo’s drawing The Incarnate Angel (possibly not work-safe).

15

Well, chalk up another victory in the fight against ignorance. I’ll check my facts before posting next time.

Thanks everyone.

16

And I concede, as well.

The Vermeer forgeries…

John In The Last Supper has lips painted red. So I went through the other forgeries, and found no other male had similarly painted lips - until I clicked on the Young Christ. His, are also bright red.

Oy.

17

See? Ignorance vanquished in only 16 posts! And those Great Debates people think they are sooooooo smart!

:wink:
:smiley:

18

Given that the Bible mentions Mary Magdalene being around at the time of the Crucifixion, and she is said to be a follower of Jesus, for Da Vinci to have her present at the Last Supper seems reasonable.

19

Interesting:

http://www.kensmen.com/catholic/xdavincilastsupperphotos.html

Apparently after a 1999 restoration of this painting the restorer definitely made John more feminine appearing.

20

Of course the amazing thing is the multitude of people who feel that because some italian dude painted a scene occuring over a dozen centuries before, it is proof of anything at all.
If Davinci had painted all the disciples throwing darts, that would not then constitude proof that the last supper took place in a U.S. college town fake English Pub, now would it?