We are so used to seeing representations of the Last Supper (on canvas, film and stage) and hearing the different versions recorded by the evangelists that its strangeness tends to pass us by. It takes Leonardo’s famous fresco to show us what, even in purely secular terms, an unusual tale of mystery it remembers.
It is hardly the only story we have of a last meal or supper. We know what many historical figures ate as a last meal. The closer they are to our time, the more likely we are to ask. That’s how we know about Marilyn Monroe’s Mexican buffet, Princess Diana’s asparagus omelette and Dover sole and Elvis’s cookies and ice cream (less than usual, he specified).
Of course, they didn’t know it would be their last meal. Jesus of Nazareth did. To find better comparisons we need to look to people who are, because of their crimes or illness, under a death sentence.
It was as a criminal that Jesus would be executed and, in the age of listicles, the last suppers of notorious criminals on death row are a simple Google search away.
Deep-fried chicken, cheese burgers, steak, pints of ice-cream, cola and coffee are staples. The occasional request for a diet soda might sound amusingly absent-minded (what’s the point of watching your sugar a few hours before a lethal injection?) but it isn’t. The common thread throughout these last suppers is the attempt to recreate the taste of normality, in denial of what was to come in a few hours.
Same goes for Adolf Hitler, his world crashing around him, his hour come. It was a brisk lunch in the company of his secretaries, to whom he was kind, as usual. From his cook’s letters we know that she catered for the genocidal maniac’s vegetarian sensibility. She prepared pasta with tomato sauce and then fled the bunker.
In the Gospel we get no details about the menu, in spite of the quirky details the writers are fond sometimes of giving us. We must assume it was a normal Passover meal. But even here its normality is remarkable.
The climax of the Last Supper is when Jesus drops his bombshell that he is to be betrayed. But there can’t have been much tension, introverted silence or sulking before then.
Even with all the emotional drama with which the evening finished, the apostles had later to sleep the supper off in Gethsemane. They probably drank and feasted very well, as would be expected of a feast whose traditions borrowed heavily from the Ancient Greek institution of that special drinking party, the symposium.
Contrast this with the last meal organised by François Mitterrand, the former president of France (1981-1995). In the last days of December 1995, dying of cancer, he decided he would have one last banquet and then eat no more.
The food prepared ranged from oysters to a final, illegal dish of baby song-birds, ortolans, no bigger than a thumb, drowned alive in Armagnac, cooked in their own fat, eaten whole, bones and all, with the face covered in a white napkin so that private pleasure wouldn’t need to be mindful of good manners.
It was a meal organised for many old friends of Mitterand’s to share his private pleasure in tasting, for one last time, the France he loved. And his friends knew it.
Leonardo’s own portrait is concerned with the mystery, not with resolving it- Ranier Fsadni
In that room, death was present. The company was sober. The guests left quietly when the dying man said he was tired and could eat no more and asked to be taken away to his room.
It is Mitterand’s last supper that meets our expectation of what such a supper should be like. Yet, point by point, the Gospel versions depart from our expectations. Leonardo shows us how.
His painting shows the scene just after Jesus dropped his bombshell that he was to be betrayed. Everyone is confused and loud, except for Jesus, calm and collected. Leonardo uses perspective to make the back of Jesus’s head, his brain, the centre of the scene.
While everyone is losing it, the betrayed man seems whole. A closer look shows Jesus’s face displays Leonardo’s ideal of a countenance that is a perfect blend of male and female.
The meanings of objects on the table have themselves been subject to much speculation. Is that spilled salt just beside Judas? Does it mean misfortune or is it a reference to the ‘salt of the earth’? Is the fish eel or herring and what would the difference signify?
I myself suspect Leonardo wanted the ambiguity. He wanted to show what’s so striking about the Gospel account.
It doesn’t portray a man savouring the taste of his world for one last time. Nor someone trying to recreate normality, just as it’s crashing all around him.
It’s instead a portrait of someone launching a project, not summing things up; changing the significance of normality rather than celebrating it.
And it’s a strange portrait because the very people putting it into words depict themselves as anything but sober. The narrators speak of themselves not as an avant-garde elite but as the dolts who missed what was happening. Unlike Mitterand’s guests, who knew exactly what was going on, Jesus’s guests sobered up only later.
Leonardo’s own portrait is concerned with the mystery, not with resolving it. It’s why his picture is full of ambiguous clues (some have even discovered hidden musical notes). It’s the Last Supper as a whodunnit, where you can’t even be sure of what was done.
As luck would have it, Leonardo’s painting would itself acquire a mystery of its own. Only fragments of it, today, are by his own hand. In its long history, it has seen Napoleon’s soldiers use it for target practice and Hitler’s air force bomb the surrounding walls.
While those empires have gone, it still stands, a kind of copy of itself, just like the murmurs about a strange last supper like no other.