Leonardo da Vinci Society Newsletter editor: Francis Ames-Lewis Issue 38, May 2012 Recent and forthcoming events The Annual General Meeting and Annual Lecture 2012 The AGM and Annual Lecture for 2012 were held as usual in the Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre at the Courtauld Institute of Art, on Friday 27 April 2012. The Annual Lecture was given by Dr Matthew Landrus, whose title was ‘New Evidence of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper as a Humanist Contribution’. Dr Matthew Landrus writes: Although one sees Leonardo’s approaches to humanist scholarship throughout his notebooks, and especially in his notes for a comparison of the arts (his paragone), direct humanistic engagements in his paintings are relatively unconfirmed when one considers his modes of musical and dramaturgical engagement. This lecture offered new evidence of Leonardo’s development of his Last Supper as a humanistic discourse, as an adaptation of moral, rhetorical, musical, geometrical and poetical categories. For Leonardo, the Last Supper was ultimately an istoria, a humanistic narrative honouring Ludovico Sforza. It is a kind of Ciceronian enargia – the vivid recreation of a vision with words – albeit as a mute painting, a more informative expression and demonstratio. It is Leonardo’s visual oration to the Sforza Court, to the Dominican friars, and to the many visitors to Santa Maria della Grazie, in which he argues that perspective painting is the ultimate artifice of Nature, reason, experience and humanistic historiography. As a basis for this moral dialogue, Leonardo contrasted Latin and Greek discourses, the former exploiting precision rhetorical devices such as perspectival coherence and narrative expressions, and the latter Pythagorean harmony and Aristotle’s Poetics. Before 1497, scholars familiar to Leonardo in Milan and Pavia included the famous Greek scholar, Demetrios Chalcondyles, humanist historiographers Giorgio Merula, Giovanni Simonetta, and Bernardo Corio, talented lawyers Giasone del Maino and Franceschino Corte, masters of pageantry and music Antonio Cornazzano, Josquin des Prez, and Gaspar van Weerbeke, poet/dramatists Gaspare Ambrogio Visconti and Galeotto del Carretto, not to mention very close associates Donato Bramante, Bernardo Bellincioni, Francino Gaffurio and Luca Pacioli. Though relatively little is known of Leonardo’s direct engagement with most of these individuals, he regularly requested advice and information on a broad range of projects. For two of the most celebrated aspects of the Last Supper – the naturalistic ‘truth’ of the figural emotions and the fictive space – he referenced Latin scholarship, as well as the Latin tradition in painting that extended from Giotto and Masaccio. Referring to the ‘strife’ discussed in Luke 22: 21-24, Leonardo presents contrasts in movements of the mind similar to what one reads in Seneca, On Anger 2.4.1, such as the initial involuntary interpretations of shock and denial by John and Philip, followed by the voluntary ‘ascent of the mind’ to anger by James Major, and then the third movement: the blind insistence to act, by Peter with his knife, and by Philip asking if the traitor is himself. Leonardo arranged this space with a geometric diagram on Windsor RL 12542r, mapping a central space that corresponds to both perspective and grid plans (this analysis ws one of the lecture’s new assessments). The vanishing point extends through Christ’s right temple – the tempia – a reference to him as tempio, a temple (or church). Orthogonal lines extend the perspective space toward the refectory, starting at the centre of his brain, the traditional location of his soul and sensory judgement in the sensus communis ventricle. In this manner, ‘spiritus domini replevit orbem terrarum’ (the spirit of the Lord filled the world), as noted in a Gradual (Getty MS. Ludwig VI 3, fol. 62v) illustrated by Antonio da Monza, one of several produced for the Sforza Court in the 1490s. Recent studies of stylus preparatory incisions in the wall surface locate the vanishing