“He who does not oppose evil......commands it to be done.”
Most Holy Mary Magdalene and Unholy Jesus
Interpreting the religious art of Leonardo Da Vinci requires some curiosity and putting aside naïve interpretations from art historians who seem to be blind to the fact that with Leonardo: All is not what it seems. The ambiguity in Leonardo’s portrayals, such as the gender of the disciple sitting next to Jesus in the Last Supper, forces one to take a second look and to sometimes revise first impressions and interpretations. A classic comparative interpretation of a religious theme is often turned upside down when considering some of the incongruent and hidden elements in Leonardo’s works. And hidden dimensions, such as those found in the recently discovered metal cut of the Last Supper, only add another layer of symbolic material to mull over and understand.
First one must take in the entire composition in as a whole and then draw out each element of what the artist set before the audience’s eyes, each and every single detail. Not to dissect but to merely take into account both the observable and the elusive. Intuition drives the process and with a bit of research one can interpret the elements to understand the subject of the composition’s narrative.
Of course there is always the chance of over analysis and interpretations because of biases, assumptions, projections, and faulty analysis. A case in point was Sigmund Freud’s interpretation of Da Vinci’s The Virgin and Child with St. Ann. Freud “imagined” a vulture in the Virgin’s garment when the painting was viewed sideways. He associated the vulture with Leonardo’s earliest childhood memory of a bird flapping its tail at his mouth. From this, Freud postulated Leonardo manifested a "passive homosexual" childhood fantasy caused by the memory of sucking on his mother’s nipple (the vulture tail flapping at his mouth). Much to Freud’s dismay however, the word “vulture” was a mistranslation by the German translator and, in fact, the bird in Leonardo’s memory was a kite. In truth, the kite or falcon was an animal ally that came into his dream to announce he was developmentally ready for speech. The kite’s tail was a coaxing device fluttering at his mouth to get the toddler to open his mouth to utter his first word.
With the composition of the Last Supper engraving, Leonardo’s first attempt to render a Gnostic narrative of the Last Supper and from which he would paint the mural at Santa Maria delle Grazie Church sometime later, Leonardo had a great deal on his mind that undoubtedly weighed heavily on his heart. First and foremost, the Duke of Milan, Ludovici Sforza, had commissioned him to paint a scene from a Gospel narrative that he did not believe. He was in conflict with the ideology of the Church whose mythology and doctrine went against the grain of his spiritual knowledge. In his mind Jesus was no more God incarnate and the Savior of the World than you or I and to paint a composition in accordance with the doctrine of Orthodoxy we might imagine was in conflict with Leonardo’s enlightened soul. To remedy his discomfort, turmoil and the spiritual tension, he devised a way out: hide the truth and secrets through the use of optics, omission, and the inclusion of ambiguous symbolic elements. In this way, he could makepeace himself, and quell the feeling that he was betraying his own knowledge and wisdom. If he were going to be censored by the Church, he would still have his say.
What did Leonardo believe?
In the first edition of Lives of the Artists which includes a biography of Leonardo written in 1550, Giorgio Vasari's wrote that Leonardo's "cast of mind was so heretical that he did not adhere to any religion, thinking perhaps that it was better to be a philosopher than a Christian." We might imagine that Vasari had reviewed some of Leonardo’s notes and that he too had noticed the ambiguity in Leonardo’s paintings including the depiction of a Jesus partnered with very female complement sitting adjacent to him at the Last Supper table.
Sublayer image close-up Jesus and Mary Magdalene
Had he seen the sublayer of the Last Supper engraving and what I am about to describe, he would perhaps have had a great more to say about Leonardo’s heretical views.
From Leonardo’s depictions of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, when placed side-by-side, we recognize the theme of good versus evil. Notice the demon dog complements the baby in that its placement is almost in the identical position. The same can be said of the toad and the wheat staffs. Leonardo is offering a disturbing contrast that needs further explanation to fully understand.
As I discussed in my first blog article introducing the topic of the engraving, the demon dog or hellhound is an mythological archetype connected to the underworld of Hades and by legend was considered it a harbinger of death. My first thought was that Leonardo might have used it to symbolically to represent Jesus’ precognition of betrayal and death. However, perhaps we just need to simplify the symbolic meaning to represent merely a demon, a negative symbol denoting someone possessed by evil. Did Leonardo really believe Jesus was evil and where would he get such a notion?
Unholy Jesus
The less than flattering image of Jesus may have been derived from Leonardo’s studies in Mandaean Gnosticism. The Mandaeans were a Gnostic sect from the Northern part of Mesopotamia, who migrated there from Judea and whose name is derived from the Aramaic root, “manda”, meaning: “knowledge.” They claimed to hold the secret laws of God and believed that John the Baptist was superior to Jesus. They rejected Jesus Christ as the Son of God, maintaining he corrupted John’s teachings and instead held up John as the representative of their faith. To the Mandeans, Jesus was a false prophet and messenger and some went so far as to consider him an evil representative of the demiurge, who according to their cosmology was the craftsman and controller of the world who is not God.
Leonardo’s painting of John the Baptist mentions John’s superior knowledge. John’s gesture, as rendered in the portrait John the Baptist, doesn’t seem to be born out of arrogant superiority, but is instead a simple yet meaningful proclamation: “There is only one God.” The index finger in the air pointing up coupled with his other hand at his heart, reminds us that the one God in heaven is in our hearts.
The heretical debate over who was the legitimate Lamb of God was introduced by Leonardo in Virgin of the Rocks in which the angel Uriel all-knowingly points back to John the Baptist while John reverently bows in prayer before the Christ Child. This allegorical debate within the composition represents a controversial stance about who in the artist’s mind is the legitimate bearer of the title, Lamb of God. For Da Vinci, at least for a time, it was John the Baptist who he venerated.
Virgin and Child with St. Elizabeth, John the Baptist and Michael, unknown artist- 16th century
This same debate is spelled out in a 16th Century painting from an unknown artist who was probably one of Da Vinci’s contemporaries or students. Titled, Virgin and Child with Saints Elizabeth John and Michael (Uriel), the painting depicts John the Baptist perched next his mother Elizabeth holding onto a lamb and the Christ child on the Virgin’s lap with his hand in the bowl of a balance scale held by Archangel Michael. Interpreted, Michael is determining the measure or worth of Christ’s soul, presumably to determine if he is the legitimate Messiah as prophesized in Isaiah 53:1-12. It appears that whomever the artist was, he was clarifying the debate that Leonardo hinted at in Virgin on the Rocks by painting a more detailed pictorial narrative. If this is the case, the title might be inaccurate because the angel would not be Michael, but Uriel. In Christian apocryphal gospels Uriel plays a role in rescuing John the Baptist from the Massacre of the Innocents ordered by King Herod. He carries John and his mother Elizabeth to join the Holy Family after the Flight to Egypt. This reunion is depicted in Virgin of the Rocks.
Virgin of the Rocks National Gallery London
Leonardo painted two versions of Virgin on the Rocks, the one thought to be the prime version hangs at the Louvre. The second, housed at the National Gallery in London, is of particular interest in that Uriel no longer points to John the Baptist and that all members of the Holy Family are adorned with halos. However, the most outstanding element transfers attention from the hand of Uriel to the hand of the Virgin.
Outstretched hand in Virgin of the Rocks National Gallery London
One interpretation from an art critic is that the outstretched hand represents the Virgin’s blessing. Another describes it in combination with the outstretch cloak associated with her role as the iconic Madonna della Misericordia (Madonna of Mercy), help in time of strife or plague. However, neither of those interpretations are what I suspect Leonardo had in mind. Notice the hand neither appears to be a blessing hand nor a sheltering hand. It is a cursing hand. From where I sit, the fingers are serpents about to snatch the halo off the Christ child’s head as if he is being cursed by his own mother or under the spell or the shelter of Satan. In contrast, the Virgin adoringly favors John the Baptist for his humility (praying hands) because her sheltering clock of mercy covers only him. This evil hand imagery associated with the Christ child, like that of the demon dog and toad in the Last Supper engraving, is quite telling. It suggests Leonardo held disdain for Jesus Christ. My intuition tells me more than his Mandean beliefs, Leonardo with all his knowledge and wisdom perhaps viewed himself superior spiritually and intellectually. Perhaps, he was a bit envious of the Son of God, feeling he deserved as much glory, appreciation and to sit at the right hand of God as his Son.
By reviewing the collection of paintings attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci, we notice John the Baptist is a frequent subject. Some have suggested that his painting John the Baptist, like the Mona Lisa, possesses transgender or androgynous features. Others, including myself, have gone so far as to conclude that John the Baptist was in fact a self-portrait. Da Vinci may have painted himself as John the Baptist because he strongly identified with John as the archetype of the mystic preacher who had not received his due recognition. He painted John the Baptist in a darkened background perhaps to reference the description of St. John in the Bible as 'a light that shineth in the darkness'. Perhaps, Da Vinci himself wished to be hailed: a bright shining light in the world.
St. John the Baptist- Leonardo Da Vinci- 1513-1516
Sugar and spice and everything nice
In contrast, Mary Magdalene, Jesus’ complement and marriage partner, is treated with reverence and adoration at the Last Supper table. She is everything holy while Jesus seems to have been assigned everything unholy, “snips and snails and puppy dog tails.” She is depicted as possessing symbols of spiritual goodness: maternal qualities (baby at her chest) and before her an offering of her fertility, that which sustains life—staffs of wheat. And as I thoroughly explain in my another blog post, Last Supper or Bride’s Feast, she is the “heavenly bread”, the “manna from heaven”— made in the image of God the Mother. In this way, Leonardo transferred the meaning of the holy sacrament of the bread at the Last Supper from Jesus to Mary Magdalene.
The dualism expressed in rending of Jesus and Mary as divided, forming the V, not only mentions the split soul, the division and separation between divine masculine and the divine feminine intelligences, only unified through the mystical marriage, but the division between good and evil, light and dark and life and death. The Mandeans believed Adam, the first man was created by bad beings, Lords of Darkness, but his “animating essence” is derived from the World of Light. This “substance of light” in Adam is called “inner (hidden) Adam”, which must be saved or rescued from the dark, evil body and the world by heavenly beings of light. Interestingly, in one of the versions of Adam and Eve’s creation, the wife of Adam, Eve, is created separate from him according to the heavenly “cloud of light” and she figures as the wife of the heavenly or “great Adam”. It could be argued that Leonardo drew from Mandean cosmology and creation myths to construct his ideology, however what is more likely is that he strongly identified with the maternal anima, admiring his own more feminine qualities over the masculine. His own mother Caterina whom historians believe was an Arab slave and from whom he was separated at an early age, may have been an inspiration. Perhaps because of early childhood memories of his mother, he sought to acknowledge the power of her feminine soul, elevating her status through the image of Mary Magdalene, who also had a tainted history.
There is some evidence that Leonardo sorted out his problem with Jesus as he spiritually transformed and matured. Later works like Salvator Mundi and the yet to be authenticated Magdalene/Madonna and Christ Child with John the Baptist, portray Jesus in a more positive light. In Salvator Mundi, Jesus is the Gnostic Jesus, a mystical teacher with a crystal ball instead of the orbus crucifix denoting his status as Savior of the World. I will take up this painting in a future post.
Related articles:
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150806006487/en/#.VcTWC4uFbdk
http://davincirevelation.blogspot.com
http://www.deism.com/davinci.htm
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