Leonardo’s ‘Last Supper’ Started Out Queer and Got Queerer
Let’s look at the Renaissance painting and its legacy
Christianity longs to see itself as the religion of heterosexuality. But there’s a problem? When trying to see its deity, the religion turn to queer artists.
Indeed, the paradox deepens when thinking about the depiction of Jesus that is received as the most profound, the most sacred in history: Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. For many, this painting really is Jesus.
Of course, Leonardo wasn’t Christian…and he was queer.
Leonardo was a profound theologian.
In a striking shift away from Medieval depictions of Jesus, he offered the deity without a halo. This is Jesus as a human man. The table seems like it’s really a meal in progress. The action is messy, full of confusion and secrets — with the serene and knowing presence of God at the center.
How strange it remains that Christianity selected this image as its signature Jesus, as made by a painter who, as the art critic Kenneth Clark notes, “gladly allowed his homosexuality to penetrate to the depth of his being.”
The original image has faded to a ghostly copy.
Like Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, which is filthy dirty, his Last Supper exists in a highly degraded state. We see Jesus and the disciples as ghostly apparitions, half-present in this world, half in another.
But the androgyny is certainly apparent. Jesus is half-man and half-woman, an androgynous being, which was Leonardo’s style. He did a preliminary study of Jesus, which was even more inconclusively sexed, a blond being neither male nor female. For Leonardo, Jesus was always queer.
Leonardo’s final Jesus is more ‘male’ than the study—though still a little girly?
That might’ve been the reason that, in 1652, a doorway was cut into the bottom. The art critic Leo Steinberg, in Leonardo’s Incessant Last Supper, wondered if the door wasn’t an effort to remove Jesus’ feet. We can see them in early copies.
As Steinberg writes, “neither in common experience nor in the conventions of Western art do the feet of male sitters so cling together.”
Did the revisions begin with Frida Kahlo?
In 1940, the Mexican painter did La Mesa Herida, which means ‘The Wounded Table’. She re-staged the Last Supper as if a savage story happening in her own unconscious mind.
The painting disappeared in Poland in 1955, but in photographs and re-creations we see Kahlo reconfiguring the gospel story, and re-staging Leonardo’s painting for a self-portrait that becomes highly individual.
Then there’s Salvador Dali.
In the surrealist painter’s 1955 work, The Sacrament of the Last Supper, we see Leonardo’s work changed into a kind of New Age fantasy, mystical and light-charged. There are two Jesuses, the man and the higher self in the heavens, naked with arms outstretched.
The message going forward: remix and revise the Last Supper. Make it your own. It’s divine.
There’s Andy Warhol 1980s-era variations.
In 1984, the painter began a series of copies of Leonardo’s original, eventually doing over a hundred. In a famous 1986 show, they were exhibited across the street from the Santa Maria delle Grazie church, where Leonardo’s original painting resides.
This was a Last Supper for the age of AIDS. The art critic Jessica Beck writes:
“More than a demonstration of reverence for Leonardo’s masterwork, or even an unveiling of his own Catholic faith, Warhol’s Last Supper paintings are a confession of the conflict he felt between his faith and his sexuality, and ultimately a plea for salvation from the suffering to which the homosexual community was subjected during these years.”
The “Last Supper” began to be rapidly re-staged.
I think of Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin, Ecce Homo photo in 1998. Exhibits caused scenes. I love a 2012 news story with a report from Belgrade:
“A 2,000-strong battalion of police in riot gear cordoned off streets around the cultural center to prevent an outbreak of violence as thousands took to the streets to blast the portrayal of Jesus and his disciples as gay.”
Jesus is just wearing high heels. Who’s saying he’s gay?
Leonardo’s messy action seemed a means of processing all human conflict.
To do a Last Supper became a means for artists to depict war, as with the Israeli photographer’s Adi Nes’ 1999 photograph Untitled (The Last Supper Before Going Out to Battle. The photo came to represent not just the Israeli struggle, but his own queer journey. As a 2012 profile notes:
“As he grew up, he searched for a place to belong. But as a gay man, he always felt a little like a stranger in a mainstream Israeli culture that he saw as promoting the ideal of the macho Israeli settler or soldier.”
The “Last Supper” became a means of arguing for gay inclusion in society.
So we see very gay works like Marcos López’s 2001 photograph, Roasted Meat in Mendiolaza. The gay Argentine photographer made a splash with a vision of the Last Supper as, as a critic writes, “the virtually sacralized ritual of the Argentine barbeque…”
Jesus and Leonardo set the table. Then everyone could join in.
The painting became a stage for racial inclusion.
As Black Last Suppers would be regularly done, Renee Cox’ 1996 photograph Yo Mama’s Last Supper upped the ante by making Jesus a woman—and nude. When it was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2001, then-New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani called for the museum to be defunded.
Cox responded to the controversy:
“I have a right to reinterpret the Last Supper as Leonardo Da Vinci created the Last Supper with people who look like him. The hoopla and the fury are because I’m a black female. It’s about me having nothing to hide.”
Across the world, the Last Supper became a means of contemplating community, and how to be with others and different. For Zeng Fangzhi a new Last Supper was a means of processing Chinese society of the 1990s.
A new “Last Supper” became a means of introducing new ideas of culture and power.
There were many female Jesus images indicating female participation in society. A poster done as an ad for the French fashion house was plastered all over Europe, though banned in Milan. Horrified observers scan the photo for its imagined sacrileges:
“One of the women apostles is kissing the naked torso of a man, which just makes the imitation more offensive.”
Does it, though?
To do a new “Last Supper” was a means of saying something about identity itself.
I love them all.
There was the Folsom Street Fair poster in 2007.
The annual BDSM and leather street fair in San Francisco, capping ‘Leather Pride Week’, would naturally turn to the Last Supper for its advertisement. And Christian groups would naturally condemn it as “reminiscent of biblical Sodom and Gomorrah.”
But nobody owned the Last Supper. It was available to everyone — including a Black Jesus presiding over muscle boys, drag queens and leather daddies.
Various “Last Suppers” were offered to broach the subject of queer people in Christianity.
Here we’d have works like Douglas Blanchard’s The Passion of Christ: A Gay Vision (2014). With a text by QSpirit’s Kittredge Cherry in the published book, a series of 2014 paintings imagines Jesus as a modern gay man.
There were drag queen “Last Suppers.”
The fashion photographer Angelo di-Benedetto had one in 2012, a quirky drag show for urban sophisticates at a theme party. Jesus here seems nearly astral in blending in against the starry cosmos.
Or lesbian “Last Suppers”…
A West Hollywood graphic artist created a Last Supper and marketed it on her Etsy page, to some media attention. Here Jesus was played by Ellen DeGeneres.
Leonardo’s painting became a means of seeing community amid difference.
It was a means of seeing people together, even when it didn’t seem like they could be together. Is that ‘religion’?
It was Leonardo’s. 🔶
