A message from Rev'd Sissons
'Food for Thought' - a message from the Chaplain
On Maundy Thursday in Holy Week Christians traditionally remember the last meal that Jesus shared with his friends, at which he instituted the practice of Holy Communion, the sharing of bread and wine, which remains the central act for most Christians, performed in remembrance of Christ's sacrifice upon the cross.
The most famous depiction of the Last Supper is surely that of Leonardo da Vinci painted onto one of the end walls of the dining hall at the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan.
The fresco took Leonardo around 3 years to paint, but he had little experience of working in this medium and his experimental pigments did not stand the test of time. This explains why the picture has undergone a series of restorations across the centuries, the most recent of which lasted 22 years and has now given us the best idea of what Leonardo actually painted.
Although many scholars have concentrated on analysing the figures gathered around the table, few have shown much interest in the actual food that he chose to put upon it. Yet what we find when we look there is quite surprising.
There is bread and wine, of course, but the bread is not unleavened as would have definitely been the case in the Upper Room, and there is no sign of any lamb, which would have been central to any celebration of the Passover. Some have suggested this may be because Leonardo was himself a vegetarian for most of his life; be that as it may, instead of meat Leonardo serves up for the disciples a decidedly non-kosher meal of eels, garnished with pomegranates. What is going on here?
Clearly Leonardo was not much concerned with portraying a realistic first century scene, but we know he didn't paint things just for fun, so what he chose to put on the table presumably has a message to tell. Remember that the mural was sited in a monastery dining hall, painted at one end of the room, creating as it were a space for the monks themselves to sit down with Christ and his disciples and share supper with them.
And as they sat at their own supper, eating in silence naturally, Leonardo may well have wanted them to ponder two symbolic foods on the table he had painted: eels and pomegranates.
Eel is eaten widely in Italy today, but in the artist's time it would have been a delicacy enjoyed only by the very wealthy and, as such, was often directly connected to the vice of gluttony. In his poem, the Divine Comedy, Dante places Pope Martin IV into hell because he was a glutton, who was particularly partial to eels marinated in wine.
Perhaps the presence of eel on the table in his Last Supper was Leonardo's way of reminding the monks (and, if we wish, us also) not to be slaves to our stomachs.
In contrast Leonardo included the pomegranate along with the eel, as a far more uplifting symbol for the monks to consider; in pre-Christian times this fruit was part of the Greek myth of Persephone, who returned each spring to bring life to the earth, and, therefore, the Church was happy to take it over as a symbol of the resurrection of Christ.
But it was also cherished as a very ancient sign of the Church: just as an abundance of seeds were contained within the single fruit, so the one Church contained a multitude of believers. I like to think that the motley monastery community, who sat in that room, would have found this worthy food for thought.
Nick Sissons
