Eucharistic Desires in England, 1500-1800: Jesus and Saint John at the Last Supper
Randolph Trumbach
Baruch College and the Graduate Center,
City University of New York
In the iconographic tradition of the western church the scene of the Last Supper usually illustrated verses 21-26 of Chapter 13 of John’s Gospel. Jesus announces that one of his disciples will betray him. Simon motions to John and asks him to ask Jesus who the traitor is. John is described as the one Jesus loves (quem diligebat Jesus, in the Vulgate) and as lying on Jesus, in sinu Jesu, in Jesus’s lap. John straightens himself and lying on Jesus’s breast, supra pectus Jesu, poses the question. Jesus answers that it is the one to whom he gives a piece of bread. John was painted in two ways. He was either an early adolescent, of fourteen or fifteen or the age at which puberty then began, folded in Jesus arms, and sometimes asleep on the table. But sometimes John was an older adolescent of eighteen or nineteen, after his voice would have broken at seventeen, but still beardless, and sitting either on Jesus’ right or left side. The Eucharistic dimension could be indicated by the remains of the paschal lamb in a dish on the table, but increasingly after the Counter Reformation, Jesus distributes a communion wafer into the mouths of the apostles.
Before 1700, this adolescent John embraced by Jesus was used by libertines throughout Europe to justify their desires for boys. Limiting myself to 17th century England: James I, according to the Spanish ambassador, justified himself in 1617 to the Privy Council by saying that as Christ had his John, he James had his George. Christopher Marlowe said that “John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosom.” Aphra Behn’s lover the lawyer John Hoyle at his death was described as a “blasphemer of Christ” because he had said something similar. And in 1698 Captain Rigby in “most blasphemous words” put Jesus and John at the head of the list of famous lovers with whom he tried to persuade nineteen year old William Minton to let him “fuck him.” I have not found Englishmen making such statements after 1700, probably because the nature of sodomy changed profoundly after 1700.
Before 1700 it was the case that men desired both women and adolescent boys. This was certainly true for Italy as Michael Rocke has statistically demonstrated for late 15th century Florence, and the legal, literary, and biographical evidence make the same case for England. After 1700 in England and the rest of northwestern Europe a new sexual system appeared in which the majority of men desired only women (or were “heterosexual” to use the 19th century word), and a minority of men desired only males, and were said to signal this desire by their effeminacy. The traditional “bisexual” system remained in force in southern, central, and eastern Europe.
In this paper I mean to ask whether this change in the organization of male same-sex desire changed the representation of the Last Supper in England – was it the case that Jesus and John at the Last Supper were represented in one way before 1700 but were painted differently after 1700 because of the displacement of the old bisexual system by the new modern heterosexual/homosexual system. We will start with some of the representations of the Last Supper in Italy before 1700 because Italian artists dominated the European iconography of the Last Supper, as they certainly did in England. Because of Protestant opposition to putting up painted images in the churches, there were relatively few Last Suppers in English churches before 1700. It was easier to illustrate books with Last Suppers, and they appeared on the title pages and inside bibles, catechisms, books of devotions, and the occasional theological treatise. After the Restoration in 1660 Last Suppers appeared first in royal chapels and then after 1700 in country house chapels and in parish churches throughout England, as anti-papist feeling declined among the elite.
In Italy Last Suppers were not positioned over the Church’s main altar as Protestant Englishmen thought they should be. In Florence Last Suppers were painted for monastic refectories, and most typically had eleven of the apostles lined up behind the table, with Judas sometimes alone on the opposite side of the table. In Venice Last Suppers were typically done for confraternities devoted to the Eucharist, and might take either the form of the all disciples behind a long table, or there might be a more compact table with the disciples around three or four sides. The Venetian Last Suppers were sometimes paired with a painting of Jesus washing the feet of the apostles, sometimes with a scene of the gathering of manna in the desert which was thought to be one of the Old Testament prefigurations of the Eucharist. The St John in these pictures might be either the young adolescent of fourteen or fifteen, or the older but still beardless boy of eighteen.
We start our Italian tour with a picture by Taddeo Gaddi from Florence in the 1330s, showing the apostles seated around a table, Judas getting up to leave, and the younger John nestled in Jesus’s lap. A century and a half later is Leonardo’s famous picture for a refectory in Milan, done in the Florentine manner, but with an older adolescent John seated at Jesus’s right. This picture will have many imitators. But Raphael’s drawing at Windsor Castle will have as great success after it circulated in Marcantonio Raimondi’s engraving. Here John is the older adolescent seated to Jesus’s left, with a distinctive hairstyle that will show up frequently. One sees this John and his hairstyle in Andrea del Sarto’s Last Supper for the refectory at San Salvi in Florence in the late 1520s.
We now turn to a Venetian series by Tintoretto. Between 1546 and 1592 Tintoretto designed and often painted with his own hand nine Last Suppers, six of which I show. They were usually paired with another picture, the washing of feet five times, the Agony in the Garden three times, and two gatherings of manna. San Marcuola is the first and has the older John to Jesus’s left, and a lamb on the table. San Trovaso has the figures around a square table with an older John asleep on the table with Jesus’s hand on his back. San Polo moves in a more Eucharistic direction with Jesus giving bread to two disciples, not a host, and a younger John asleep on the table. Santo Stefano has the very long Florentine table with a very young John asleep on the table and Jesus offering bread to an apostle. At San Rocco the table is more compressed and at first some viewers count only eleven disciples and speculate that Judas has left, but when one looks more carefully the younger John lies nestled in Jesus’s lap (the instance most clearly of the Vulgate’s in sinu Jesu) while Jesus embraces him with his left arm and with his right hand gives to Peter what is clearly a communion wafer. The last version from San Giorgio Maggiore has the long table with eleven apostles on one side and Judas isolated on the other, John holds his head in his hand, as Jesus gives the cup to an apostle (communion in both kinds). This Supper was paired with a Manna in the Desert, and both were hung on either side of the main altar, but the altar itself in the Counter Reform manner is dominated by the tabernacle for the reserved Eucharist to which all eyes in the church were supposed to gravitate.
We start the English images by looking at two from before the Reformation. The first is a Supper in alabaster from the early 15th century: the apostles sit around, the younger adolescent John has his head in Jesus’s lap, and Jesus holds the Eucharistic bread over John’s head. Cardinal Wolsey in the late 1520s had Bartholommeo Peni repaint for him at Hampton Court a series on the Passion of Christ. The first slide in black and white shows the Last Supper and the flagellation. The second slide in color includes Mary meeting her son on the road to Calvary, the Spasimo. The flagellation is based on pictures Peni would have seen in Rome by Giulio Romano and Sebastiano del Piombo who famously used a drawing by Michelangelo. The Spasimo comes from a painting by Raphael and his workshop-- Peni’s older brother was part of Raphael’s circle. The Last Supper is based on Durer’s print which was closely studied by Raphael’s friends, and has John embraced in Jesus’s arms.
After the Reformation representations of the Supper are most easily found in books. A title page from 1550 has a Supper in which Christ hands out bread, there is a lamb on the table, and the older adolescent John is at Jesus’s left hand. The hairstyles and mustaches have been brought up to date. The title page also has images of the Jewish Passover and two images of Moses in the desert. A book of piety from 1629 reverts to the younger John in Jesus’s embrace. The most important image before 1660 is Batista Sutton’s window for St Leonard Shoreditch in 1634. It is based on Durer’s print, but once again, the hairstyles have been brought up to date. The parish at first had proposed putting a Crucifixion over the altar but this was set aside as too controversial since it implied the Roman doctrine that the Eucharist was a sacrifice rather than a memorial. For English Protestants the Supper was to be placed over the altar, contrary to Roman practice. In the Restoration a number of parishes had Moses and Aaron with the tables of the law, probably implying that they represented the Old Covenant and that what the congregation saw on the altar was as Jesus said the new covenant in his blood – but it was better not to represent this by a painting. In most of these pictures the John represented is the younger adolescent embraced in Jesus’ arms.
The painting by Antonio Verrio done for Charles II’s chapel royal had a Last Supper over the altar but all these paintings were destroyed in the early 19th century and one can see the arrangement vaguely in Pyne’s 1819 engraving. When James II fled to France, Louis XIV seems to have lent him Poussin’s Communion of the Apostles which in the English fashion was hung over the altar in the royal chapel, possibly to put the Anglicans at court more at their ease. A Supper probably by Franz de Cleyn was placed in the St George chapel until it was later moved to Windsor parish church, where it now is.
Sir James Thornhill in 1721 made a Supper for his parish in Dorset. It was based on Raphael and Andrea del Sarto as one can see from the way John is represented. All of the increasing number of 18th century Suppers will have the older adolescent John seated on Jesus’s left or right. The younger adolescent embraced by Jesus disappears. It is possible that this reflects the new sexual regime of a heterosexual majority and a sodomitical minority, but it may also be that the overwhelming authority of Raphael in part explains the dominance of the older John.
William Kent in 1724 produced a Supper for St George’s Hanover Square. It takes place at night and the apostles recline on couches, rather than sitting on benches or stools. This greater historical accuracy had begun to appear in the prints by the Wierix brothers in the sixteenth century and they can be seen in Poussin’s two Last Suppers which Kent may have known from prints.
Italian Last Suppers or copies of them were brought into England. In 1755, when Horace Walpole helped his friend John Chute to redesign his home The Vyne in Hampshire, it was decided that a chapel could be authentic only if it had a Last Supper over the altar. Walpole wrote to Sir Horace Mann in Florence to find and make a copy of a Supper that would fit. Mann eventually settled on one by Santi di Tito as most of the others in Florence were too large. The sodomitical network of Chute, Walpole, and Mann, together brought in an Italian picture on aesthetic rather than on religious grounds. But this sodomitical network did not express any particular enthusiasm for St John. The great collector Sir Abraham Hume gave to the parish church on his estate in Hertfordshire Jacopo Bassano’s first Last Supper from 1537. Later and more famously Bassano did the version in the Borghese and another in Bergamo. Hume’s parishioners liked the picture on religious grounds.
Four late eighteenth-century Last Suppers complete our tour. Two are by Zoffany and two by Benjamin West. In all the pictures St John is the older adolescent but extremely effeminized. In the Supper that Zoffany did for St John’s in Calcutta, the model for John is said to have been an English magistrate who was a “Brahmanised European, notorious for his hostility to Christianity and his indifferent character.” As a young magistrate he was said to have dressed as a woman to make some of his captures. The model for John in the Supper that eventually found its way to St Paul’s Brentford was taken from a portrait of Zoffany’s wife when she was still quite a girl. West’s two Supper from 1784 and 1786 have John seated first at Jesus’s left, then at his right. The first was painted for Windsor Castle and given by George IV to the National Gallery from which it was transferred to the Tate. The second picture was also done for George III and sold by the Dean and Canons in 1978. Two different beardless twenty-year-old boys have been claimed as the model for John. Both Johns share the effeminacy of Zoffany’s Suppers.
By the end of the eighteenth century, male passivity could only be imagined as a form of effeminacy. The public representation of Christ embracing a young adolescent disappeared first. Passivity as an ordinary accompaniment of male adolescence which had been common before 1700 became tabooed. Something similar would happen with the representation of angels. In high Renaissance painting angels were beautiful adolescent males. By the nineteenth century all angels were young women, and if there were time, it would be possible to show this transition among the angels in Benjamin West’s other paintings.
I have added at the end of this presentation a Last Supper by William Blake from 1799, which shows the clearest effeminization of Saint John that I have come across.
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