For all of the Vatican’s current apoplexy about homosexuality, there is little doubt that religious art — particularly from the Italian Renaissance — was flush with male homoerotic imagery: Michelangelo’s David (1504), Caravaggio’s The Inspiration of St. Matthew (1602), Donatello’s David (circa 1440s), and Sodoma’s St. Sebastian (1525) are probably the most famous, but a connection between male homoeroticism and accepted Catholic iconography is generally evident. That is why the implicit homoeroticism in da Vinci’s fresco The Last Supper should not be at all surprising. Depicting events from the Gospel according to St. John, the painting shows the beloved evangelist — a pretty, young beardless man — sitting next to Jesus. In spite of Brown’s insistence that da Vinci cast this figure as a coded Magdalene, it makes far more sense to take the fresco at face value and see that there is an intimate relationship between the two men.
LEONARDO DA VINCI’S ANGEL IN THE FLESH (UNDATED): a sketch of the angel Gabriel with a huge erection.
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This was not a new idea, and da Vinci was not letting his sexual impulses dictate his theology. The Gospels testify to an intense intimacy between Jesus and John. The beloved apostle himself says that on the cross, Jesus tells his mother that John is now her son, and the non-canonical Secret Gospel of Mark portrays an explicitly sexual relationship between Jesus and John as well as between Jesus and other men. In contrast with much medieval and Renaissance art, da Vinci’s The Last Supper is, if anything, a modest portrayal of the relationship. Jacopo Bassano’s The Last Supper (1542), for instance, pictures a sleepy, seated, barely adolescent St. John who seems to be physically attached to the Jesus standing behind him. Late-15th-century Dutch painter Meister des Hausbuchs’s The Last Supper shows the beloved apostle’s head resting firmly and lovingly in Jesus’s lap.These images of physical intimacy were not unusual: high- and late-medieval stone carvings of Jesus and John often place the saint’s head on Jesus’s shoulder, breast, or lap. The implications of this imagery were not lost on the faithful. According to art historian Jeffrey Hamburger in St. John the Divine: The Deified Evangelist in Medieval Art and Theology (UC Press, 2002), “John played many roles in medieval thought and literature ... including ... the virgin ‘bride’ of Christ ... model of contemplative union with the bridegroom.” Usually presented as androgynous, John is the perfect mate for the perfect man-God. Hamburger notes that one version of the wedding feast at Canna that “circulated quite widely in both Latin and Middle High German sources” has John rejecting “his earthly bride ... in favor of Christ, his spiritual bridegroom.”
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