Leonardo And the Last Supper
“In 1516 an Italian traveler to India wrote home to Giuliano de’ Medici, the son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, that the Indians were a “gentle people ... who do not feed on anything that has blood, nor will they allow anyone to hunt living things, like our Leonardo da Vinci.”1 Leonardo’s shopping lists attest to an apparently vegetarian diet: kidney beans, white and red maize, millet, buckwheat, peas, grapes, mushrooms, fruit, and bran. “Have some ears of corn of large size sent from Florence,” re...ads a note written around the time he painted The Last Supper. Corn was a completely new food in Italy, having been introduced to Europe from the Americas only a few years previously. Leonardo had evidently developed a taste for this exotic new import.2When precisely Leonardo became a vegetarian is unknown. Meat does turn up on several of his lists: one of them, from 1504, records the purchase of “good beef.”3 However, he was probably supplying it to his assistants and apprentices rather than to himself.MoreLess
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