Transgender Motifs in Leonardo’s Art
In 1991, a highly controversial drawing by Leonardo da Vinci emerged from obscurity: a young figure in a pose very similar to his Louvre portrait of St John, but with an exposed female breast and male attributes. Now known as the Angelo incarnato — “the angel made flesh” — and dated to the last phase of Leonardo’s stay in Rome, the drawing “meets all the contradictions, not only between the feminine and masculine, but between a certain ecstasy and a sadness,” in the words of André Green.
This interest in androgynous characters is evident throughout Leonardo’s oeuvre. In another late painting of John the Baptist, dated to between 1513 and 1519 and also in the Louvre, the Baptist is depicted with an almost feminine grace, particularly in the position of the legs. This prompted an anonymous 17th century artist to paint a wreath on the saint’s head and replace the cross at the end of his staff with a thyrsus (the crown of vine leaves or ivy). At the same time, the fur-like cloak was overpainted with the texture of a leopard skin. These changes transformed the painting into a portrait of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and pleasure, known as Bacchus in Roman mythology. Today, the painting is commonly identified as St John the Baptist with the Attributes of Bacchus.
Dan Brown’s bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code suggests that the John figure seated at Jesus’ right in Leonardo’s Last Supper fresco is actually Mary Magdalene. That, of course, is nonsense. The Last Supper fresco was painted for a Dominican monastery in Milan, and Mary Magdalene was one of the Dominican Order’s leading patron saints. As such, she appears prominently at the center of Montorfano’s Crucifixion on the opposite wall. It is safe to say that if the Gospels had put her at the Last Supper scene, the Dominicans would have insisted she be included as well. But the Gospels are very explicit. The Last Supper was shared only by Jesus and the twelve Apostles. Any deviation from this iconographic program would have constituted a breach with the Gospel tradition, and that is something the Dominicans, guardians of Catholic orthodoxy, could never have countenanced.
Yet there is no question that this elfin-like figure, the beloved disciple, is in many ways a throwback to the Madonna portraits of Leonardo’s Florentine and early Milan period. Compared to the robust masculinity of the other Apostles, the ambiguous gender of this young disciple is striking. In fact, it seems that the model Leonardo used was the young woman who sat for his study of Leda and the Swan (see the video above). What did Leonardo mean by this?
Is the obvious similarity to Leonardo’s Madonna paintings (the tilted head, the long flowing hair, the downcast eyes filled with love and sorrow) a deliberate allusion to Mary, the only other human being who loved Jesus without any qualification?
Leonardo’s work reveals a lifelong fascination with womanhood — not from an erotic or sexual perspective, but with the idea of women as mothers, as paragons of grace and unstinting, nurturing love. The root of this interest was very likely his own traumatic experience of being separated from his mother at age five, without the polar balance of a strong and loving father figure. And while it may well have stymied his sexual development in puberty, it certainly endowed him with a lifelong yearning to capture the elusive ideal of a motherhood — graceful, loving, eternally young and beautiful — in his art.
This desire had found an early outlet in the motif of the Madonna, a theme that dominates Leonardo’s oeuvre and would grow in importance in the later stages of his life, culminating in his last great masterpiece, the Saint Anne. As a mother, Mary was a feminine motif that Leonardo could be comfortable with; that he could explore ad infinitum without any concern for the erotic connotations of the female form. Of course, the real answer for the feminine appearance of these and other Leonardo figures may always elude us. It is one of those mysteries that are deeply rooted in Leonardo’s enigmatic mind, and may leave us to speculate at will.
