The Da Vinci Load

Today, I’m posting a picture of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous mural The Last Supper (Il Cenacolo, 1495-98).  Since the painting depicts the even more famous story of Jesus of Nazareth’s final meal before his arrest by the Romans, it’s my way of acknowledging Easter.  I’m not a Christian, but I thought that Easter was a good excuse to recognize da Vinci’s marvelous — if dilapidated — work of art.  

Although I’m not a Christian, another thing I’m not is a conspiracy theorist.  And, regrettably, da Vinci’s masterful mural has become best-known in recent years as a puzzle “decoded” by the bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.  

The jumping-off point of the puzzle’s “solution,” according to Brown, is the feminine-looking figure directly to Jesus’ right.  Brown notes that if you moved this figure to Jesus’ left, the figure would appear to be laying its head affectionately on Jesus’ shoulder.  Brown interprets this intriguing juxtaposition of the people in the painting to mean that the figure to Jesus’s right is actually a woman, who was Jesus’ secret romantic love.  From this idea, Brown spins a narrative of Jesus and the “woman” — whom the author interprets to be Mary Magdalene — having children, a narrative suppressed (in the novel) by the Catholic Church.

One of the effects of the novel’s popularity is that it has caused some readers and critics to re-evaluate the role of women in the Christian church (especially the Catholic Church) and re-evaluate the humanity of Jesus.  I believe that these are worthwhile outcomes of Brown’s fiction, but if you know the background of da Vinci’s The Last Supper, the puzzle that Brown constructs is a little on the discomfiting side.

The figure seated to Jesus’ right in da Vinci’s mural is the Apostle John, later known to Christians as St. John, the putative author of the biblical gospel that bears his name.  The Gospel of John is widely considered to be the last of the four biblical gospels (the others being the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke) to have been written.  For this reason, St. John the Apostle has long been depicted in Christian art as quite youthful in comparison to the other eleven of Jesus’ disciples.  This explains why John’s likeness in The Last Supper is beardless, while the other disciples appear more hirsute.

Also, the story of the Last Supper in the Bible describes the Apostle John leaning on Jesus’ chest (“bosom”) upon hearing the news that one of his disciples will betray him (John 13:23-25).  The biblical Last Supper was portrayed multitudinous times in Christian art before da Vinci’s painting, and many (perhaps most) of these older artworks depict John leaning his head against Jesus’ chest or shoulder at this moment.  Da Vinci was originally going to depict John this way as well, but the painter changed his mind.  Still, he kept John in the “slouching” position that the figure would have been in had the artist stuck to his original design.  Some art historians think that da Vinci kept this rather awkward positioning of John in order to acknowledge the bosom-leaning in the biblical narrative.

If you know this history of da Vinci’s The Last Supper and the depiction of the biblical event in the mural’s artistic antecedents, it’s difficult to give yourself over to Brown’s very fanciful extrapolation.

‘Cupid,’ Part Two

Two years ago, I wrote a blogpost about Rob Thomas’ late, lamented TV show Cupid (1998-99).  As you may know, the series was an hour-long romantic dramedy about a man in contemporary Chicago (Jeremy Piven) who proclaimed himself to be Cupid, the Greco-Roman god of love.  On my post, I wrote how disappointed I was that the show ended before it would tell us whether or not Trevor, the protagonist with the talent for turning singles into couples, was indeed the deity or just some gifted guy suffering from a delusion — and also resolve Trevor’s will-they-or-won’t-they relationship with his sexy psychiatrist Claire (Paula Marshall).  I wrote:

Was Trevor really the god Cupid or a flesh-and-blood mortal — albeit one extremely skilled in affairs of the heart — with an identity-engulfing delusion (and an extensive knowledge of Greco-Roman mythology as well)? The series never let on. Given Cupid’s naturalistic depiction of contemporary Chicago, the idea of a mortal Trevor would certainly conform to the show’s ambiance. But this was also the realm of fiction, where it wouldn’t be impossible for archaic gods to assume human form and toy with our knowledge of the known world. I was certainly hoping that the show would last long enough to answer the question of Trevor’s identity in an intriguing way....  But such, alas, was not to be. 

Well, now I know.

In a 2004 article for Entertainment Weekly, series creator Thomas revealed how he would have ended the show, had it run longer.  Referring to the plot device of Trevor/Cupid needing to unite 100  couples in order to “return” to his home on Mount Olympus — all the while abstaining from romance himself to preserve his immortality — the article read:

Claire and Trevor [would have] become his [Trevor’s] lucky 100th match, with Trevor believing that he’s giving up his immortality to be with her. Eventually, she loses her practice because of the affair, and as the series ends, we’re left to decide for ourselves whether Trevor actually was Cupid. “I would have never disproved it,” Thomas says, “but I always wrote it as though he weren’t.”

I’m not sure how satisfying that would have been.  If I had stuck with the show for several seasons, only to have Trevor’s true identity still hanging in the air — without the series preserving that ambiguity in an unexpectedly clever way — I might have felt cheated.  Perhaps if such an equivocal ending had been preceded by a dream sequence, where Claire imagines that Trevor is indeed the god Cupid, the series at least exploring that possibility might have made the finale’s indeterminacy endurable.

But the truly frustrating fact is that we, Cupid’s loyal viewers, never got a chance to decide for ourselves.  We were dismayed by the ABC network abruptly pulling the plug on the series.  The cancellation of the TV show Cupid was a shot through the heart, in the bad sense, that rivaled its namesake’s legendary dexterity with the bow and arrow.


‘Cupid’s’ title sequence

Click here for ‘Cupid, Part One’

The Old Switcheroo

Last month, I wrote a comment on the Internet Movie Database’s discussion boards about Steven Spielberg’s recent film Lincoln (2012), which, as anyone reading this probably knows, is a drama about the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the amendment that ended legal slavery. On a discussion thread titled “WHY: Lincoln and Repubs Free Blacks: Blacks Vote Demo?,” a contributor, who was clearly conservative, wondered why African Americans voted more consistently for the Democratic Party, rather than Republican Party, the political party that did the most to end slavery in the 1860s.  That discussion quickly got off topic.  So, I thought that I would write, adopting as politically neutral a tone as possible, to answer the original poster’s question.  Here is what I banged out on my keyboard:

For the record, the “modern” Democratic Party began shaping its philosophy with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, so you can’t genuinely equate pre-FDR Dems to today’s (just as you can’t genuinely equate the pre-Reagan GOP to today’s).  And the Democrats fought the hardest for civil rights in the 1960s.  Although there were important exceptions (Dwight Eisenhower forcibly integrating schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, for example), the most action against segregation came from the FDR-transformed Democrats, culminating in Lyndon Johnson’s Voting Rights Act of 1965.  As a direct result of Democratic Party zeal on civil rights, the “Dixiecrats” — the pro-segregation Democrats, most of whom were from the South — had switched allegiance to the Republican Party by the mid-1970s.  So, you could say that between the time of Lincoln and the 1960s, the Democrats and the Republicans had traded places.

But despite all this, into the 1960s and beyond, many elderly African Americans were said to have voted for the Republican Party anyway because, as they said, it was “the party of Lincoln.”

The thread’s originator replied to my post, saying, “I still see the Republican party as the party to champion freedom for all Americans, regardless of color.”  She continued her new post by bringing up, for the first time on the thread, the issue of abortion, which she clearly opposed.  “I suppose the Dixiecrats of today have jumped back into the Democrat [sic] party to push for partial abortions….”  It’s obvious that the Deep South is both solidly Republican and perhaps the most anti-abortion region of the country.  Her illogical and irrelevant reply told me that there wasn’t a reasonable mind on the other end of the conversation.  So, I didn’t bother responding to her.