The Missing Saltcellar in Leonardo’s Last Supper

Oct 5

5 min read

There is something missing from Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper.

Look closely at the table near Judas’s right wrist today and there is little to suggest that anything unusual was ever there. The surface is damaged, the paint badly compromised. What remains is what art historian Jack Wasserman described as an “amorphous discoloration.” On its own, it tells us almost nothing.

But Leonardo’s painting does not survive only through the battered mural in Milan.

Copies made in the early sixteenth century preserve a detail that has nearly disappeared from the original: an overturned saltcellar beside Judas, its contents spilling across the table. As Wasserman put it, without those early replicas, “we would never know” that Leonardo had included it.

And once the saltcellar reappears, it raises a much more interesting question.

Why did Leonardo put it there?

A Detail Lost from The Last Supper

Leonardo painted The Last Supper between 1495 and 1497 in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. Its deterioration began notoriously early.

By 1568, Giorgio Vasari described the painting as so badly affected that he could see little more than a mass of blots. The mural suffered further damage in 1652 when a doorway beneath it was enlarged. The work reportedly shook the wall enough to loosen portions of its painted surface. Then, during an intervention in 1770, Giuseppe Mazza scraped parts of the painting with iron instruments. Any one of these episodes could have contributed to the disappearance of the saltcellar. Wasserman concludes that by the end of the 1770 restoration, at the latest, it was no longer discernible.

That leaves us with an obvious problem.

If we cannot clearly see the saltcellar in Leonardo’s mural, how do we know it was ever there?

The answer is copies.

Early replicas of The Last Supper preserve details that have since been damaged or lost from Leonardo’s original. One early sixteenth-century copy associated with Boltraffio clearly shows the overturned vessel near Judas. Other versions preserve the motif as well.

The identification is generally accepted by modern scholars, although Wasserman notes that it has not been completely uncontested. Some earlier scholars argued that the saltcellar was an addition introduced by a copyist rather than a feature of Leonardo’s original.

The surviving evidence, then, is more interesting than simply spotting a mysterious shape in damaged paint. We are reconstructing a lost element of Leonardo’s composition by comparing the original with images made when the painting was far better preserved.

Leonardo Did Not Invent the Saltcellar

Saltcellars had appeared in northern Italian representations of the Last Supper before Leonardo. Wasserman identifies late fifteenth-century examples in which a saltcellar stands upright directly in front of Judas. A particularly useful example is a Last Supper by Cristoforo Baschenis from around 1493. Wasserman argues that Leonardo may have encountered this tradition in northern Italy.

But Leonardo changed it.

Instead of simply placing the vessel before Judas, he knocked it over. That change matters because now something is happening.

Judas has been pushed forward by Peter while simultaneously recoiling from Christ. In the commotion, he knocks over the saltcellar. Salt spills onto the table.

There is even an intriguing precedent in Leonardo’s own preparations for the painting. In a notebook description apparently connected with the composition, Leonardo imagined an apostle, probably Peter, knocking over a glass with his hand. In the finished painting, the overturned glass has become an overturned saltcellar associated with Judas.

The accident creates movement and drama. But was that all Leonardo intended?

Why Salt?

One explanation would have been familiar to Leonardo’s audience and remains familiar today: spilling salt was considered unlucky.

Giuseppe Bossi made precisely that argument in 1810, interpreting Judas’s spilled salt as a dire omen of the betrayal to come. Wasserman does not reject the superstition entirely, but he considers it insufficient to explain Leonardo’s choice. Judas already carries the money bag associated with his betrayal and reaches toward the dish, another biblical reference to the betrayer. Leonardo did not need another simple warning that Judas was about to do something terrible.

Wasserman instead turns to the New Testament.

Salt itself does not appear in the Gospel accounts of the Last Supper. But elsewhere Christ uses salt as a metaphor when speaking to his followers:

“You are the salt of the earth.”

The passage continues with a warning. If salt loses its savor, it becomes useless and is cast out. Wasserman reads the passage as a warning to Christ’s followers to remain faithful or risk forfeiting the grace represented by the salt.

Suddenly, the little overturned vessel beside Judas becomes much more interesting.

Judas Breaks the Bond

Another Gospel passage strengthens Wasserman’s interpretation. In Mark, Christ tells his followers to have salt within themselves and to “have peace one with another.”

Wasserman connects that command to the fellowship among Christ and the apostles. In The Last Supper, that fellowship has just been shattered.

Christ has announced that one of the men sitting with him will betray him. The apostles erupt. They gesture, question, recoil and protest. Judas pulls away from Christ.

And beside him, the salt spills.

Wasserman therefore proposes that Leonardo used the spilled salt as a symbol of discord, a visual representation of the breaking of fellowship. Remarkably, a seventeenth-century cleric describing a copy of Leonardo’s painting offered a similar interpretation, writing that Judas knocked over the saltcellar as though he had broken the peace of the group.

We cannot prove that this was Leonardo’s intended meaning. Wasserman himself presents it as an interpretation rather than a documented explanation from Leonardo. But it fits the extraordinary care with which Leonardo constructed the scene.

The overturned saltcellar sits within a network of objects and gestures surrounding Judas and Christ: Judas’s money bag, his hand reaching toward the dish, Christ’s hands, the bread and the wine. Wasserman argues that these details draw together the painting’s central themes of betrayal and the institution of the Eucharist.

And one of those details is now almost invisible.

That may be the most fascinating part of the story.

For centuries, The Last Supper has been deteriorating, damaged, restored and altered. What we see today is not everything Leonardo’s first viewers saw. Sometimes recovering his original conception means looking beyond the original itself, to drawings, documents and copies made before portions of the painting disappeared.

In this case, those copies preserve something tiny: a fallen saltcellar beside Judas.

But that tiny object may have carried an enormous idea.

At the very moment Judas breaks faith with Christ, the salt of the earth spills onto the table.