Free The Secret Supper by Javier Sierra Page A

and men gesticulating grotesquely toward the heavens, things that are nowhere described in the Gospels.”
    I held back a shiver.
    “Are you certain of this?”
    “I never lie,” he said curtly. “But that is nothing compared to the rest.”
    Nothing? If Father Alessandro’s insinuations proved themselves to be true, the Soothsayer had fallen short in his fears: that devil from Vinci had landed in Milan, leaving behind a trail of serious pictorial distortions. Some of the lapidary phrases I had read in the anonymous letters began to echo in my mind like thunder before a storm. I allowed him to continue:
    “That was no ordinary Adoration. It didn’t even have a Star of Bethlehem! Don’t you think that is odd?”
    “What does it tell you?”
    “Me?” Father Alessandro’s cold, pale cheeks acquired a warm peach color. It made him blush that a learned man from Rome should ask him, with undisguised interest, his sincere opinion of something. “The truth is that I don’t know. Leonardo, as I’ve told you, is an unusual creature. I’m not surprised that the Inquisition should be interested in him—”
    “The Inquisition?”
    I felt another stab in my guts. In the short time we had known each other, Father Alessandro had developed an uncanny ability to surprise me. Or perhaps I had become more susceptible? His mention of the Holy Office made me feel guilty. How was it that I hadn’t thought of it earlier? Why had I not consulted the general archives of the Sacra Congregazione before traveling to Milan?
    “Let me tell you about it,” he said with enthusiasm, as if he enjoyed searching his memory for this kind of thing. “After leaving his Adoration of the Magi unfinished, Leonardo moved to Milan, where he was engaged by the Fraternity of the Immaculate Conception, which, as you know, belongs to the Franciscans of San Francesco il Grande and with whom our prior is in constant conflict. And there, Leonardo fell into the same trouble he had encountered in Florence.”
    “Again?”
    “Of course. Master Leonardo was supposed to paint a triptych for the fraternity’s chapel, with the assistance of the brothers Ambrogio and Evangelista de’Predis. Between the three, they received two hundred scudi in advance for the work to come, and each of them set himself to a section of the altarpiece. The Tuscan took charge of the central panel. His task was to paint a Virgin surrounded by the prophets, while the side panels would depict a chorus of mystical angels.”
    “No need to continue: he never finished his work—”
    “No, not at all. This time Master Leonardo finished his part but didn’t deliver what had been asked of him. In his painting there wasn’t a single prophet to be found. Instead, he’d painted a portrait of Our Lady in a cave, with the Child Jesus and Saint John the Baptist. The impudent scoundrel assured the brothers that his painting depicted the encounter of the two infants during the Flight to Egypt. But that too is a story absent from all four Gospels!”
    “And so they denounced him to the Inquisition.”
    “Yes. But not for the reasons you imagine. Ludovico intervened to impede the trial, and thereby freed him from certain condemnation.”
    I doubted whether I should proceed with my questioning. After all, it was he who wanted me to tell him about the riddles. But I couldn’t deny that his explanations intrigued me.
    “What, then, was the accusation they made before the Inquisition?”
    “That Leonardo had sought inspiration for his work in the Apocalipsis Nova.”
    “I never heard of such a book.”
    “It’s a heretical text written by an old friend of his, a Menorite Franciscan called João Mendes da Silva, also known as Amadeo of Portugal, who died in Milan in the same year that Leonardo finished his painting. This Amadeo published a tract in which he dared to suggest that the Virgin and Saint John the Baptist were the true protagonists of the New Testament, and not