An Opinion piece by Ling Sing Lin
The Last Supper
During the Easter season, I received a TikTok video relating how Leonardo da Vinci painted the pictures representing Jesus and his twelve disciples at The Last Supper. He wanted to find models for each person, based on what he felt the person should look like. At mass, he found a model for Jesus. This was a young man in the choir loft. He worked 3 days painting the Jesus character. He then took eleven months to find suitable people to represent eleven disciples like Peter, John, Andrew, etc. However, he couldn’t find someone to represent Judas Iscariot.
He walked the streets of Milan for many hours, searching the faces he came across. Because he failed to find a suitable Judas, he left the painting unfinished for eleven years.
He finally found a suitable Judas, one whose face showed harshness and with a hardness of the eyes. He invited this man to pose for the painting. After a few hours, the man began to weep inconsolably.
Do you not recognize me? he asked. Eleven years ago I posed for you as Jesus in this same painting!
The narrator’s view was that each of us have a Jesus or a Judas in us. Jesus is the best version and Judas the worst version of us. He concluded that the challenge to each of us is to celebrate Jesus more in our lives. We should be the best version of ourselves, to allow Jesus to come fully alive in us.
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson in 1886 wrote this Gothic novella. Dr Jekyll had created a potion which when ingested transformed his good personality into a cruel, remorseless and evil Mr Hyde.
Is it possible that the man who was the artist’s model for both Jesus and Judas had dual personalities of good and evil, like the narrator surmised?
The closest I can think of is a personality disorder like narcissism, sociopathy or psychopathy. Such people can be charming when it suits them, and extremely selfish and without any conscience at other times.
Dorian Gray
I had written a previous post, The Impermanence of Beauty, in which Dorian Gray (a product of Oscar Wilde’s imagination) was described. This extremely good-looking young man never aged or lost his looks over time. However, his portrait was the one which bore the brunt of his aging, his hedonistic lifestyle, and the effects of his increasingly wicked life.
Could da Vinci’s model have, over the eleven years, led a wasted or difficult life, rather than have a dual personality?
Vicissitudes of Life
This is when a person is faced with changed circumstances or fortune, which are unpleasant and unwelcome. These difficult circumstances could have caused him to suffer, become bitter and unhappy, resulting in a changed facies so that his facial expression became that of a hardened or harsh person.
My personal view is different from the narrator’s view, which is that we have good and bad versions of ourselves. I believe that when the model posed as Jesus, he was young and had not experienced the hardships of life. Eleven years later, the hardships he had subsequently faced had unfortunately left an imprint on his face. He did not become bad. He did not become Judas, or Mr Hyde.
lingsinglin
Dr Ling Sing Lin is a medical doctor by training. She worked in MOH HQ for many years, in policy making and administrative positions, until her retirement.
