The Last Supper

The Last Supper is a wonderful theme in paintings to study for an art historian. What a challenge to get 13 guys around a table, table covered with dishes. Every body sitting in a room. Try to project this on a flat surface.

Last Supper as fresco, on the wall of the severely damaged St. Mary's Cathedral of Malbork, the Crusaders' castle in Poland.

As an artist you need to take a lot of decisions when starting this painting.

First of all, you need to decide for the sake of composition whether you are going to have the thirteen men sitting around the table? If so, someone will have to sit with his back to the audience. So who is a lesser one whose face is not to be painted? How you decide this? And will the people sitting in the front not cover the most important cast of the scene? How do you avoid this? If they sit only on one side of the table, how do you make the scene look naturally?

And what about the activity on the table? The choice of dishes? Is the table covered with cloth? Do you see the feet or even legs of the people sitting? 

How big is the room, how deep? Does it have windows? And can you see a landscape through it? If so what landscape and what time of the day? 

Talking about the day, where is the light coming from? 

And last but not least, how individualistic is the exposure of the people gathered and how expressive is their behavior? 

Last Supper as a relief on the back of the altar of the St. Mary's church in Lübeck. 

Having answered only these basic questions, a picture can be diagnosed on the epoch, region, artist, political statement, artist's mandate and sponsor and many more. Furthermore, the scene is like any other predisposed to reveal to a historian a very detailed information on every day life in many ways - for example reconstructing a medieval menu of a festive meal. The architecture and requisits gathered in the parlor, the clothes, dishes, cutlery, the furniture and details of the landscape commonly give us clues on the social reality of the epoch of the artist. 

Last Supper as a wooden relief in the Cathedral of Porto

Of course, the most famous Last Supper is assigned to Leonardo da Vinci. Many artists before Leonardo and after Leonardo portrayed the scene too. Myself, I am fascinated by these paintings who contain a break through into the understanding of perspective, movement, composition, study of human body and reflecting the social condition in them. They mark a beginning of another epoch in the human understanding of arts. One of my favorites "Last Suppers" is Dirk Bouts' "Last Supper" within the altar of St. Peter's in Leuven in todays Belgium:

http://www.wga.hu/tours/flemish/bouts/

The theme is so popular that is being quoted nowadays day-in, day-out in different context in picture, movies, posters and is being printed on t-shirts and mugs.

One cover of this evangelistic evergreen I found very refreshing is that one:

http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/File:Battlestar_Galactica_Last_Supper.jpg

Today is Maundy Thursday, for Christians the day commemorating the Last Supper.

Post Scriptum

Since making the Maudy Thursday compilation of Last Supper, the theme catches my eye more then it did before, and I decided to start here a collection of the samples. Who knows where it will get us.

For the start, a panel of the altar "Goldene Tafel" from the State Museum of Lower Saxony in Hanover (see more of the artwork in the posting to this blog "Rough Surfaces"):

My chronologically next encounter with the theme: tourist souvenirs from Cracow, May 2013:

Gartenkirche, Hanover (July 2013)

An icon at the flea market in Cieszyn, Poland, August 2013

Today is Maundy Thursday. It is one year on this blog that I started collecting Last Supper motifs in fine arts. Above, the latest snap shot (the quality is a bit disappointing - of my shot, not of the picture): stained glass in Oude Kerk in Delft, the Netherlands. March 2014.