THE LAST LAST SUPPER

THE LAST LAST SUPPER

Having just completed a number of blogs on Last Suppers just in time for the Easter season,
I wish to devote one last blog to a Last Supper of note that is the last Last Supper for awhile.
It is also appropriate to call it the LAST LAST SUPPER because it was not allowed to be a
Last Supper painting. It is the 1573 painting by Veronese now in the Accademia in Venice that
was originally a Last Supper for the monastery of San Giovanni e Paolo in Venice.

Soon after it was finished in 1573 (April,) Veronese was brought by July before the Inquisition, the church court that decided whether artistic images conformed to the Vatican's strict rules for the Counter-Reformation, the period after Luther's Protestant rebellion forced the church to revise its theology. Fortunately the court proceedings for his trial were written down, and they have been published by David Rosand in his wonderful book, Painting in Sixteenth-Century Venice (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1997.)

What the church objected to in Veronese's Last Supper were the liberties the artist took with the
story in the Bible. Veronese's painting is enormous, as you can see from this photo of it in the Accademia with visitors:

It has three arch openings and stairs on either side that give the impression of a stage set with hundreds of actors and animals.

What the Inquisition Court seems to have disliked the most, however, were individual sections of the painting. In the trial they put Veronese on the witness stand for his painting and asked him:

Why have you painted in Germans, and dwarfs, and drunkards?
The German is probably this man in the silk-striped tunic below the right gigantic engaged column:

 

Here is the dwarf:

 

and two possible drunk men on either staircase, one on the right who is drinking from a glass, and the other on the left, who leans over the staircase parapet, although he may be the servant who has a nosebleed, to whom the court objected as well.

Veronese's reply to that question was to say that he had not put anything objectionable inside the
"sacred space" where Christ is seated in the middle, that is, within the space between the two center columns of the painting:

Veronese's excuse for including people like the toothpick holder and the dwarf is that he has set them

outside the holy area where Christ sits with the apostles at table. Yes, he paints in a dog and cat there

but, as we have seen from previously blogs, dogs and cats are not unusual in Last Supper scenes.

Dwarves, toothpick wielders, jesters with monkeys, and drunkards are unusual.

Veronese defends his decision to include these figures by saying that he had to fill up a large space
and felt free to include whatever he could to decorate the large expanse on the wall, as long as he
didn't violate Christ's "holy space," the "luoco dov'e il Nostro Signore."

All of the figures the Inquisition objected to were "outside" the space where our Lord is, he said, and "painters have a license, as poets and madmen do, to paint what they feel is right for the scene." Veronese was told to go back and change the painting. He went back and changed nothing he had already painted. All he did was add the words "Convitto in Casa Levi" on one staircase top and "LUCA CAP. V" to the other. By so doing, he changed the title of the work to FEAST IN THE HOUSE OF LEVI, referring to another meal that Christ had with his disciples in the Bible at the house of a man named Levi (Matthew 9:9, Mark 2: 13, Luke 5: 27). LUCA CAP. V, then is Luke, CAPITOLO V, Chapter Five in Luke's version.Since the meal described in that chapter is one where Christ eats with publicans (Roman tax collectors) and sinners, Veronese felt he had met the requirements of the Inquisition and been able to justify his artistic choices, too.
            So Veronese's LAST SUPPER starts out as that subject but is changed to FEAST IN THE HOUSE OF LEVI, a title it still retains. Veronese continued to paint large feast scenes for
ecclesiastical settings, but he made sure never to presume to call them LAST SUPPERS.

 Scroll right for the entire tumultuous affair.

LORENZETTI'S WILD LAST SUPPER

LORENZETTI'S WILD LAST SUPPER

Pietro Lorenzetti is a surprising artist for his time. He lived from 1280 to 1348, but his painted rendering of Christian stories is never in line with the usual depictions of those stories made by other painters from his period. He imagines scenes in ways that are unexpected. One example of his creative reinvention of a story from Christ's life is his fresco painting of the Last Supper made around 1320 for the south transept of the Lower Church of San Francesco in Assisi.

Entrance to Lower Church of the Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi:

His Last Supper is painted as part of a fresco cycle depicting the Life of Christ on the archway to the left of the main altar of the Lower Church (yellow arrow points to last Supper)

Before we analyze the painting, however, it is important to see two other Last Suppers, one by Giotto in the Arena Chapel in Padua of 1305-6

and one by Duccio of 1309-11 for the back of the Siena Cathedral Altarpiece:

In both of these earlier depictions, the Last Supper is a staid affair. Yes, Christ is announcing the betrayal of Judas and reaches for the bread as Judas does,

 

but the apostles sit solidly in their robes around the table on benches. They fill up the fictive architectural space and hardly move,
 
 especially if they are anchored to the haloes right in front of their faces.
Only the apostles and Christ are present in these earlier supper scenes, with Judas the only apostle without a halo in the Giotto fresco. (Duccio seems to have wiped out the haloes for the apostles near Judas in order to avoid the problem posed by haloes at the back of the heads obscuring their faces.)


Pietro Lorenzetti conforms to some of the elements of Giotto and Duccio; John the Evangelist is asleep, as in the earlier scenes, his Judas is missing a halo, for instance, and Christ reaches for the bread with the betrayer (see arrow.)

But in other ways Lorenzetti decides to compete for complexity in his Last Supper. He constructs an elaborate hexagonal room ceiling, with sculpted angels alighting on colonnette perches:

No simple rectangle for him and no simple angels; angels with wings, cornucopias, and elaborate headpieces.

He encircles the room with a beautiful starry sky, with a crescent moon:

He suggests an octagonal table with the angled backs of the two-seater benches and space between the benches. Each of the apostles turns his head in a different direction and their body shapes suggest movement around the table.

The saw he places in a diagonal on the table for the cutting of the bread seems to point to the apostle in pink, Phillip? before we realize he can't be the betrayer because he has a halo, so Lorenzetti makes his viewers guess at the identity of the betrayer as much as Leonardo does (see my blog entry on his Last Supper) but with more complicated perspective views of the grouping.The artist also adds two figures to the supper who stand over at the left, gesticulating and speaking to each other, the innkeeper and his servant, the witness figures of this event:

We have seen these two witness figures in Del Sarto's 1527 Last Supper, where he places them up in a balcony, but perhaps he got the idea for them from Lorenzetti.
And, if that were not enough complexity, Lorenzetti goes one room further.
He paints on the left side the kitchen for the supper, complete with fire and water urn, with two servants washing dishes, while a dog and cat seem to vie for scraps of food. In that side room we even see a shelf with a vase on it behind the servants and a shovel for the fireplace ashes:

The servant in green leans on the shoulders of the man kneeling wiping off plates, and he gestures with his thumb towards the main room, as if to say, "Did you hear what they are saying in there?"  much the same commentary on the event as the two balcony men in Del Sarto's later Last Supper (see my blog entry on that.)


All of this side scene is extraneous to the Last Supper text, but Lorenzetti's fine-tuned imagination makes the holy scene more believable with the addition of these mundane elements of animals, servants, fireplace, and dish scraping. He enables the viewer to empathize with the anxiety at the supper by making the holy scene more ordinary, more human, and more filled with movement, from the cat and dog's tail to the flames leaping off the floor to the sweeping arm motions of the servants.
A lively motion-filled event with lots of people and animals.
Judas' betrayal, is as simply human as reaching for a piece of bread,

or a cat waiting its turn to feed,

 or a crescent moon waning in the sky:

 

The conviviality of this active gathering has taken some license with the biblical text, but it is a rendition of the Last Supper that leads later artists such as Ghirlandaio to include a cat in his 1482 San Marco Last Supper

 

 

and Veronese to include in his Last Supper a cat and dog, dwarf,

and even a toothpick wielder.

 
It is no wonder Veronese's painting was censured by the Inquisition for making a mockery of the holy scene. But Tintoretto had no such censure when he included Lorenzetti's dishwashers in his Last Supper in San Giorgio Maggiore in 1594:

In fact, the dog, cat, and female dishwasher are moved front and center,
upstaging the main event

two centuries after Lorenzetti's servants and animals:

But Ghirlandaio, Veronese, and Tintoretto's Last Suppers in situ are much physically closer to the viewer than Lorenzetti's. We have to imagine Lorenzetti up on a scaffolding, far from the floor and wanting entertainment for himself since his scene would have been hard to discern from down below. His drama, with his own added characters and animals and moon and stars, is partly staged for himself. He would never have imagined we, through digital technology, could look at it as closely as he did. How he has enlivened the Last Supper scene with its side room, innkeeper, servants, night sky, and marble inlay seats has become not just his secret now but a wild Last Supper for the world to treasure.

A whole universe and at its heart two men reaching for the same piece of bread.