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.