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.
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.
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