Image Details

© ROMNEY OUALLINE NESBITT

ROMAN-STYLE REPAST. Beginning in the late 18th century, Western scholars and artists sought to imagine the Last Supper scene in a way that reflected more accurately the historical reality of Jesus’s time as they understood it. Relying primarily on ancient Greco-Roman literature, as well as newly discovered dining spaces at Roman sites such as Herculaneum and Pompeii, they reconstructed the scene by placing Jesus and the disciples in a Roman triclinium—a banquet hall with diners reclining around a U-shaped arrangement of low couches or benches and an open center that allowed servants to facilitate the feast (artist’s reconstruction shown here).