What’s in a Name?

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When first gazing at Veronese’s painting of the Last Supper, it is difficult to recognize that it actually is a painting of the Last Supper. Indeed, the first reaction of most viewers to this Italian Renaissance masterpiece is simply awe at its scale. Measuring 42 feet wide by 18 feet high, Veronese’s painting is surely one of the largest paintings on canvas in the world; it takes up an entire wall in Venice’s Galleria dell’Accademia.

The viewer might next be seduced by the theatrical setting: The artist has set the biblical scene in three bays of a marble portico (porch), supported by massive 035Corinthian columns. Within the portico, Jesus and the disciples are seated at a grand cloth-covered banquet table that stretches across all three bays—the entire length of the painting. Instead of 13 men focusing on one event, however, we see some 50 figures, engaged in almost as many conversations and activities. Jesus sits at the center of the canvas, where all the lines of perspective converge. A halo—almost imperceptible—does little to help set him apart from the crowd. This central portion of the painting most closely resembles more traditional images of the Last Supper. But even here no one is looking directly at Jesus, not even Peter, with his bald pate 036and full white beard, sitting to Jesus’ right, or the youthful John, to his left. It is difficult, perhaps even impossible, to pick out the faces of all the disciples; instead, the bustling servants, animals and colorful onlookers dominate the canvas.

These other figures include a well-fed man (right of center), dressed in a splendid striped robe and soft brown cap; a spotted dog (center foreground) that casually scratches itself and sticks out its red tongue while watching a cat play with a bone under the table; a second dog that hovers beside the table (waiting for the disciples to throw him scraps?); a small man with a parrot (left foreground); a petite woman (also in the foreground); a lady sneaking down the staircase at right; and a cluster of women who ogle the feast from the windows of the buildings beyond.

If the subject of the painting isn’t immediately recognizable, the title will provide no help. For Veronese’s painting of Jesus’ final meal with his disciples is not titled The Last Supper but The Feast in the House of Levi. It’s not a mistake; Veronese himself was forced to change the title to the latter within months of finishing his masterpiece.

Born Paolo Caliari (1528–1588), the artist was dubbed Veronese by the Venetians because he came from the nearby city of Verona. After working in Venice for more than 20 years, Veronese was commissioned by the monastery of Santi Giovanni e Paolo (Saints John and Paul) to paint a Last Supper for its refectory (dining hall). The painting was to take the place of an earlier Last Supper by the Venetian artist Titian, whose work had been destroyed in 1571 by a fire said to have been set by German soldiers who were billeted in the monastery. Veronese finished his replacement painting in 1573.

Veronese’s painting is, of course, only one of many paintings of this event. The earliest major Last Supper is Pietro Lorenzetti’s early-14th-century fresco in the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi. The most famous Last Supper is certainly that of Leonardo (1490s), which also appeared on a refectory wall, in the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie, in Milan. In more recent times, Salvador Dali tackled the subject; Andy Warhol produced more than 100 studies and paintings based on Leonardo’s Last Supper, including several that rival Veronese’s in scale.^a

Traditionally, paintings of the Last Supper have focused on one of two subjects: the betrayal of Judas—when Jesus predicts, “Truly I tell you, one of you will 037betray me…The one who has dipped his hand into the bowl with me will betray me” (Matthew 26:21, 23); or the institution of the Eucharist—when Jesus takes the bread, blesses it and says to his disciples, “Take, eat; this is my body,” and then offers them wine, “Drink from it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant; which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matthew 26:26–28).

Veronese, like Leonardo before him, has captured the former moment. While Peter continues to eat, John appears confused, perhaps even dazed, by Jesus’ words; across the table, the accused Judas, his face in shadow, turns away from Jesus.

But the correspondence with more traditional images of the Last Supper stops here. With its elaborate setting and colorful crowd of onlookers, Veronese’s version is dramatically different from others of its genre, containing many seemingly irreligious if not anti-religious features.

Veronese’s apparently irrelevant and irreverent approach to the Last Supper immediately came to the attention of the Inquisition, the Roman Catholic tribunal created to stamp out heresy of all kinds, particularly that of the followers of the German priest Martin Luther. Veronese finished the painting on April 20, 1573; on July 28, he was brought to trial for heresy because of it.

The lively transcripts from Veronese’s case before the church’s high court have been pored over by art historians ever since the 1860s, when they were discovered by accident by a historian examining papers from the Inquisition in Venice’s state archive.¹

The court, the transcripts tell us, was horrified to find “buffoons, drunkards, dwarfs, Germans, and other such scurrilities” present at the Last Supper. The judges were also dismayed by the presence of the dogs, the jester, the servant with a bloodied nose and handkerchief (standing on the left staircase), the well-armed German (that is, Lutheran) soldiers on the right staircase (remember, German soldiers reportedly set the fire that burned the Titian painting in the monastery of Santi Giovanni e Paolo in 1571) and the turbaned Turks (far left). The court insisted it was not being overly strict. By comparison, the judges suggested that the nudes in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel were appropriate, since on the Last Day all humanity will appear naked before Jesus.^b But drunkards, parrots and soldiers at the Last Supper? Never! Even a Lutheran is imbibing the wine served at Jesus’ table—an act surely in conflict with Roman Catholic church dogma.

In his defense, Veronese used the argument that artists on the defensive have often used. He told the church’s supreme court that he was responding to “the inner needs of creator and artist.” He was simply making use of the license given to “poets, painters and madmen.” Plus, he noted, he did have to decorate a considerable amount of space.

What happened next is a little unclear from the transcripts. The court told Veronese to paint out the 038“irrelevant elements” at his own expense. Given their predominance in the painting, it is hard to see how this could have been done without drastically altering the size and shape of the canvas. Veronese apparently took another tack, perhaps on the advice of the monks of the monastery. He simply changed the name of the painting from The Last Supper to Feast in the House of Levi, recalling a dinner described in the Gospel of Luke 5:

Then Levi gave a great banquet for him [Jesus] in his house; and there was a large crowd of tax collectors and others sitting at the table with them.

The Pharisees and their scribes were complaining to his disciples, saying, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?”

Jesus answered, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance.”

Then they said to him, “John’s disciples, like the disciples of the Pharisees, frequently fast and pray, but your disciples eat and drink.”

Jesus said to them, “You cannot make wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them, can you? The days will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them, and then they will fast in those days.”

(Luke 5:29–35)

The evidence for this change in the title of the painting is on the painting itself. Veronese painted on the cornice of the balustrade under the left arch: FECIT D. COVI. MAGNV. LEVI, which is an abbreviation of the first part of Luke 5 in Latin: “Et fecit ei convivium magnum Levi in domo sua,” (“Levi gave a great banquet for him in his house” [Luke 5:29]). The inscription on the cornice under the right arch—LUCAE CAP. V.—is of course the source: Luke, Chapter 5. On the base of the columns appears the earlier inscription A.D. MDLXXIII. DIE. XX. APR. (April 20, 1573 A.D.), the day Veronese thought he had put his final touches on the painting.

With this clever sleight of hand, the Turks and the Germans became tax collectors and sinners; the jester, the women, the dogs and other animals became part of the entertainment at a rich man’s feast; the free-flowing wine became a symbol of the good Christian life.

The court appears to have been satisfied with the change in name; Veronese’s painting remained in the refectory for 200 years, before it was stolen during Napoleon’s invasion of Italy. It hung in the Louvre 039until Napoleon fell 12 years later and the painting was ultimately returned to Venice.

But why did Veronese paint this scandalous painting in the first place? Was it simply because he had to fill up a large canvas? Was he truly as much a madman as a painter?

Veronese’s Last Supper is, of course, not the first work of religious art to be declared sacrilegious. Although the Venice court approved of the nudity in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, the authorities in Rome deemed the male figures obscene and gave them loincloths. In our era, Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1951 novel The Last Temptation of Christ was widely criticized, as was the 1988 Scorsese film based on it. The movie’s depiction of Jesus dreaming that he had settled into a contented bourgeois life was found particularly offensive.

Veronese (like Kazantzakis) clearly did not intend for his painting to be understood as an accurate and historical portrayal of Jesus’ last meal. If he didn’t see it simply as decoration, he must have intended it to be viewed as a metaphor.

Other artists have used their paintings of the Last Supper in this way. In Tintoretto’s Last Supper of 1594, now in San Paolo’s (St. Paul’s), in Venice, one of the apostles hands bread to a man lying on the floor: Jesus’ meal is a metaphor for Christian concern for the poor. Veronese himself in 1585 painted another Last Supper, now in the Brera Museum in Milan, in which a young girl gives a piece of sanctified bread to a crippled beggar.

The art historian Philipp Fehl offers this interpretation of Veronese’s Feast in the House of Levi:

It is our recognition of the quiet unfolding of the contrast between the gaiety of the banquet and the grief of the chief actors which makes us become aware of the dramatic power of representation. This contrast, we should notice, also enhances the plausibility of the scene. The painting celebrates, in an artistically elevated form, the manner in which great events really come to pass—quietly and hidden.²

For Fehl, the painting may thus be viewed in a much broader context than either the Last Supper or a feast at the house of Levi: It is a subtle reminder that the turning points in history often originate in humble or mundane events.

Great artists (and writers) are seldom willing to explain to others the broader meaning of their works; they assume that the meaning is evident. It is only through the accident of this trial by the Inquisition that we have Veronese’s interpretation of his Last Supper: There is no other record of his intentions. And we certainly should not accept his testimony at the trial as the whole story; he was clearly doing all that he could to prove his innocence of heresy.

Could it be that the extraneous features of the painting—the ones that he described as mere decoration—were quite deliberately chosen with a different purpose in mind?

Could it be that Veronese was also trying to say through this picture that, in its true meaning, the Eucharist—certainly a central event for all Christians—is not just for Jesus and the apostles, not just for priests and other holy people, but for all mankind—for drunks and Lutheran soldiers, for Turks and for women, and even, perhaps, for poets, painters and madmen? Might the crowd of diverse people be a metaphor for the openness of the church, an openness to which the Inquisition was quite blind?

Perhaps BR readers have their own ideas about Veronese’s use of metaphor in this painting.

034 When first gazing at Veronese’s painting of the Last Supper, it is difficult to recognize that it actually is a painting of the Last Supper. Indeed, the first reaction of most viewers to this Italian Renaissance masterpiece is simply awe at its scale. Measuring 42 feet wide by 18 feet high, Veronese’s painting is surely one of the largest paintings on canvas in the world; it takes up an entire wall in Venice’s Galleria dell’Accademia. The viewer might next be seduced by the theatrical setting: The artist has set the biblical scene in three bays of a […]