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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > October 2001

What’s in a Name?

The Strange Case of Veronese’s Last Supper

By David L. Sills

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 […]

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Footnotes

1.

See Jane Daggett Dillenberger, “Jesus as Pop Icon: The Unknown Religious Art of Andy Warhol,” BR 12:05.

2.

The court apparently disagreed with the papal authorities who, nine years earlier, had loincloths painted on some of the male nudes in Michelangelo’s masterpiece. The artists became known as the braghettoni or breeches-painters. See A. Dean McKenzie, “Michelangelo’s Masterpiece Reclaimed,” BR 12:06.

Endnotes

1.

English translations of the transcripts appear in Philipp Fehl, “Veronese and the Inquisition: A Study of the Subject Matter of the So-called ‘Feast in the House of Levi,’” Gazette des beaux-arts 58 (1961), 6th series, pp. 325–354; and Giuseppe Delogu, Veronese: The Supper in the House of Levi (Milan: Art Editions Amilcare Pizzi; New York: Transbook Company, Inc., 1950).

2.

Fehl, “Veronese and the Inquisition.”