The Last Supper

Entry

At the Last Supper which Christ had with his 12 disciples in Jerusalem just before he was arrested (Matthew 26:17-29; Mark 14:12-15; Luke 22:7-23; John 13:21-30), he announced that one of them would betray him.⁴ In a room off to the left of the main scene he is washing the disciples’ feet (John 13:4-17),⁵ and in the right background he is in the garden on the Mount of Olives immediately prior to his arrest (Matthew 26:36-46; Mark 14:32-42; Luke 22:39-246).⁶ Kneeling in the right foreground is a man in a brown habit, either a friar minor or a monk.

There is no direct model for this Last Supper, but there are similar scenes of Christ and the apostles in an interior with a tiled floor in 15th-century Netherlandish miniatures and paintings. Most of them appear to derive from the scene in the centre panel of Dieric Bouts’s Altarpiece of the Holy Sacrament of 1464-68 in the St Pieterskerk in Louvain.⁷ There Christ and the disciples are seated around a square table, with the focus on Christ blessing the host. In the Rijksmuseum painting the figures are seated around a round table and Christ is giving the host to Judas, who is recognisable from the purse in his hand. This is also the case in The Last Supper in the Book of Hours of Catherine of Cleves,⁸ to which Caroll compares it.⁹ The differences between the painting and the miniature are too great, however, for the latter to have been the model for the painting. In the miniature, for example, John rests his head on Christ’s breast.

It seems likely that The Last Supper and The Resurrection (SK-A-2130) were originally the front and back of a single panel which were probably separated in the 19th century.¹⁰ This is confirmed both by the dimensions of the planks of both panels and the dendrochronology.

In The Resurrection Christ is stepping out of the tomb which has been opened by an angel, and holds the cross of the resurrection. A few of the sleeping soldiers are startled from their slumbers. Christ’s resurrection three days after his death signified his return to earth, where he remained for 40 days until his ascension, and was depicted countless times in the 15th and 16th centuries.¹¹ Portrayed in the background are several subsequent events: Christ in Limbo,¹² The Ascension,¹³ Noli me tangere,¹⁴ and Pentecost.¹⁵

The Resurrection was often depicted in northern Netherlandish painting in Passion series, such as The Roermond Passion (SK-A-1491) and in altarpieces, usually in combination with the Crucifixion. It is presented in a similar way in late 15th-century engraved Passion series, usually in an upright format. One possible model for the Amsterdam painting is an engraving by Israël van Meckenem (B. 20; L. 154; inv. no. RP-P-OB-1111), in which there is also a background scene showing Christ releasing the souls of Adam and Eve from Limbo. One striking object in the painting is the large lantern in the foreground, which shows that the event took place at night. This could have been borrowed from the engraving The Arrest of Christ by Master IAM van Zwol, in which there is an overturned lantern in the foreground.¹⁶

The original panel with The Last Supper and The Resurrection probably came from a larger ensemble that was made by the same artist or his workshop. It is difficult to say how the original series of Passion scenes looked. It is conceivable that it was a polyptych with a Crucifixion in the middle. Both paintings with their secondary scenes belong to the traditional series illustrating the life of Christ. The presence of the friar or monk in a brown habit as the donor in
The Last Supper indicates that this scene could have been on the inside of a right wing. Since the Ascension on the Resurrection panel closes off Christ’s life, it is conceivable that that scene was on the outside of an altarpiece. Since there are the remains of an unpainted edge at the top of The Last Supper, the original panel could not have been any higher. Nor could it have been the lower half of a right wing with other Passion scenes that was twice as high.

Both panels, which were initially regarded as 15th-century Flemish works, were attributed to the Master of the Amsterdam Death of the Virgin by Friedländer in 1932, an artist named after the painting in Amsterdam (SK-A-3467), although he remarked that the present panels are inferior in quality.¹⁷ He thus placed the master in Amsterdam, but Hoogewerff felt that he came from Utrecht on the evidence of similarities to miniature painting there. However, he gave these two panels to a different artist, whom he called the Master of the Lantern after the prominent lantern in The Resurrection.¹⁸

The stylistic and technical similarities between these panels and The Death of the Virgin (SK-A-3467 are indeed not all that great. The rather old-fashioned manner and dark palette of that painting do not make it very likely that the same artist was at work here. There is a connection, though, in the naive style and careful, draughtsman-like way in which the faces and hands are rendered. The relationship between the paintings and late 15th-century miniature painting in Utrecht and the county of Gelre requires further investigation in order to arrive at a convincing localisation of these two panels. The dendrochronology indicates that they were probably painted in the last 15 years of the 15th century.

(J.P. Filedt Kok)