Discover the Last Supper Art

Although I was raised in Christianity and attended Maundy Thursday dinners at our church, as well as other services related to Easter, I had never given the “Last Supper” much thought…until Dan Brown wrote The DaVinci Code. All of a sudden I was obsessed with Leonardo Da Vinci, the sacred feminine, Mary Magdalene, gnostic texts, and symbology. At that time the book was published, I hadn’t traveled to Italy yet, but once I did I realized that there are far more depictions of the Last Supper than the one in Milan by Leonard Da Vinci. In fact, Florence hosts several that are open to visit…and are in better shape than Leonardo’s.

Thanks to the Florentine elite trying to curry favor with God, the people, and the pope, they commissioned artists to create fabulous works in the churches and other public spaces. Not all religious art was meant for public consumption though. Artists frescoed religious areas of convents and monasteries both public and private. Dining halls often were painted with an important event in Christianity—the Last Supper. This was the final meal Jesus Christ shared with his apostles before his crucifixion.

The Italian word for depictions of the Last Supper is cenacolo. You will see this word a lot when trying to hunt down these paintings, so it’s helpful to know. The term refers to the convent refectories where meals were taken; this is where many of the paintings are still located.

The churches, monasteries, and convents where the cenacoli (plural) are like small little museums and will also have other works on display besides the Last Supper. The ones in Florence that I’m noting all hail from the Renaissance period. The Italian Renaissance artists took the picture a step further, rendering the full scene of the meal—complete with Judas’ betrayal of Jesus, vessels for the Eucharist, and apostles surrounding Christ, generally at a long table—on the walls of rooms where the devout would dine.

Below is a list of my favorite cenacoli in Florence (in no particular order).

Cenacolo by Taddeo Gaddi (c. 1336-1366) at Basilica of Santa Croce. This massive painting takes up the lower part of a wall in the separate room of the convent. The area was almost completely submerged by the great flood of 1966, so some of the fresco is badly damaged but restoration efforts saved a lot of it. Above the Last Supper is Gaddi’s painting of the crucifixion on the Tree of Life. The cost to see this cenacolo is…