Beholding Mystery: Tintoretto’s Last Supper and Magnifying the Divine
Sept 14, 2020 | By Sharla Moody BK ‘22
Upon the first viewing, Tintoretto’s Last Supper is wholly disorienting. The painting is a conglomeration of people, color, and mystery grouped under a title that immediately ties it to da Vinci’s older, more famous depiction of the same event. But Tintoretto imagines a less formal, more enigmatic scene. Like da Vinci’s painting, Christ is still central, but the rest of the painting crowds in on all sides, overwhelming the eye and mind. There are angels! And a cat! And so many people! Where da Vinci is detached and formal, Tintoretto invites the viewer to take a seat with Christ; where da Vinci focuses on the stature of individual attendees, Tintoretto draws attention to the divine nature of the event he paints. The result challenges perceptions of the Last Supper and asks us to widen the scope of reality to include miracles, mystery, the hidden glories of the divine, and the miraculous intimacy man can have with God. Though difficult to stomach, the indiscernible beauty and care of the divine are woven into the fabric of the universe. With Tintoretto’s help, perhaps we can internalize this reality.
Tintoretto was a Venetian painter in the fourteenth century who painted in the Mannerist style, which emerged in the late Renaissance and focused on solving difficult artistic problems, primarily the difficulty of depicting the human body. Tintoretto frequently painted scenes from myth and the Bible, and professed a love for Saint Mark, Venice’s patron saint, and painted a cycle about the saint to be displayed in la Scuola Grande di San Marco, a hospital in the city. The Last Supper in question was the last of at least nine works he completed on the subject, and one of the last paintings he made before his death the same year. Rodolfo Pallucchini, director of the Institute of Art History at Venice’s Giorgio Cini Foundation, said of Tintoretto’s Last Supper, “[T]he choice of rough and popular types succeeds in endorsing the scene with a portrayal of ordinary everyday reality struck with wonder by the revelation of the miracle.” [1] If Pallucchini’s analysis is correct, Tintoretto intends us to view with awe the historical scene he addresses. Reality is broader than the historical and physical processes visible to the eye or immediate human experience, and Tintoretto expands the scope of the Last Supper scene from a group of individuals sharing a meal to a reality that encapsulates the laws of nature and miracles simultaneously.
Tintoretto positions the viewer directly in the scene. Rather than painting from a direct, head-on perspective of the table and Christ, Tintoretto angles the table and places other individuals who are not apostles before Christ and the table. The effect is as if the viewer is stepping into the room: the viewer is immediately intimate with the attendees of this Passover celebration. Tintoretto further emphasizes the intimacy of the event by depicting attendees bent towards one another in conversation. Perhaps most telling, Christ is administering the first communion. He stoops here to present his broken body in the eucharist for an apostle, his hands stretched towards the receiver’s mouth. The actual act of communion is emphasized by Christ’s bright halo, the focal point of the painting. While there are numerous other details in the painting, including spiritual processes, communion is most central and also markedly the most personal. Christ’s bending towards the mouth of the receiver is a tender and intimate beckoning toward the viewer: “Take, eat; this is my body which is given for you,…This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.”[2]
Tintoretto invokes the spiritual to emphasize the divine nature of communion. In the ceiling, angels swoop out of a flaming lamp to frame both sides of Christ. Their presence suggests yet another divine element within the Last Supper. Additionally, the room is windowless and dark; it is as if the room would have been pitch-black if not for Christ’s halo, which illuminates the room in astonishing detail. Tintoretto calls upon Scripture where Jesus refers to himself as “the light of the world.”[3] Additionally, the darkness foreshadows Christ’s crucifixion and estrangement from God the Father. The one source of light found is Christ, which is all the brighter because of the pervasive darkness. If the one source of light in the painting is Christ, this has the effect of centering the painting upon the bright figure, regardless of where the viewer stands in the geography of the painting. While it makes claims on the historical event of this specific Passover celebration, the painting also presents a metaphysical reality in which spiritual and divine beings have presence and power.
The attendees of the dinner include Jesus and his apostles, as well as numerous other people, including women, and at least two animals. The apostles are also denoted by their halos, which are not as bright as Christ’s but still gleam golden in the darkness. John, “the beloved apostle,” sits to the right of Christ, as he does in the Gospel of John, and is easily identifiable because he wears the same clothes as Christ. It is curiously difficult to identify Judas, who betrayed Jesus. There are two men around the table, both without halos, who might be him: one, standing at the end of the table closest to the viewer, is dressed in tattered clothes and leans on a staff. The other, at the end of the first table farthest from the viewer, wears orange. Still, there are other men present, not at the table, who could be Judas. This difficulty in identifying the treacherous apostle indicates that Judas is not “the other” but rather implies that all people are in similar states of sin. In searching for Judas, the viewer realizes that just as he has been invited into this first celebration of communion with Christ, so might he fall into the temptation to sin against Christ. The anonymity of Judas emphasizes the indiscriminate grace of the God who shed his blood to absolve even the vilest men. This too is fundamental to Tintoretto’s perception of a divinely tinged reality.
The inclusion of women at the Last Supper also emphasizes Christ’s willingness to fellowship with those of lesser status. The presence of the beggar as well highlights Christ’s coming for all, not just the wealthy, as did his birth in the manger rather than in a palace or even an inn. The beggar’s presence also calls back Christ’s teaching on riches and poverty: “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God,” to feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, clothe the naked, and visit the imprisoned. [4][5][6] Christ’s body was not broken for a select group. Communion is not barred from anyone according to any earthly status.
Tintoretto intends for us to be struck by the mystical elements of Last Supper; otherwise it is difficult to understand why he would have made them so bold and integral to the painting. The viewer is to behold the mysteries of the divine and internalize these mysteries as a fundamental part of reality. The role of art in beholding the divine has biblical precedent. In Exodus, God gives Moses extremely detailed instructions for the construction of the tabernacle, a mobile, earthly dwelling place for God. In total, around fourteen chapters are used to describe the tabernacle. Artisans are involved in its construction. God calls Bezalel specifically to help make the tabernacle, saying, “I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, to work in every craft.”[7]
Every part of the tabernacle is aesthetically pleasing, with precious metals, gems, and wood used to outfit it. While the tabernacle must be beautiful because it is the dwelling place of God, its beauty may serve another purpose. Because no one can look directly at God, the beauty of the tabernacle may allow worshippers to gain a foretaste of his divine glory and to behold his majesty at a distance. Those who enter the tabernacle would immediately know that it is a sacred place due to its outfitting. Similarly, gothic church architecture emphasizes light as a way of depicting the divine. God’s intent for the artist in Exodus is to build a place where he might dwell—a place that glorifies and honors him, but also brings viewers of the art into greater communion with him. Abbot Suger wrote of the Basilica of Saint-Denis in France,
Thus, when—out of my delight in the beauty of the house of God—the loveliness of the many-colored gems has called me away from external cares, and worthy meditation has induced me to reflect, transferring that which is material to the immaterial, on the diversity of the sacred virtues: then it seems to me that I see myself dwelling, as it were, in some strange region of the universe which neither exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity of Heaven; and that, by the grace of God, I can be transported from this inferior world to that higher world. [8]
The Catholic conception of sacrament—that a sacrament is a physical representation of God’s grace and promises to his children—can be applied to the role of art. Art can and should physically represent grace, too. While the first communion was an event shrouded in mystery, Tintoretto’s painting points out these mysteries and sheds light on the mystery of grace, as incomprehensible as a God who washed the feet of filthy sinners. Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar writes, “[T]he Christian form is structurally a part of the miracle of the forgiveness of sins, of justification, of holiness, the miracle that transfigures and ennobles the whole sphere of being and which in itself guarantees that a spiritual form will thrive as the greatest of beauties.” [9]
While art may be one way of bringing attention to the mysteries of divine mercy, our own lives are evidence enough of a reality impinged by a loving, merciful God, whose every gift to man is as miraculous as every breath. And though we can never understand the ways in which God is at work—trying to parse this is far more disorienting than Tintoretto’s Last Supper—we can have faith that this metaphysics is as real as you or me. Like art, the Christian form is a commission by God to display Himself. And where we—and Tintoretto—fail to depict or understand this incredible reality, God still stands, incarnate, whole, breathing miracles into every moment.
1. Pallucchini, Rodolfo, “Tintoretto,” Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tintoretto.
2. 1 Corinthians 11:24, ESV; Matthew 26:28, ESV.
3. John 8:12
4. Matthew 5:3
5. Matthew 19:24
6. Matthew 25
7. Exodus 31, ESV.
8. Suger, “De Consecratione,” or “On the Consecration of the Church,” On the Abbey Church of St-Denis and its Art Treasures, translated by Erwin Panofsky (Princeton: Princeton Press, 1948), 63-64.
9. Von Balthasar, Hans Urs, “Introduction,” The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Volume I: Seeing the Form, translated by Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (San Francisco, Ignatius Press), 28.
