Das Abendmahl

Tintoretto painted the Last Supper more than once, and in Venice you can walk from one to another. In the 1560s, working for a parish congregation of ordinary Venetians, he set the meal in what looks like the back room of a working household. The apostles wear the patched clothes of laborers, the table is covered with plain cloth, the chairs have rush seats you could buy at any market. That was the point. Instead of a solemn frieze of thirteen figures facing out, he crowded the scene with the clutter of a real supper, cats and jugs and a floor you could trip on. By the end of his life he pushed the same subject much further, dissolving the room into swirling light and hovering angels.