Last Supper

When Basel turned Protestant in 1529, crowds moved through its churches pulling down and burning religious images, and Holbein's Last Supper only just came through. What hangs here is a fragment. The outer boards are gone and the panel was cut down, so only nine of the original twelve apostles remain, with later repairs done none too carefully. Holbein had painted it a few years earlier, around 1524, borrowing the crowded, agitated table from Leonardo's mural in Milan, which he seems to have known through copies. The subject is the instant Christ says that one of the men at the table will betray him. You can still read that shock on the faces that were spared, pressed tight along a table that once ran much wider.