The Last Supper (Tintoretto)

The supper table runs back on a steep diagonal into a smoky, lamp-lit hall where servants clear dishes and the air itself seems to thicken into hovering angels. Tintoretto rejects the calm frontal symmetry of earlier Last Suppers - against, say, Leonardo's lucid stillness - for restless movement, plunging perspective, and flickering light, the moment Christ gives the bread charged with supernatural energy. Painted late in his life for the Benedictine church of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, it makes the Eucharist a blaze of mystery rather than a frozen act of betrayal.