
The Last Supper (da Vinci)
Christ has just said one of them will betray him, and the shock rolls down the table. Leonardo's experimental paint began flaking in his lifetime.

Christ has just said one of them will betray him, and the shock rolls down the table. Leonardo's experimental paint began flaking in his lifetime.

The table runs off on a steep diagonal into a smoky hall where servants clear plates and the lamp smoke thickens into angels.

Not the betrayal but the blessing of the bread, staged in a Flemish hall on one of the earliest correct vanishing points in the north.

The room is a twelve-sided glass chamber and a torso hovers over the table. Dalí called this sort of thing nuclear mysticism.

Painted on a refectory wall so the monks dined at the end of the same table. Leonardo would blow the arrangement apart a few years later.

Every apostle is named in gold and Judas sits apart with a darkened halo, which makes the panel a teaching aid as much as a picture.

Christ stands to place the host on each tongue exactly as a priest does at Mass, in a bare cell-like room with stools.

The light in the darkened room seems to be coming off Christ himself, painted when religious art had largely gone out of fashion.