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Supersizing the "Last Supper"

Posted by samzenpus on from the a-meal-fit-for-a-king-of-kings dept.

gandhi_2 writes "A pair of sibling scholars compared 52 artists' renditions of 'The Last Supper', and found that the size of the meal painted had grown through the years. Over the last millennium they found that entrees had increased by 70%, bread by 23%, and plate size by 65.6%. Their findings were published in the International Journal of Obesity. From the article: 'The apostles depicted during the Middle Ages appear to be the ascetics they are said to have been. But by 1498, when Leonardo da Vinci completed his masterpiece, the party was more lavishly fed. Almost a century later, the Mannerist painter Jacobo Tintoretto piled the food on the apostles' plates still higher.'"

5 of 98 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Worthless article by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    A less worthless article can be found here:
    http://www.mindlesseating.org/lastsupper/

  2. Re:Sparrow food by JustinKSU · · Score: 5, Informative

    The last supper is thought to have been a Passover Sedar. This would mean, if possible, there would have been many kinds of foods, but not in large quantities.

  3. This isn't Da Vinci's fault by blair1q · · Score: 3, Informative

    Beginning early in the 2d Millennium, the Catholic Church started burning many true ascetics (e.g., the Cathars) as heretics. (They of course then expanded the powers of the Inquisition to include, well, anyone their twisted logic could rationalize to oppress.)

    No doubt this led to a change in the way people perceived heroes from religious history. Da Vinci may never have even considered the idea that an apostle was an ascetic. The Inquisition was in full force, and in charge of most of the governments and virtually all of the churches of Europe, when he painted that picture.

    1. Re:This isn't Da Vinci's fault by blair1q · · Score: 2, Informative

      The church demonized the Cathars' practices. In doing so, they couldn't help but give asceticism a stigma, and to marginalize it. (NB for other readers: the Cathars were Christ worshippers who took any bodily pleasure as sinful, to the point that any sensation at all could be so. Eating food, even just touching another human being on the skin, was eschewed by the Perfecti, those who took on the ultimate rite of the Cathars. These people were, in a word, nuts. But the Catholics were more nuts, and paranoid of losing power to these super-pious beings, so they had the Cathars exterminated). Asceticism could otherwise have grown as a tenet of the church, given that its roots were with the apostles. It could certainly have been a popular feature of the monastic orders. Instead the image of the apostles drifted to popular tropes rather than dogmatic ones. They got fat, and colorful. I'm frankly surprised they aren't being repainted in the Vatican wearing Dockers and iPod earphones...maybe next year.

  4. Re:Some historians are actually questioning Da Vic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    for the complete transcript you can either read the next 72 posts (undoubtedly they will quote the entire skit) or you can look here:

    http://www.mat.upm.es/~jcm/michelangelo.html