Slashdot Mirror
Supersizing the "Last Supper"
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.'"
Everyone has blinders (or sets of presuppositions) - to assume otherwise is ignoring reality. If I begin a project in web design, I have a certain set of presuppositions about how things go together - this on the basis of general consensus. If I begin a project involving history, I begin with a certain set of presuppositions (If I set out to do a project on what the food was at the Last Supper, I would generally have to have as a presupposition that the meal happened).
Being scholarly does not mean rejecting presupposition but rather working towards a greater understanding of a given topic while understanding the presuppositions upon which my research is based.
And if we really want to get down to it, the whole reason we have "scholarly" pursuits is because of the medieval "scholastics" who were almost uniformly religious in some respect.
I only know a bit about the ancient greek habits - the strength was probably about the same as today, given that the winemaking techniques are not fundamentally different. It was, however, almost always watered down. There are different accounts on the amount of watering - during a symposion, one person, the symposiarch, was in duty of the watering. The mostly used ratio probably was 3 parts water on 2 parts wine. I think Plutarch discusses the matter in depth *somewhere*, but I'd have to dig deeper to find a quotation. Drinking the wine pure was often considered barbaric or even dangerous, apart from medical use.
The use for making the water safe is obvious, but there also was a huge culture surrounding wine, with ancient greek wine critics going into details just as the modern ones. It was also common to flavour the wines by adding honey, herbs or spices.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.