Cena

The title Cena — Italian for supper or meal — likely refers to a Last Supper scene, one of the most frequently commissioned subjects in European religious painting. Jean Jouvenet painted several works related to the Gospel meals of Christ, and a Last Supper would have been entirely consistent with his established range of New Testament subjects. The canvas, dated around 1700 and held in the National Museum in Warsaw, may have been painted for an ecclesiastical patron in France and subsequently acquired by the Polish royal or aristocratic collection. Jouvenet's treatment of communal meal scenes brought the theatrical crowd-management skills developed in his large devotional canvases to a subject that required both doctrinal dignity and human warmth. The Last Supper convention established by Leonardo had been endlessly revisited by seventeenth-century painters; Jouvenet's version would have negotiated between that famous model and the Baroque preference for more dynamic, emotionally charged figure arrangements.

Oil on canvas with the broad horizontal format naturally suited to a meal scene around a table. Jouvenet's colour in this period is warm and saturated — deep crimsons, ochres, and whites reading against darker shadowed passages. The apostles would be individually characterised following the convention of assigning each a distinct gesture and expression drawn from Le Brun's theory of the passions. Table still-life elements — bread, cup, vessels — are rendered with supporting naturalistic precision.