La Cène

Giorgio Vasari's La Cène (The Last Supper), painted in 1545 on panel and now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Troyes, belongs to the pictorial tradition of one of Christianity's most frequently represented subjects. The Last Supper was a subject whose compositional conventions had been profoundly altered by Leonardo da Vinci's late fifteenth-century version in Milan, which transformed a ceremonial meal into a moment of dramatic psychological tension. Vasari, deeply conscious of artistic history as the author of the Vite, would have engaged with Leonardo's legacy while imposing his own Mannerist inflection — complex figure groupings, heightened gesture, brilliant colour. A Last Supper of 1545 also carried strong doctrinal resonance in the context of the Council of Trent, which opened that same year and would make the Eucharist central to Counter-Reformation theology.

The panel support and oil medium allowed Vasari the tonal control needed to distinguish the apostles by costume and expression across the long table format. His handling creates a sequence of dramatically varied figures whose responses to Christ's announcement of betrayal demonstrate the full range of his Mannerist figure vocabulary — surprise, grief, protest, and concealment.