The Last Supper

Tintoretto's Last Supper at San Marcuola, painted in 1547 for the Venetian church facing the Grand Canal in the Cannaregio sestiere, is among the earliest of the seven treatments of this subject that he would produce across five decades — a lifelong meditation on how to represent the institution of the Eucharist that culminated in the visionary final version at San Giorgio Maggiore (1592–94). The 1547 version is compositionally more conservative than his later treatments, the table set at a conventional right angle to the picture plane, the apostles arranged without the radical spatial compression and dramatic light effects of his mature style. But even here Tintoretto's engagement with the Counter-Reformation significance of the subject is evident: the Eucharist was the doctrinal center of Catholic theology being asserted against Protestant challenges at the Council of Trent, and images of the Last Supper carried enormous theological weight in post-Tridentine churches. San Marcuola, a modest Venetian parish church whose name derives from 'Santi Ermagora e Fortunato' compressed through Venetian dialect, preserves this early Tintoretto in the setting for which it was created.

The early treatment arranges the apostles around the table with dynamic gestures and expressions. Tintoretto's energetic early style already shows his characteristic compositional inventiveness.