Passover

This Passover scene from 1466 is a wing of the Altarpiece of the Holy Sacrament, depicting the Hebrew Passover meal—bread, bitter herbs, roasted lamb eaten in haste by the Israelites before the Exodus—as typological prefiguration of the Christian Eucharist. Bouts renders the scene with Flemish domestic specificity: the figures gathered around a table, their clothing and posture given the precision of contemporary observation though set in a notional Old Testament context. The theological argument of the altarpiece as a whole was that Christian sacramental practice fulfilled and superseded Jewish ritual, a standard medieval typological framework. Bouts makes this abstract theological program visually compelling through characteristic naturalistic detail.

The Passover table is rendered with Bouts's meticulous attention to domestic detail and spatial construction, the ritual meal depicted with the same careful precision he brought to the central Last Supper panel.