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Find Christ at the far left, then the man on the stool at the center with his back to you: Rubens placed Judas, not Christ, in the middle of the scene.
This is one of Rubens’s designs for the Breviarium Romanum, a Roman Catholic prayer book reissued in 1614 under the new rules of the Counter-Reformation. The scene opened the prayers for the feast of Corpus Christi. The careful layers of ink, wash and white, and the lines incised to transfer the design, show how closely Rubens wanted to control the printed version.
Pen and brown ink, with brush and brown wash, heightened with touches of white opaque watercolor, over traces of black chalk, on cream laid paper, incised for transfer · 30.2 × 19.7 cm · Art Institute of Chicago · Baroque
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Details and source
- Museum title
- The Last Supper
- Artist
- Peter Paul Rubens Flemish, 1577–1640
- Date
- late 1613 or early 1614
- Medium
- Pen and brown ink, with brush and brown wash, heightened with touches of white opaque watercolor, over traces of black chalk, on cream laid paper, incised for transfer
- Dimensions
- 30.2 × 19.7 cm (11 15/16 × 7 13/16 in.)
- Credit line
- Gift of Richard and Mary L. Gray
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- Art Institute of Chicago
Galler’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.