Andrea del Castagno (Italian, 1420 – 1457)
Cenacolo di Sant’Apollonia, Florence
This Last Supper is a fresco by the Italian Renaissance artist Andrea del Castagno, located in the refectory of the convent of Sant’Apollonia, now the Museo di Cenacolo di Sant’Apollonia, and accessed through a door on Via Ventisette Aprile at the corner with Santa Reparata, in Florence. The painting depicts Jesus and the Apostles during the Last Supper, with Judas, unlike all the other apostles, sitting separately on the near side of the table, as is common in depictions of the Last Supper in Christian art.
Sant’Apollonia was a Benedictine convent of cloistered nuns, and Castagno’s fresco was not publicly known until the convent was suppressed in 1866. Thus its exclusively female audience should be considered in analyzing the work. Castagno painted a large chamber with life-sized figures that confronted the nuns at every meal. The fresco would have served as a didactic image and an inspiration to meditation on their relationship with Jesus.
Although the Last Supper is described in all four Gospels, Castagno’s fresco seems most closely aligned with the account in the Gospel of John, in which eleven of the apostles are confused and the devil “enters” Judas when Jesus announces one of his followers will betray him. Saint John’s posture of innocent slumber neatly contrasts with Judas’s tense, upright pose and exaggeratedly pointed facial features. Except for Judas, Christ and his apostles, including the recumbent Saint John, all have a translucent disc of a halo above their heads.
Andrea del Castagno (1420 – 1457) was an Italian Renaissance painter in Florence, influenced chiefly by Masaccio and Giotto. In 1447 Castagno worked in the refectory of the Benedictine nuns at Sant’Apollonia in Florence, painting, in the lower part, a fresco of the Last Supper, accompanied above by other scenes portraying the Passion of Christ: the Crucifixion, Entombment, and Resurrection, which are now damaged. The fresco of the Last Supper is in an excellent state of conservation, in part because it remained behind a plaster wall for more than a century. Many important Florentine families had daughters in the convent at Sant’Apollonia, so painting there probably brought Andrea to Florentine fame. Del Castagno’s Last Supper may have been seen by Leonardo da Vinci before he painted his own Last Supper, about 50 years later. Castagno died of the plague in 1457.
- The Museo di Cenacolo di Sant’Apollonia is open in the mornings, free entrance. It’s in the centre of Florence, but totally off the beaten track.
- For directions, click here.