Ruth’s harvest picnic of bread and dips
I’ve always found it difficult to envisage the Last Supper with the Disciples ranged round the table on couches, as prosperous Romans ate.
We don’t have pictures of the Last Supper from the first centuries. The holy event tended to be represented symbolically by loaves and fishes. This connected it with the feeding of the 5,000 – and, of course, the fish, ichthus, stood as an acronym for Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Saviour (Iesous Christos Theou Huios Soter).
Or the Last Supper was depicted by means of its Old Testament antitypes, such as the three guests fed by Abraham, the manna gathered in the desert or the sacrifice of bread and wine by Melchisedek.
One of the earliest surviving pictures of the Last Supper in classical style is an early sixth-century mosaic at Sant’apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna. In a fascinatingly illustrated new book, CM Kauffman, formerly of the V&A and Courtauld, points out that Jesus and the Apostles are depicted in this mosaic wearing Roman tunics and cloaks, and reclining on a stibadium, a couch set round a semi-circular table. It would have been a bit of furniture more massive than the most florid Edwardian dining table and sideboard.
Might not the people at the Last Supper in fact have sat on low cushions, as Bedouin do, with the food on a low table in the middle? No matter. Art and reality are different things, and, as time went on, Bible scenes were, until the historicising 19th century, depicted in contemporary dress.
Yet manuscript art was conservative, and it was a virtue to follow precedent. The stibadium arrangement is depicted in a ninthcentury manuscript image of the dinner enjoyed (for a time) by Job’s sons and daughters, and for the guests at Belshazzar’s Feast in the very stylised early 12th-century manuscript from Santo Domingo de Silos, Spain, now in the British Museum.
In his book, Eve’s Apple to the Last Supper: Picturing Food in the Bible, Professor Kauffmann is delighted by a manuscript illumination that illustrates the Book of Ruth. It is rare in showing peasants seated on the ground for their meal. Even so, they have a clean white cloth spread over their knees – to keep their clothes clean or to keep the food clean, I’m unsure.
These peasants are reapers sharing with Ruth their midday meal of bread dipped in sour wine, called in Latin acetum or in the original Hebrew chomets. It is shown in a bowl ready for dipping, balanced on top of a jug. Some of the men stand around with pitchforks and straw hats, and two of them have knives for cutting their bread rolls open.
Professor Kauffmann observes in his chapter on the Last Supper (which is depicted in medieval times far more often than any other biblical meal) how manuscript art and mural art influenced each other. A sixth-century Gospel manuscript in Greek, from Rossano in southern Italy, shows the Disciples reclining at the Last Supper. This image was closely followed 500 years later in a wall painting at the abbey of Sant’angelo near Capua.
Similarly, as far as style goes, the wonderful 12th-century paintings on the vaults of St Isidore in Leon (which are just as worth seeing as the celebrated stained glass in the cathedral) resemble manuscript miniatures blown up to life size.
There, as with Ruth’s reapers, the shepherds sit upon the ground, one on his cloak and playing the pan-pipes, another giving his dog a drink from a bowl with a handle that he holds out for it. For us, such everyday details in old biblical illustrations add to their charm.