My Quarantine Obsession: Last Suppers

Comparing two masterpiece treatments just 50 years apart.

tribulation, shock, gravitas, confusion, silent states of being, psyches agape—it is perhaps the most dramatic moment in Western history. This is the cosmic hour of despair in which Jesus announces that one of the 12 disciples gathered for the Last Supper will betray him that night and that this is the last time he will dine with them on this Earth. He bestows the Eucharist on humanity with a primitive, cannibalistic “Take, eat; this is my body”; “Drink … this is my blood.” He offers a new commandment, “Love one another,” and makes one of his apostles the new son of his mother. How is an artist to get all this into a painting?

In this time, overwhelmed and dizzied, I find myself going back to Renaissance masterworks for reasons I don’t entirely understand. Probably this has to do with feeling those paintings depict, indeed enact, momentous shifts—philosophical, stylistic, social, political, and economic—that not long before had been literally unthinkable. They are paintings in which so much is at stake. I think it also returns to the kind of painting imprinted on me as a 10-year-old really seeing art for the first time, when I became obsessed with piecing meaning together from pictures. Being a Jewish atheist in love with great stories, wanting to assimilate (even saying I was Catholic for several years), and also in love with ornate systemizations of the world and eternally curious as an outsider to the New Testament—all this makes me look for a measure of our time in those other times.

Which is how I found myself, recently, looking closely at two versions of the Last Supper. Painted just 50 years apart, in almost the same place, more than 500 years ago, they allow me to glean how ideas and worldviews can shift almost overnight. The first is the second-most-famous painting in Western art history: Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, begun in Milan around 1495. The other is an almost unknown 1445–50 masterpiece by Andrea del Castagno in Florence, a painting Leonardo probably knew, studied, and tried to move beyond. Leonardo’s painting shattered older artistic forms and embedded new ideas in material; Castagno’s version, tremendous in its own right, can still surprise and imparts incredible spiritual power.

Really, no one has seen Leonardo’s Last Supper for half a millen

nium, at least as it was meant to be seen. A mad-scientist experimenter with materials and techniques, Leonardo loved blending colors, playing with shading (chiaroscuro) and smoky space (sfumato). For this showpiece, rather than employing stable fresco, he used oil and tempera paint over two coats of gesso and one or two of white lead. This promoted mold between the work and its surface. He paid it no mind. Worse, the wall he painted on was filled with moistureretaining rubble. By the time he finished in 1498, the painting was already deteriorating. It was flaking 20 years later. In 1532, it was called “blurred and colorless.” By midcentury, it was written that “the painting is all ruined.” Vasari described it in 1556 as a “muddle of blots,” saying the figures were unrecognizable. In the 1700s, drapery was hung to protect the work. This trapped moisture between the painting and the fabric; each time the drapery was drawn, the surface was scratched more. Soon, artists began touching up missing and damaged parts. In 1770, the whole thing was largely repainted. At some point, a door was cut into the painting; floods came and went. Napoleon’s army stabled horses in the refectory, and soldiers reportedly lobbed bricks at the apostles’ heads. Finally, on August 15, 1943, the building was struck by Allied bombers and mostly destroyed: The roof was blown off. The painting survived, covered in sandbags and mattresses, but remained exposed to the elements for months. In 1999, the entire thing was “restored.” So who knows what we’re looking at?

Even so, we are struck by Leonardo’s gigantic leap of painterly faith. Unlike almost any Last Supper before it—which tended to be flatter, more grounded in symbolism and part-by-part narrative— Leonardo’s work was meant to be grasped simultaneously in a whoosh of emotion. The artist wrote that all the component parts of his work should be “seen at one and the same time both together and separately.” This is insanely advanced—it is how Vincent van Gogh wanted us to see his subject matter, surface, strokes, paint, and texture all at the same time. Leonardo’s painting has a flow of sensual space, feeling, movement, atmosphere, light, and drama—a visual-intellectualphilosophical-psychological order that hadn’t been presented or imagined on the Earth before.

This isn’t a style of the Church, Italy, a patron, or a doctrine. It’s a personal style, the work of a self-taught 40-something gay man who devised ways to dye one’s hair blond as well as build bridges. Art history has been going through regular stylistic shifts ever since. This is what a social revolution looks like.

This brings us to Castagno’s marvelous Last Supper, a Middle Renaissance masterpiece. This huge beauty covers one wall in the Florence refectory of the Benedictine nuns of Saint Apollonia. The space isn’t rhythmic, cinematic, naturalistic, breathing, or real. It’s a wildly exciting mix of Byzantine with forced geometric perspective, exaggerated horizontality, metaphysical symbolism, finicky late medievalism, spiritualism, and episodic herky-jerkiness. It shows us what Last Suppers used to look like: Each disciple might be given particular attributes to universalize them and make them recognizable; they might hold certain objects, follow established iconographic or pictorial programs, pose in specific ways.

Even if it doesn’t represent an Olympian height and will never be on a fridge magnet, I love it more than Leonardo’s. Castagno’s picture flattens like a fabulous kaleidoscopic illuminated manuscript; the overall optical effect is like seeing a hallucinogenic inlaid marble table from above. There’s no light source, windows, or central majestic Jesus, so the eye darts about this uncentered mazy space. Without having Leonardo’s unity, Castagno’s painting is about presenting a lot of information bit by bit anywhere you look. It’s a tour de force of divided attention.

Castagno’s Last Supper is set where it was in the Bible: the eastern Roman Empire city of Jerusalem. The dress is contemporary Roman: toga. The décor is wealthy contemporary Roman. Unlike Leonardo’s nondescript room, opulent materials and patterns are the visual stars of the painting—particularly six magnificent marble panels behind the disciples. Each is a lavalike abstraction of the emotional state of the disciple below. I don’t recall ever seeing anything like these before. These are each great abstract paintings. We may identify Egyptian serpentinegreen porphyry (a sign of great wealth and position), cipollino rosso from nearby western Turkey, and breccia pavonazzo, among other colors.

All the apostles are scrunched together in a row on a long built-in banquette in an alcove—almost like rowers in a Roman barge. As close as they are together, however, each is in his own visual and interior space. This is important. This may be contemporary Jerusalem, but Castagno’s is a great otherworldly stage where this frozen moment is played out in a never-changing, eternal tableau. This mystic dislocation connects Castagno to the mind-set and space of Gothic and medieval art. Things don’t flow; they stop and start. Yet his scale, space, techniques, ambition, and colors are pure Renaissance. This makes optical sparks crackle. The figures are not people so much as they’re symbolic statues and states of mind. This turns a skeleton key in the picture. Now I see the disciples having visionary premonitions of all dying martyrs’ deaths.

Start with Judas, easy to spot as the only one without a halo, and in medieval style, Castagno seats him alone on the opposite side of the table. Note his hooknose and stereotypical Jewish features. Judas teeters on a three-legged stool and seems suspended in midair. His feet dangle, which makes him look silly and stunted. In the Gospel of John (the account Castagno appears to use), Peter asks Jesus to say who the traitor is. Jesus says it is he whom he offers a crust of bread. Look close; Judas holds that sop in his right hand. We don’t see his left hand, perhaps because it grips the 30 pieces of silver received for the betrayal.

Peter is seated on Jesus’ right (our left). His backstory explains his unusual defensive pose—which is one hand grasping his other wrist in front of him, as if in denial. The Gospel records that Peter protests to Jesus at dinner that he will never betray him. Jesus tells him that he will deny him three times before the break of the next day. This comes to pass. (He also falls asleep while on guard right before Christ is arrested.) The disciple to Peter’s right is James the Minor. He looks into a glass of red wine; you can almost see the reflection of his head there. He was later said to have been stabbed, beaten, clubbed, sawed in two, and thrown off a wall in Rome.

Next is Thomas, who looks up in a gesture of doubt, as if to say to Jesus’ story, “I don’t know about that.” Of course, this is Doubting Thomas, who sees Jesus after his death, still doesn’t believe it’s him, and is told to “thrust [your hand] into my side and be not faithless.” The other two disciples on this side of the table are Philip and Matthew, who in Turkey and Ethiopia, respectively, were said to have been impaled, beheaded, hanged, or crucified. No wonder everyone seems frozen. They’re being given some sort of intuition of what’s to come.

On Jesus’ immediate left (our right) is John. Often called the Beloved of Christ, he bows his head into Jesus’ arm. Some accounts say he was beheaded, others that he died of old age in the year AD 98 in Turkey. Said to be the youngest of the 12 and deemed by Jesus to be his mother’s new son, he looks so sweet I prefer this latter explanation of him as some sole-surviving Ishmael of the crew. Next is Andrew, who holds a knife. He turns to his dining partner Bartholomew, who will be flayed alive in Armenia—as if saying, “This is for you.” Perhaps Andrew’s twisted foot implies his crucifixion on an X-shaped cross. Next

is Jude, who is the most emotionally lost at sea. He will later be shot with arrows, clubbed, or crucified. The last two are Simon, crucified in Jerusalem, and James the Major, who will be stoned, clubbed, or crucified there as well. The violent death of Jesus and his disciples are key components of Christianity. I surmise that had Jesus sat under a yew tree, like the Buddha, and simply ascended to heaven, Christianity mightn’t have been what it became. Suffering and death are at the core of its idea of redemption, at least before Martin Luther. And that’s in this painting.

This is a great painting, a masterpiece in pristine condition. But there are no lines to see it, no souvenir industry built around it. Maybe it’s because Castagno died so very young, before the age of 40. He arrived at this height of Middle Renaissance painting when he was barely in his 20s and apparently bound for extraordinary things. But he didn’t live to be part of the revolution. He wasn’t there to develop and advance a style he helped codify. Still, this painting beats with genius, though genius of an era that was dying as soon as it was painted. ■ trailing off questioningly. No further explanation needed.

Palm Springs is the absurdly charming narrative-feature debut of director Max Barbakow and writer Andy Siara, and it is indeed another exploration of what it’s like to be stuck in a moment you can’t get out of. But one of its immediate pleasures comes in how dexterously it skims past many of the obligatory beats in order to get to less-explored territory. It’s not that Sarah (Cristin Milioti), a recalcitrant maid of honor at her sister’s destination wedding, isn’t shaken to find herself returned to the start of her day after a strange encounter with a mysterious cave in the desert. It’s just that Nyles (Andy Samberg), the man she follows into the cave after a hookup goes horribly awry, has been dealing with their now-shared situation for longer than he cares to divulge. Sarah wants to drive all night until she has escaped back home to Austin? Nyles has already traveled much farther and found it a wasted effort. Sarah opts to steer the car straight into the path of an oncoming semi in hopes that death will provide an escape? Nyles unbuckles his seat belt and informs her he’ll see her in the morning. Cycles of panic and denial are dispatched in record time until what remains are two emotionally skittish people trapped together on November 9 for a possible eternity. What’s left for them to do but fall in love?

Honestly, a fair amount, including a choreographed dance number. For one especially giddy stint in the middle of the film, the stranded pair take advantage of the fact that nothing they do matters, and the sequence manages to be both more adventurous and less dark than you might expect. Sarah (in her own words) “fucks around and drinks too much,” while Nyles is an apocalyptic variation on the exuberantly immature goofballs Samberg always plays, but they’re still fundamentally nice people. The Hello Kitty–cute chemistry between Milioti and Samberg would verge on cloying if a few obvious revelations weren’t waiting in the wings to fuck things up. Palm Springs is a romantic comedy, but its central question is less whether these two characters will get together than whether they’ll be able to build a future for themselves. The endlessly resetting day becomes a metaphor for a relationship in its early stages, when it’s all fun and none of the hard stuff. Nyles has achieved an equilibrium that looks Zen from afar but turns out to be a means of emotional avoidance and selfprotection. Sarah harbors serious tendencies toward self-sabotage, but she’s willing to try to change and move forward.

All of this makes Palm Springs, at its core, something a little discouragingly conventional under the cleverly executed high concept—a movie about a woman waiting for a man to grow up enough to commit. The characters meet as cynics feeling alienated by the spectacle of matrimony, though they’re hardly removed from the straightforward hetero monogamy they roll their eyes at. Still, the film is too quick on its feet and too eager to please to begrudge it that eventual turn. Palm Springs is the latest project from the Lonely Island, the comedy troupe turned production company Samberg runs with Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone. While the trio didn’t write or direct this film, it owes a lot to their sensibility, especially in knowing when to cut away from a joke. It may be about characters who have all the time in the world, but it’s painstakingly careful not to overstay its own welcome, generously divvying up funny scenes to a supporting cast filled with talent like J.K. Simmons, Meredith Hagner, Dale Dickey, and Peter Gallagher. Palm Springs would have been a scream and likely a word-of-mouth hit in theaters, but maybe there’s something fitting about its going straight to streaming in the middle of a pandemic. What is quarantine, anyway, if not waking up and going through the same routine over and over without end? ■ police. In Woodstock, Bob Dylan, a voice of eloquent youth dissatisfaction in some years prior, stayed home.

That year was also Dylan’s first extended break from songwriting since signing to Columbia Records at the other end of the decade. The folk-rock singer and his wife, Sara, were raising two babies with a third on the way. The Woodstock house became a refuge after his 1966 motorcycle accident. He stopped touring for what would become an eight-year stretch, famously ducking the festival on Max Yasgur’s farm just 60 miles west in 1969, returning to the road in the next decade to play the hits only after a string of critically reviled albums, soundtracks, and compilations had eroded his chart standing and highbrow cachet. The music Dylan wrote at the end of the ’60s is an attempt to escape the pressure of being the voice of a generation. 1969’s Nashville Skyline is a gorgeous foray into pure country, and 1970’s Self Portrait is a playful batch of covers and weird originals, a slick commercial album followed by a puckish parody of the country form.

Over the past decade, in a political climate increasingly identical to the tumult at the end of the 1960s, Dylan disappeared into the Great American Songbook again. After 2012’s dark, foreboding Tempest, Dylan released three albums of standards in quick succession, starting with 2015’s Shadows in the Night, a collection of songs made famous by Frank Sinatra, returning to that well for 2016’s Fallen Angels and completing the experiment with the 2017 triple covers album, Triplicate. The recordings were quaint and frequently pretty, the function of a great rapport between the singer-songwriter and his band. But they painted a portrait of an aging lyricist giving up on feeling out the ever-changing pulse of modern times in his music, of a great song catcher joining the ranks of Michael McDonald and Rod Stewart in resigning to life as a walking oldies jukebox.

The trickle of new Dylan tunes released this year revealed the opposite to be true. Half time-hopping, sidelong fever dream and half epic poem, “Murder Most Foul” found the ’60s veteran returning to the unsteady political climate that birthed his great early songs at a time when people are once more in need of music that girds them in uncertain times. Arriving at the dawn of a period of nationwide sickness and seclusion, “Murder,” with its suggestion that peace is a song away, was a timely word. On the surface, the followup, “I Contain Multitudes,” is a wry bit of peacocking and literary allegory from a famously prickly cultural figure, but look a little deeper, and the act of pitching lyrics about respecting duality into a

moment in history defined by its divisive entrenchment looks a lot like a message about the virtue of balance.

Rough and Rowdy Ways, the album these singles heralded, shares the dualmindedness of “Multitudes.” As much as it is a song cycle about the experience of being Dylan, a public intellectual nearing 80 who has always used the rich and weird culture and history of America to glean fresh understanding about its present, it is also a framework for how to stand tall in the face of nearing mortality. Death is ever present in “Goodbye Jimmy Reed,” a love song disguised as an elegy to the titular Mississippi blues guitarist; in “Crossing the Rubicon,” which references the last days of Julius Caesar and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in its celebration of fearlessness in the face of what looks to be certain doom; and even in “My Own Version of You,” part murder ballad, part love song, and part Frankenstein story.

These aren’t new topics for Dylan; his self-titled 1962 debut features covers of grim gospel and blues tunes like “In My Time of Dyin’,” “Fixin’ to Die,” and “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean.” But on that album, he was using the music of the past to conjure an air of mystery and agelessness, as a young folkie less interested in recounting the story of his own quintessential middle-American childhood than in shining a mirror on the country itself in all of its flaws and virtues. On his new album, the blues are his own; the mystery is gone. Here, there’s an elderly man surveying an unusual ride and bracing himself for what comes next, thanking his many muses and influences and imparting wisdom for anyone who looks up to him as he looked up to the likes of Woody Guthrie and Blind Lemon Jefferson.

Guiding Dylan in this mission is a loyal and limber band, capable of both delicacy and hardness, often at once. “Murder Most Foul” is 17 minutes of gorgeous, shimmering interplay, a band walking its leader up and down a slow-burning crescendo. In “False Prophet” and “My Own Version of You,” the singer’s morbid subject matter is matched by devilish blues. “Black Rider” is all tremolos on acoustic string instruments. “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You,” one of the great sort of noncommittal Dylan songs about love—see “Most Likely You Go Your Way (and I’ll Go Mine)”—is light and tender, like a lullaby. The amalgam of folk, rock, blues, gospel, and country music Rough and Rowdy Ways displays is one the legend has been building and tweaking since the rocky ’60s. His music and his message are every bit as poignant now as they were two generations of unrest ago. ■