Workshop of Niccolò di Tommaso, The Last Supper

Richard Morris Hunt (1828–1895), New York; Richard Howland Hunt (1862–1931), New York; Richard Carley Hunt (1886–1954), New York

The wood structure of this tabernacle base, though much worn, is intact but for the loss of a molding running along the front and sides at the bottom. The frieze above this missing molding is silver gilt and also very worn, surviving mostly as exposed gesso and tarnished bolus. The frieze on the front is decorated with simple dot punches, while the frieze on the returns introduces a six-petaled rosette punch. The thinner molding above this frieze is largely preserved, though with its silvered surface impaired. The painted surface of the curved superstructure of the base varies in width from 52 centimeters at the bottom to 38.2 centimeters at the top. The gilding and paint of this surface are both well preserved, apart from deep scratches through the face of Christ and through the head of the third apostle from left behind the table. Scattered local losses elsewhere within the painted image are inconsequential, and abrasion is minimal, although some lighter pigments used in the draperies have faded sufficiently to permit underdrawing to be clearly visible through them. The sloping sides of this superstructure are silver gilt (fig. 1), with stamped borders and a painted vegetal motif that may or may not be original. The top edge of the panel is also silver gilt, though this is unlikely to be original. Two sets of dowel holes are drilled into this edge. One set, aligned approximately along the midline of the base, is 13.5 centimeters apart on center and is probably original. The other, slightly further back, is 22.5 centimeters apart and is probably later; gilding on the top edge of the base may have occurred when it was repurposed with these later holes. A cavity at the back edge of the base may have been intended to accommodate a backing board as part of the original structure. The second set of dowel holes half overlaps this cavity, suggesting that the backing board may have been cut through flush with the top edge of the base. The remnant still affixed within the cavity would then have been present when the second set of holes was drilled and was presumably removed when the base was freed from whatever the second set of holes was intended to support.

The Last Supper is commonly represented in fourteenth-century illuminated manuscripts but encountered with surprising infrequency in trecento panel painting. In this image, the apostles are disposed around a long trestle table set parallel to the picture plane, with Christ seated on an intarsia-inlaid bench at the head of the table at left. Next to Him and seated behind the table, Saint John the Evangelist bends over to lay his head in Christ’s lap. Seven other apostles are seated to the right of the Evangelist behind the table, all of them looking across and down toward Saint John, as is the single apostle seated at the foot of the table at right. Three apostles are seated in front of the table on three-legged stools, all of whom are shown in profile. At right, an apostle dressed in blue looks to the right toward his companion seated at the foot of the table. To his left, an apostle dressed in yellow looks to the left toward Christ. To that apostle’s left, Judas Iscariot, in light blue and identifiable by his lack of a halo, also looks toward Christ. The table is laid with a white cloth and set with plates, glasses, and knives, although with no particular care to place these directly in front of any of the figures.

The composition fills an unusual curved surface, the belled foot of which reveals its original purpose as the base of a tabernacle. The painted surface has a richly tooled gold ground, while the vertical front edge is silver gilt and punched. Two dowel holes drilled in the top edge of the structure once secured the tabernacle to which it was attached, which may additionally have been supported by a backing board extending down the full height of the Yale panel. The presence of this backing board may imply that the tabernacle was of greater-than-usual weight or comprised precious materials, such as would have been the case with a reliquary or verre églomisé plaque. Such curved and painted tabernacle bases are more frequently encountered in Siena, where they remained popular into the fifteenth century, than in Florence. A similarly shaped reliquary tabernacle painted by the Sienese artist Francesco di Vannuccio is preserved in the collection of the Monte dei Paschi di Siena, while a larger and more elaborate double-sided example dated 1347 is in the Cleveland Museum of Art (fig. 2). The latter retains, in addition to the base, the frame with reliquary cavities that it supported but lacks the painted or decorated center the frame once enclosed. The narrative subject of the Yale base may imply that it once supported a sacrament tabernacle or ostensorium, although no exact parallel examples are known that remain intact.

When it was presented to the Yale University Art Gallery in 1937, the Last Supper was attached to a panel of the Crucifixion obviously much later than it and now attributed to Bicci di Lorenzo (see Bicci di Lorenzo, The Crucifixion with Saints and the Penitent Magdalen) The base was, at that time, labeled simply as by an unknown Florentine artist, but there has been no dissension among the few scholars to have considered the work since it was first published by Richard Offner in 1956 with an attribution to Niccolò di Tommaso.¹ The repeated facial types of the apostles recall Niccolò’s frescoes in the Convento del Tau in Pistoia and fully justify Offner’s attribution, but the painting lacks the artist’s usual concision of rendering and evinces none of his considerable sophistication in suggesting spatial relationships among the figures or in their setting. It is possible that this broader, more casual handling may be explained by workshop intervention or the ancillary function of the painting as the base of a frame: the decoration of some of the predellas attached to tabernacle triptychs by Niccolò are similarly vague in style, although without exception, they are smaller and less detailed than the Yale Last Supper. It is also possible that it is an indication of persistent confusion between Niccolò’s works and those of his almost-exact contemporary Andrea Bonaiuti (documented 1343–79), especially during a period in their early careers probably covering the decade of the 1350s. Erling Skaug emphasized the probability of extended contact, possibly collaboration, between Niccolò di Tommaso and Andrea Bonaiuti sometime prior to 1365, based on the appearance of a single punch tool—number 90 in his charts—in numerous paintings by both artists, a tool evidently used by no one else in trecento Florence.² Skaug also identified a second tool shared by the two painters—a six-petaled rosette, number 452 in his charts—which occurs in one painting by Andrea Bonaiuti and in two by Niccolò di Tommaso, one of which is the Yale Last Supper.³ —LK

1. Offner 1956b, 191. ↩︎

2. Skaug 1994, 1:167; 2: no. 90. ↩︎

3. Skaug 1994, 1:165; 2: no. 452. ↩︎