Dieric Bouts - Last supper (central panel of "Altarpiece of the Holy Sacrament")

• Title: Last supper (central panel of "Altarpiece of the Holy Sacrament")
• Artist: Dieric Bouts (c.1415-1475)
• Date: c.1464-67
• Medium: Oil on oak panel
• Dimensions: 180 x 151 cm (central panel) and 89 x 72 cm (each wing)

The “Last supper” is the central panel of “Altarpiece of the Holy Sacrament” of Saint Peter’s Church in Leuven, Belgium.

The painting is structured with a single vanishing point in the centre above Christ’s head, though the small side room has its own vanishing point. The slant of the table is such that the viewer seems to stand higher and look down on the scence, similarly to the rendering by two Italian pre-Renaissance artists of the Last Supper scene, that of Pietro Lorenzetti from 1320 and that of Duccio from 1325. Funnily, his son, Albrecht Bouts, will use this slanted perspective repeatedly, particularly in Jesus with Simon the Pharisee of c.1490.

Bouts was one of the first North Europeans to have used Italian linear perspective and to have depicted the biblical subject of the Last Supper. However, Bouts did not focus on the biblical narrative itself but instead presented Christ in the role of a priest performing the consecration of the Eucharistic host from the Catholic Mass blessing the viewers who would have been sitting on the church’s pews.