Advent 12

Tintoretto was by all accounts something of an opereator in Venice - undercutting other artists to obtain important commissions and generally making himself unpopular with his peers. He claimed to have been apprenticed to Titian but that master seems to have denied the connection. Whatever, Tintoretto could paint. In this Last Supper he defies classical perspective and looks upon the scene on the diagonal, giving prominence to servient underlings instead of Christ and the apostles. He was playing the same manner of tricks that Orson Welles would bring to bear in cinema four and a half centuries later.