Breaking Bread: Piety, Poverty, and Praxis in Tintoretto's Last Suppers

Abstract

Jacopo Robusti, known as Tintoretto, completed nine paintings of the Last Supper during his lifetime. These works exhibit a stylistic and iconographic evolution that showcases a deep preoccupation with the impoverished, while versions completed after the Council of Trent also center the Eucharist as their primary subject. Concurrently, careful analysis of Tintoretto’s career during and after the 1570s reveals a developing pattern of gift giving and generosity that becomes counterproductive to maintaining a successful business and undermines the traditional view of Tintoretto’s business-driven character and artistic persona. These factors, coupled with the stylistic developments found in the post-Tridentine Last Suppers, emphasize that Tintoretto’s primary motive in his late career was the acquisition of piety through the act of painting.