Peasant Meal or Lord's Feast? The Social Iconography of the Naumburg Last Supper

Abstract

The image of the Last Supper on the mid-thirteenth-century west choir screen at Naumburg Cathedral has long bewildered and amused commentators, who have seen in the figures' robust bodies and emphatic eating gestures evidence of coarseness and rusticity. This study questions the accuracy of the view that the Last Supper was conceived as a peasant meal through analysis of both modern scholarly literature and relevant medieval sources, and offers a new interpretation of the scene's social content. The first section traces the peasant interpretation through its varying permutations in art historical texts, finding its roots not in the image but rather in the rhetoric of German nationalism that developed after World War I. The second section tests the peasant thesis by holding the Naumburg image up against contemporaneous pictorial and textual representations of manual laborers and concludes that the relief presents a world that is anything but lowly. Even the eating gestures of the apostles-the most idiosyncratic element of the panel, and the subject of the final section of this paper-conforms to guidelines laid out in handbooks of table manners (Tischzuchten) that circulated among the petty nobility in the mid-thirteenth century. As surprising as the apostles' behavior may appear to modern eyes, medieval sources reveal that the figures demonstrate through their gestures what courtly clerics and laypeople prized as schoene site, or beautiful manners, even as they play out the drama of redemption. Through its elevated setting, I argue, the Naumburg Last Supper casts the treason of Judas in terms of misbehavior at a lord's feast, thus heightening the ethical import of the scene for an audience of clerics and laypeople trained in the codes of courtesy.

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