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 idiosync...