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Jesus’ Last Supper – Supersized

  • Heidee
  • March 29, 2010
Last supper
Giving us a clue into what 15th Century people ate

It’s Lent, perfect time to talk about Jesus. While he was alive, he increased five loaves of bread and two fishes so that it fed more than five thousand men. More than two millennia later, It seems as though he is performing miracles beyond his grave, or should I say beyond his resurrection. The food in the Last Supper paintings, one of the most reproduced paintings depicting him, have also increased.

What Jesus Would Have Dined on in the 1300'sOops, did your eyes just increase in size as well? It’s actually no miracle but a case of art imitating life. Based on this rule, a pair of scholars, the Wansink brothers, decided to trace when the trend of increasing food portion sizes began by analyzing 52 of the best known depictions of the most commonly painted meal – Jesus Christ’s Last Supper. These paintings were coded into a CAD-CAM program that allowed the items to be scanned, rotated and calculated, regardless of their original orientation in the painting. The sizes of the loaves of bread, main dishes and plates were assessed based on the average size of the heads depicted in the paintings to account for the varying dimensions of the paintings. An index of 2.0 for the bread would indicate that the average width of the bread was twice the width of the average disciple’s head. To confirm that their findings were not biased, the calculation of relevant ratios of size was confirmed by two independent coders who did not know the purpose of the study.

11th Century FrescoThe main dishes depicted in the paintings contained included fish or eel (18%), lamb (14%) and pork (7%); the remaining paintings had no discernible main dish (46%). And the results? As expected, the size of food depicted in these paintings increased with time. From its depiction circa 1000 AD/CE to the present, the ratio of main course entree has generally increased by 69.2%while bread has increased by 23.1%. To accommodate the food, the plate size also increased by 65.6%. The complete results are published in the International Journal of Obesity.

Da Vinci’s painting doesn’t just provide a code about the Holy Grail, after all, but could also very well provide the first clue to how we got to our present state of supersized meals, as this study suggests.

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