EVOLUTION OF THE COMPOSITION CANON OF THE LAST SUPPER IN THE ART OF THE MIDDLE AGES AND RENAISSANCE

Abstract

The article states that the plot of the Last Supper, at which the Sacrament of the Eucharist was initiated, acts as a certain watershed between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, since the evangelical event is interpreted here in different waysю In the first case, it is usually interpreted as an ordinary meal, and in the second, it is considered as the celebration of the Jewish Passover by Christ and the apostles, which turns the situation into a connecting the Old and New Testaments link. It is proven that the Byzantine tradition increasingly focused attention on the moment of spiritual ecstasy, which led to a demonstrative violation of the logic of the physical world in favor of the symbol. Instead, the Western tradition cultivated, starting from the time of the establishment of the Romanesque style, an ever greater naturalism and freedom of individual creative interpretation of the Gospel event, which in the era of the late Gothic and especially the Renaissance sometimes leads to an open neglect of both the spiritual content of the plot and those crumbs of historical realities that were kept from ancient times in the art of the early Middle Ages. This opened up space for an extensive "dialogue with nature" and for the psychologization of the characters and the active modernization of the canonical basis. The main idea of the article is the need to apply a comparative analysis of the stable functioning of the Byzantine canon and the creative initiative of Western masters in interpreting this plot. As a result of highlighting the problem in the aspect of a broad comparative analysis, the conclusion emerges that, in this way, we get the key to the proper analysis of such a difficult phenomenon as the process of transplantation of the theological postulates of Christianity to the sphere of church art in the East and West of the Christian world. This helps to understand in more detail the historical focus and ways of evolution of the sacred art of Europe.

Key words: Last Supper, Byzantine canon, Middle Ages, Renaissance, composition, naturalism, stylistic systems.