The Supper at Emmaus

The Four Figures

Christ sits at the centre, and Caravaggio painted him without a beard. His hair is long, wavy and parted in the middle, his cheeks are full, and his eyes are lowered almost shut. He wears a red tunic under a cream mantle. His right hand is raised and strongly foreshortened above the table, the palm open, the fingers spread.

The disciple on the left is seen from behind in an olive-green jacket, gripping both arms of his wooden chair as though about to push himself up. There is a split in the cloth at his shoulder with pale lining showing through it. A salmon-coloured cushion is under him.

The disciple on the right is older, balding and grey-bearded, in a brown jerkin over white shirt sleeves. A white scallop shell, the badge of a pilgrim, is pinned to his chest. He has thrown both arms out sideways, and his right hand reaches so far toward the viewer that the fingers are foreshortened into blunt stubs.

Behind them stands the innkeeper in a white cap, a red sleeve showing under a dark jacket. He looks down at Christ without any reaction at all. He is the one person at the table who does not know who is sitting at it.

The Table

A white cloth is laid over a patterned carpet that hangs down the front of the table. On it are a roast fowl on a white dish with a knife beside it, and two bread rolls. Beyond them stand a glass of red wine, a jug decorated in white and blue, and a pale bowl at the right edge.

The wicker basket of fruit sits at the front, and its rim projects past the edge of the table into the viewer's space. It casts a hard shadow back across the cloth. Inside are pale green grapes, dark grapes, a split pomegranate with its red seeds showing, two pears, figs and an apple with a dark blemish in its skin.

The fruit is not idealised. One large vine leaf spread on the cloth is green, and another is brown and spotted. Caravaggio painted the basket as a thing that could fall.

Light and Shadow

The light enters from the upper left and falls across the table, the white cloth and Christ's face. The clearest proof of its direction is the innkeeper's shadow, thrown large and soft onto the bare wall to his right, directly behind Christ's head.

That shadow does the work a halo would do in an older painting. Caravaggio gave Christ no gold and no rays. The only thing marking him out is the dark shape a standing man casts on a plaster wall.

Acquisition and Provenance

The National Gallery records the painting at the Villa Borghese in Rome by 1650, probably in the ownership of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, and lists it in a Borghese inventory of 1693. It stayed in that collection until Prince Camillo Borghese sold it in 1801.

It had entered the collection of the Honourable George Vernon by 1831, and Vernon presented it to the National Gallery in 1839. It is NG172, and it hangs in Room 32.

A Second Supper

Caravaggio painted the subject again some years later, and the second version is in Milan. The London painting is the earlier and the more crowded of the two, with the fuller table and the wider gestures.

The comparison is often made to show how far his work changed after he left Rome in 1606. The later canvas is darker and quieter, with less on the table and smaller movements.

Close reading

Reading the work, detail by detail

Caravaggio pushed the table to the front of the canvas and then pushed things off it. A basket of fruit hangs over the edge, one disciple's hand comes out toward the viewer, and the figures are life-size. Close views show a meal painted as carefully as the miracle happening over it.