The greatest feasts in Art

by Jason Farago

Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper, late 1490s

Depictions of Jesus' final meal with his 12 apostles in Jerusalem have been a popular artistic subject since the days of early Christianity, but Leonardo's is the most famous -despite severe damage and clumsy restorations that have left it a shade of its former self. Christ, sitting dead centre at the composition's vanishing point, proclaims that one of his apostles will betray him; Judas, fourth from the left, leans back and reaches incriminatingly for a piece of bread. There's no paschal lamb to be seen on the apostles' feast, but rather grilled eel and orange slices, off to the right. (Leonardo da Vinci)

Paolo Veronese, The Wedding at Cana, 1563

This massive feast scene has the singular misfortune of hanging across from the Mona Lisa in the Louvre's Italian wing, thus making it one of the most ignored masterpieces of all of Western art. The mega-wedding, at which Christ has just turned water into wine, has been transposed from Cana to contemporary Venice. The finely dressed guests seem to be on the dessert course, but note that none of them is actually eating. While a genre scene might depict lower-class wedding-goers consuming food and drink, here the feast is a public pageant, a showcase for wealth and power. (Paolo Veronese)

Diego Velázquez, Triumph of Bacchus, 1628

Nicknamed 'Los Borrachos' -the drunks -this important early work by Velázquez features the god of wine, pale-skinned and crowned with ivy, alongside leathery-faced workers who are wearing much more sober and Spanish brown cloaks. It's one of his few mythological scenes, and it departs from earlier depictions of Bacchic revelry, which usually featured prancing nymphs and rolling hillsides. Velázquez's move to a more naturalistic style, more common to the genre scenes known as bodegones, suggests he sympathised with the desire of these men to let loose after the day was done. (Velázquez)

Peter Paul Rubens, The Feast of Herod, 1635-38

The ultimate party foul: you lift up the lid on the serving tray, and there, staring back at you, is the head of John the Baptist. Rubens's grand painting, stylish and macabre by turns, shows the moment when Salome, having danced for her stepfather Herod, wins her prize of the decapitated saint - which is presented as just another course at this feast, along with lobster and game birds. Herodias, Salome's mother, pokes at John's tongue with a fork, while her husband's eyes bulge in horror. (Peter Paul Rubens)

John Martin, Belshazzar's Feast, c 1821

Martin was one of the strangest painters of 19th-Century England, given to apocalyptic visions that often tipped into kitsch. Here he depicts a dizzying scene from the Book of Daniel, in which the titular king of Babylon gets the bad news, glowing on the wall at left, that "thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting." The feast in the foreground is overshadowed by Martin's comically grand fantasy of Babylonian architecture, with columns extending out to infinity, and the terrible, lightning-cracked sky above. (John Martin)

Jan Steen, The Dissolute Household, 1663-4

While feast scenes in the High Renaissance depicted gods or nobles, Dutch artists in the 17th Century turned to domestic scenes, sometimes with a moralising gaze. Steen's revellers indulge in just about every sin imaginable: the man in black is trying to seduce the serving maid, while the woman in the foreground is so busy getting her drink on that she doesn't notice she's trampling a bible underfoot. As for the large ham that served as the centre of this feast, it's been abandoned on the floor, ready to be eaten by the family cat. (Jan Steen)

James Ensor, The Banquet of the Starved, 1915

After the German army occupied Belgium at the start of World War One, Ensor painted this bitter parody of the Last Supper. Instead of a sumptuous paschal feast, the diners are sitting down to a table with just two raw carrots, an onion, and insects, in evocation of the horrible famine that overtook Belgium in the year Ensor completed the work. The diners are grabbing each other in poses that could be sexual or violent or both, while in the background hang three paintings-in-the-painting: tableaux of skeletons, dancing or fighting. (James Ensor)

Giovanni Bellini, The Feast of the Gods, 1514

The divine banquet was a frequent theme of Italian painting in the 16th Century, and in fact many Renaissance artists would stage their own banquets with Olympian costumes and lavish eats. (The painter Andrea del Sarto once designed a church made of sausages and parmesan.) Bellini's final major work - made with assistance from a young Titian, his student - is a masterpiece of this mythological genre: the fertility god Priapus is putting the moves on a nymph on right, while Jupiter and the other divinities are drinking wine. An innovation: Chinese blue-and-white porcelain, newly imported to Europe. (Giovanni Bellini)

Édouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, 1862

The greatest painting in the history of Western art, rejected by the Paris Salon and scorned by Napoleon III himself, broke all the rules of perspective, illusionism, and iconography (why are the men in modern dress, why is the woman naked, why aren't they looking at one another?). But Manet's up-to-the-minute pastoral scene is not much of a picnic: just some fruit and a brioche, tumbling out of a basket and onto the grass and the nude woman's discarded clothes. What's significant is not the fanciness of the picnic, but its newness - no more mythology, no more moralising, just the blunt facts of modern life. (Edouard Manet)

Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party, 1974-79

The iconic work of American feminist art is the ultimate feast: a banquet table set for more than three dozen great women, from Sappho and Hatshepsut to Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf. The focus isn't the food but the covers: each guest has a unique place setting, most of which feature plates in the form of a certain part of a woman's anatomy. Chicago completed the work with the help of 400 volunteers, and while most feasts put the guest of honour in the centre, this one is in the shape of an equilateral triangle, with uniform billing for everyone. (Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images)

-BBC Culture