The Last Supper (1510): Art, History and Details

The Last Supper (1510) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Albrecht Dürer (German, 1471–1528).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The Christian sacrament of the Eucharist is traced to the Last Supper, when Christ said of the wine, “This is my blood.” For artists, the scene was full of both symbolic and narrative potential. Albrecht Dürer created a compact, vertical composition that focuses on the closeness of the disciples and the moment, wine flowing, when Christ reveals his fate. Dürer’s ingenious woodcut technique includes the creation of a halo made from parallel lines around Christ’s head that continue outward to define the shadow of the vaulted room.

Object facts

• Title: The Last Supper
• Date: 1510
• Creator attribution: Albrecht Dürer (German, 1471–1528)
• Culture: Germany
• Type: Print
• Technique: woodcut
• Dimensions: Sheet: 40 x 28.8 cm (15 3/4 x 11 5/16 in.)
• Collection: PR - Woodcut
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 1926.112

A detail from the museum

This print depicts the apostles dining on a humble but sturdy refectory table. Dürer included the date of the print on the middle trestle, a location often reserved for heraldry on more lavish tables.

Collection credit

Gift of The Print Club of Cleveland in memory of Ralph King

Further reading listed by the museum

• "The Print Club's Gift in Memory of Ralph King." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 13, no.7 (July 1926): 159-162.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1928.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.