POURBUS, Pieter
(b. ca. 1523, Gouda, d. 1584, Brugge)

Last Supper

1548
Oil on oak panel, 46,5 x 63 cm
Groeninge Museum, Bruges

The Last Supper, dated 1548, is the earliest known painting of the artist. The painting reveals a weakness on the artist's part for unusual iconographical programmes, with some similarity to the allegories favoured by contemporary chambers of rhetoric. A monstrous figure with claws and a skull (Avarice, Treachery?) enters the room from the right, in the direction of Judas who exits, purse in his hand.