TIZIANO Vecellio
(b. 1490, Pieve di Cadore, d. 1576, Venezia)

Supper at Emmaus

c. 1530
Oil on canvas, 169 x 244 cm
Musée du Louvre, Paris

The painting's first owners were the Maffei family from Verona, where Titian painted an altarpiece for the Cathedral, and its sonorous gravity and the way the colours traverse the spectrum like a progression of organ chords may take its tone from nearby Brescia, especially the art of Moretto. Indeed, Titian may have borrowed the striking orange-yellow of the page's costume from the similarly placed disciple in Moretto's own Supper at Emmaus of around 1526, which originally hung in the Church of St Luke in Brescia and now in the Tosio-Martinengo Museum. The disciple in green leaning back is modeled on the Judas in Leonardo's Last Supper. The realism of the still-life is also somewhat in the Lombard taste and anticipates not only Caravaggio but also the sacramental realism of Zurbaran.