YMMV / The Last Supper

• Adaptation Displacement: Depictions of the Last Supper almost always use Leonardo da Vinci's painting as a reference before the sparsely detailed Biblical accounts.
• Awesome Art: The Last Supper is one of the most famous pieces of art of all time for its iconic depiction of Christ and his disciples that exposes the emotional vulnerability of the Apostles through their facial expressions and hand movements.
• Common Knowledge:
  • The Last Supper is commonly referred to as a fresco, which it is not. Leonardo Da Vinci experimented with this painting, and instead of painting it on wet plaster as was the convention, he painted The Last Supper on a drywall with an experimental mix of tempera and paint, differentiating it from ordinary frescos. Leonardo wasn't in fact a great fan of the fresco technique, as it required painters to act quickly and irreversibly, while he preferred to take his time and work on details.
  • A widely-circulated urban legend tells the story that the same man posed as the model for Jesus and, some 10 or 25 years later after living a life of dissolution, for Judas. Of course, this is completely bogus; for one thing, Leonardo certainly didn't take ten whole years to finish the painting.
  • The supposed secret symbols in the painting as popularized in The Da Vinci Code are regarded as purely fanciful by art historians.
• Genius Bonus: Spotting the fact that Jesus is surrounded by a circle that implies his perfection through Aristotelian conceptions of geometry takes a someone versed in historical geometry, a field exclusively filled with geniuses and nerds.
• Household Names: TV Tropes may be able to find more story in Pinball than in Art, but even we know what The Last Supper is. Besides The Mona Lisa (also painted by Leonardo da Vinci) and the Sistine Chapel's ceiling fresco (by Leonardo's rival Michelangelo Buonarroti), it may just be the most famous painting of all time.
• Narm: The reactions of the Apostles are exaggerated to a point of being humorous to some. Specifically, Andrew's gesture of raising his hands is undermined by his rather blank expression.
• Once Original, Now Common: The painting's lack of halos, realistic depiction of human emotion, and spot-on perspective will often go unnoticed by modern viewers who have seen the five centuries of art built on the back of the work of Leonardo and masters like him.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: John, identified as such in the personal notes of Leonardo Da Vinci, is often mistaken for a woman due to his long hair and apparent swooning. This has even lead to wild speculation that Leonardo's John is supposed to be a depiction of Mary of Magdala, although this idea strangely leaves Jesus with an Apostle missing from his supper.

---