Heres my new take on The Last Supper, this time attempting to stay as faithful as possible to Leonardo Da Vincis original:







Hundreds of years of deterioration and poorly executed restorations have left it uncertain exactly how the original once looked, so I ended up basing my version most closely on an early 1800s life-size mosaic copy from the Church of the Minorites in Vienna:







Below is the current state of the Da Vinci original after its most recent modern restoration in 1989:







I was prompted to take another go at The Last Supper this week when I was interviewed about The Brick Testament by my local paper. In addition to running several sample images from the Brick Testament website, they also wanted to get a photo of me posing with a MOC from The Brick Testament in hand.



My old version of The Last Supper immediately came to mind, since its iconic, relatively portable, and one of the few scenes from The Brick Testament that Ive kept intact over the years. But Id just recently sold it as an artwork to someone who had seen it at the art gallery in Bratislava, Slovakia I was invited to last Spring.



So I began working on a new replacement Last Supper. But since this was going to be a stand-alone piece, I did not feel constrained to have the scene necessarily match the version in my Last Supper story from The Brick Testament. That version was, of course, inspired by Da Vincis version, but it was by no means an exact replica done in LEGO. I decided to keep the face of Jesus the same as it appears in The Brick Testament, but everything else I was willing to change to match the Da Vinci version. This meant new faces and outfits for the disciples; tile floors and a new table design; and perhaps the most noticeable change is the trapezoid shape of the room to mimic the perspective of the Da Vinci version.



Heres the photo as it appeared in the article:







Im pretty happy with this new third version of The Last Supper. I still see room for improvements, though. I still havent tried adding in a ceiling (which would make it much harder to properly light the scene), and the perspective still doesnt truly match the original (maybe a different camera lens would help?). And finally, though I did try to have the disciples match the poses of the Da Vinci version, its pretty impossible to get their arms into positions that match the original. Unless I resort to flex tubing and other trickery. Hmmm...



Unfortunately, its my comparatively crude first version that has achieved the most notoriety to date (being the version seen in Time magazine, on Wikipedia, and passed around on many blogs and forums). But what can you do?



-The Rev. Brendan Powell Smith

