The (supersized) Last Supper: How food portions have increased by 69% in paintings of Christ’s final meal

Not sure how seriously you will want to take this article from the Daily Mail but the ideas behind are well worth considering.

Despite being the most famous meal in history, it’s not exactly clear what was on the table – apart from bread and wine.

But it seems artists have increasingly filled the gaps in the Bible by ‘super-sizing’ The Last Supper over the last 1,000 years.

An analysis of more than 50 paintings of the scene has revealed the quantity of food shown being served during Jesus’s final meal with his disciples has grown steadily.

Upgrade: In Leonardo Da Vinci’s work, left, the food on the table appears much more sparse than in Dennys Calvert’s painting from more than 100 years later, which features a main dish

Scrutiny of the plates and their contents showed portions have ballooned by two-thirds.

This, say the researchers, is art imitating life.

Professor Brian Wansink, who carried out the study with his brother Craig, an academic and Presbyterian minister, said: ‘The last thousand years have witnessed dramatic increases in the production, availability, safety, abundance and affordability of food.

We think that as art imitates life, these changes have been reflected in paintings of history’s most famous dinner.’

Supper size: Duccio di Buoninsegna’s The Last Supper, from the Passion Altarpiece (c.1278-1318), shows the meal as a more frugal affair than in da Vinci’s painting some 200 years later

The analysis, reported in the International Journal of Obesity, suggests the modern-day taste for bigger portions or ‘super-sizing’ actually has its origins much further back.

Professor Wansink, of Cornell University in the U.S., said: ‘A lot of people want to blame this on events of the last 20 years when, really, it’s part of a much bigger trend.’

The brothers used computer technology-to ‘twist and turn’ the foods and crockery shown in the paintings, allowing them the gauge their size no matter how they were angled.

To account for differences in the dimensions of the paintings, they used a rule of thumb that a loaf of bread would have been roughly twice as wide as a man’s head.

The Last Supper by El Greco which was painted in 1568. The biggest increases in food sizes occurred in paintings completed in the second half of the millennium, the journal reports

The Last Supper by Rubens painted in 1632. Craig Wansink, a professor of religious studies, said: ‘There is no religious reason why the meals got bigger. It may be that meals really did grow, or that people just got more interested in food’

Fifty-two of the most famous paintings of the Biblical scene were put through the process, including Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous late 15th century version and works by El Greco from 1568 and Rubens from 1632.

Main meals, such as fish or lamb, grew by 69 per cent, plate size by 66 per cent and bread size by 23 per cent, between the oldest and most recent paintings.

The lack of wine in the paintings left the researchers unable to assess whether thirst for alcohol has evolved in the same way as appetite for food.