Sixty Last Suppers

Sixty Last Suppers replaces the singularity of Leonardo’s Last Supper with the logic of seriality. Warhol silkscreens the same black‑and‑white reproduction sixty times across a rigid grid, producing a field that reads less like a narrative painting than a bank of identical screens ². At distance, the regimented rectangles merge into a monumental facade, flattening drama into pattern. Yet proximity undoes that flattening: slight misregistrations, denser patches of ink, occasional blur and dropouts fracture sameness, so that each Christ and each Judas is minutely different—an index of the hand inside the machine ¹². Warhol leverages this tension to probe aura under mechanical reproduction: the image is emptied by overexposure and simultaneously intensified by accumulation. The Eucharistic table, repeated line-by-line, becomes a visual litany, where meaning accrues by counting rather than by singular revelation ². The grid doubles as a metaphor for 1980s broadcast culture. Each panel resembles a TV monitor: a backlit rectangle holding a paused transmission of betrayal and communion ². By freezing the scene sixty times, Warhol “locks” the sacred in mass-media time, making Leonardo’s Renaissance perspective collide with the modern insistence on surface. The work thus reads as an argument about mediation: most viewers know Leonardo through prints, photographs, and screens—not the fragile mural itself. Warhol adopts a 19th‑century engraving source and amplifies the distance between original and copy to expose how devotion now travels via reproductions ². Visually, the grid’s slight tonal drift—the darker block here, the softer edge there—becomes a pulse, like static in a broadcast or noise in a data stream, reminding us that even systems of perfect sameness generate difference. In this way, the piece stages the paradox of faith in a culture of images: belief must pass through pixels and halftones. The late date of 1986 sharpens the work’s existential charge. Installed at mural scale, the sixty scenes echo not only supermarket displays but also memorial walls; the repetition of Christ’s blessing and foreknowledge of death reads against a decade shadowed by illness and stigma ². Warhol’s lifelong, if private, Byzantine Catholic practice underwrites the work’s refusal of simple irony: seriality becomes a form of prayer, and Pop becomes a vehicle for revelation rather than its negation ³. The grid’s oscillation between cool pattern and trembling particularity suggests a theology of attention: the universal and the individual held together, like a congregation made of singular bodies. In the end, Sixty Last Suppers is a final reckoning with the power—and cost—of visibility. By translating the most reproduced supper in history into an overwhelming field of sameness, Warhol asks whether sanctity can survive the marketplace—and answers, with each imperfect print, that grace persists precisely in the variations the machine cannot smooth away ¹².