Pyeongye
01Where you've seen it
The layout of Leonardo's Last Supper has been copied countless times in ads, films, photographs and cartoons. In Luis Buñuel's 1961 film Viridiana, a group of beggars gather around a table and freeze in the poses of this painting.
A scene in the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics stirred up controversy over whether it copied this painting. The organizers said it was meant to recall a feast of the Greek gods. One dinner table has held people's attention for more than five hundred years.
02The real story
The original is a mural Leonardo painted in the 1490s on the dining hall wall of a monastery in Milan. He tried a new way of putting paint on a dry wall, and because of it the picture began flaking while he was still alive.
What hangs at Pyeongye is The Last Supper that Rembrandt copied in red chalk between 1634 and 1635. Rembrandt never went to Italy. He knew the composition from a print and copied it again. Copying this table is a much older habit than advertising.