Bernardo Butinone
Supper at Bethany
1490s
Tempera on panel
25.4 cm x 20.5 cm (10 in. x 8 1/16 in.)
The Suida-Manning Collection

Coming to the town of Bethany, Christ and his disciples were served supper in the house of Lazarus. When Mary Magdalene anointed Christ's feet with costly ointment, Judas objected that the substance should instead be sold to help the poor (John 12:1-8). With these prefigurations of the Entombment and the Betrayal, this panel belongs to a series of fifteen scenes from the life of Christ that are scattered in public and private collections. These panels and others since lost probably constituted an altarpiece for private devotion, with the images arranged and read sequentially like those in a monumental fresco cycle. Bernardo Butinone and his frequent collaborator Bernardo Zenale were leading painters in late fifteenth-century Milan. Basically conservative, their works tend to be anecdotal in description and decorative in effect. They do, however, incorporate some of the most advanced developments of the Po Valley: rigorous perspectival construction derived from Andrea Mantegna and, in Butinone's case, the eccentric types and lively characterization of contemporary Ferrarese painting. The miniature panels of the life of Christ are close in style to the predelle panels-the small, secondary narrative scenes-in Butinone and Zenale's most celebrated project, the so-called Golden Altarpiece begun in 1485 for their native town. William Suida was a pioneering scholar of Milanese painting of the Renaissance. The Supper at Bethany is one of the seven paintings of the school that come from his collection.