Category Archives: Olympics

“This Is My Body”: What is the Olympics’ “Last Supper” Controversy Really About?

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Paolo Veronese, Christ in the House of Levi (1573).

“The image can be worn down to the point that it is almost invisible, it can be plunged into darkness and disfigured, it can be clear and beautiful, but it does not cease to be.”

— Saint Augustine

Four hundred and fifty years ago, Paolo Veronese painted his controversial version of the Last Supper for a Venetian monastery. It was hung in the refectory, where the monks could contemplate the sacredness of every meal in the artist’s image of the first eucharist. But when the censors of the Venetian Inquisition had a look, they were shocked to find the holy scene crowded with “buffoons, drunken Germans, dwarfs and other such scurrilities.”[i] Although Veronese argued that the invented characters were needed to fill the immense canvas (42 feet wide), and that Christ was safely separated from the more unseemly guests within the central arch, the Inquisitors were not persuaded. The disorderly and irreverent scene was antithetical to the purpose of religious art. It would produce distraction, not devotion.

Veronese was given three months to change the painting. Instead, he gave it a new title: Christ in the House of Levi. As Luke’s gospel tells us, Jesus was known for eating with “publicans and sinners,” so the switch of subjects from Last Supper to Levi’s party made the scandalous scene properly scriptural. The artist was off the hook, and the Inquisitors dropped their complaint.

The controversial tableau at the Paris Olympics.
Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper (c. 1495-1498).

At the Opening Ceremonies of the Paris Olympics, a similar controversy arose when a brief tableau of a pagan feast was taken to be a mocking parody of the Last Supper. The diverse figures standing behind the raised runway of a fashion show, grouped on either side of a central figure with a silver “halo”, evoked for some the well-known iconography of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. But instead of a male Christ, the central figure was a woman, flanked not by pious apostles but dancing drag queens.

The French Bishops’ Conference slammed the tableau as a “mockery and derision of Christianity.” Mike Johnson, the right-wing Evangelical Speaker of the House in the United States Congress, decreed the performance “shocking and insulting to Christian people around the world.” The event’s artistic director, Thomas Jolly, denied the Last Supper allusion. The scene was a pagan feast on Mount Olympus. The Olympics! Get it? The blue man sitting on a pile of fruit in the foreground depicted Dionysos, Greek god of wine and fertility. There was no intention to “be subversive or shock people or mock people,” Jolly said. [ii]

Jan van Bijlert, The Feast of the Gods (c. 1635-1640).

The true inspiration for the tableau, suggested its defenders, was not Leonardo’s masterpiece, but a seventeenth-century painting by Dutch artist Jan van Bijlert, The Feast of the Gods. There is a table with a central figure behind it, but it’s Apollo. And no one would mistake all those Olympian carousers for Christian saints. However, I do wonder. Was Bijlert’s table itself inspired by Leonardo’s, making his own pagan tableau a sly remix of the Last Supper?

Whatever the intention of the Olympic organizers, the negative outrage poses a critical question. What is the table fellowship of Jesus all about? Is it not an indelible image of divine welcome? If so-called “Christians” profess to be shocked at the presence of misfits and outcasts at God’s feast, are not they the true blasphemers against the Love Supreme?

The Last Supper has long been one of the most recycled images of Christian iconography. As a widely recognizable motif of human solidarity and divine gift, it is a visual code for what everyone longs to hear: Come in. Sit down. You are welcome here.

Homer Simpson and friends in the manner of Leonardo.
Two controversies in a single meme: Paris Opening Ceremonies and Cat Ladies.

Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters, manifesting the eucharistic dimension of every table, however humble, was inspired by the Last Supper paintings of Tintoretto (1518-1594) and Charles de Groux (1825-1870).

Vincent van Gogh, The Potato Eaters (1885). The lamp, borrowed from Tintoretto’s Last Supper, illumines this humble “communion” table with divine light.
Jocopo Tintoretto, The Last Supper (1592). The spiritual turbulence swirling through the room reveals the sacredness of the first eucharist. The untraditional angle of vision intensifies the moment’s dynamic power.
Charles de Groux, The Blessing Before Supper (1861). The Last Supper imagery in an everyday setting inspired Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters.

In recent decades, photographers have invited some surprising guests to the table, often with a subversive image of Christ in the middle. Nathalie Dietschy’s extensively illustrated book, The Figure of Christ in Contemporary Photography, provides a wide variety of examples, such as David LaChapelle’s Last Supper from his 2003 series, Jesus is My Homeboy. “If Jesus was alive today,” says the artist, “this is who he would be with. He was with the outcasts, the apostle. What would the apostles look like today? The apostles were not the aristocracy, they were not the well to do, they were not the popular people, they were sort of the dreamers, the misfits.” [iii]

David LaChappelle, Last Supper (detail). Part of the series, Jesus is my Homeboy (2003).

Raised a Roman Catholic, LaChapelle wanted to “rescue” Jesus from limiting stereotypes. He described his Homeboy series as “a personal attempt to say [to fundamentalists]: ‘you have ruined so much, but you are not going to take this.’” [iv]

Some of Dietschy’s other photographic examples of the Last Supper genre are Marcos López’s Roast Meat in Mendiolaza, with the central figure at the table stabbing a hunk of meat with a knife at an outdoor barbecue in Argentina … Rauf Mamedov of Azerbaijan having men with Down’s Syndrome reproduce the gestures of Leonardo’s apostles as they ask, “Is it I, Lord?” … Faisal Abdu’Allah, a Jamaican-born American, inserting his own blackness into the story with disciples of color, both men and women, dressed as rap artists or veiled and robed in traditional Muslim dress … New Zealander Greg Semu exploring the tensions between indigenous and colonial cultures in The Last Cannibal Supper … ‘Cause Tomorrow We Become Christians, where the artist himself, as the Christ figure, presides over a table laden with cooked flesh and a human skull, as his disciples, anxious about transitioning identity, look ill at ease … and a couple of Chinese artists filling the table with Red Army soldiers, or Chinese schoolgirls with identical faces.

Such revisions of sacred iconography can be challenging, bewildering, or even disturbing. And any erosion of the “aura” of religious symbols, especially in this secular age where technology’s infinite reproducibility of images has revoked all the Christian copyrights, is a subject worth thoughtful consideration. But the persistence of sacred tropes, even when trivialized or misappropriated, is itself a testimony to their power. The logic of the Incarnation means that the divine can become indistinguishable from the human, erasing the boundary between sacred and profane.

Brigitte Niedermair, The Last Supper (2005)

The Last Supper by Swedish artist Brigitte Niedermair in 2005 first appeared in women’s magazines as an ad for a contemporary clothing brand. Leonardo’s postures and gestures are explicitly performed, strikingly, by women. There is one enigmatic young man, with his bare torso turned away from the viewer. He seems bent in sorrow, perhaps foreshadowing the Pietà.

The image’s feminine casting created a stir, unnerving the patriarchal segments of the Church. It was condemned, even banned, in some Catholic countries. But others expressed understandable reservations concerning the slick commercialization of a sacred image in order to sell expensive clothing. The ad agency seemed taken aback by the objections. “We wanted to convey a sort of spirituality through this image,” they said. It was “an homage to art and to women.” [v]

A pair of Last Suppers, each set in the Middle East, demonstrates how critical context is to the reception of art. The current violence in Gaza endows them with a fresh layer of tragic intensity. Put next to each other in 2024, they touch a raw nerve. If only humanity could heed the divine commandment spoken at the original table: Love one another.

Adi Nes, Untitled (Soldiers series,1999).
Vivek Vilasini, Last Supper—Gaza (2008). From the series, Between One Shore and Several Others.

Adi Nes’s untitled photograph from his 1999 Soldiers series, by arranging fourteen men on one side of a table, invokes Leonardo’s iconography. The soldiers are conversing in small groups, but the man in the Christ position appears lost in his own thoughts. Nes, who himself spent three years in the Israeli Defense Force, has said that “all of them are Jesus, all of them are Judas.” All equally at risk, all equally in need of forgiveness and compassion. “I hope this isn’t their last supper,” he says.[vi]

A similar nod to Leonardo by Indian artist Vivek Vilasini, Last Supper—Gaza (2007), fills the table with Palestinian women, whose anxious and fearful eyes show the distress of living under constant threat. Is it I, Lord? Is it I who will betray? Is it I who will run away? Is it I who will die?

Yo Mama’s Last Supper (1996), by Jamaican-American Renee Cox, is one of the most controversial versions. It employs Leonardo’s canonical table image, but the apostles themselves, except for a white male as Judas, are black or mixed-race and not exclusively male. They all wear traditional biblical dress, except for Jesus, who is naked. Played by the artist herself, the Christ figure spreads her arms wide like the presider at the eucharist. A white shroud is artfully draped over her arms in the manner of crosses decorated at Easter.

There is no mockery in the image. It shares the solemn stillness of traditional religious painting. But in showing Jesus as a “triply marginalized figure due to race, gender and physicality,”[vii] the image aroused heated attacks. When it was first exhibited in New York in early 2001, Mayor Rudy Giuliani called it “disgusting, outrageous and anti-catholic.” William Donohue, President of the Catholic League, said that “to vulgarize Christ in this manner is unconscionable.” However, in a debate with Cox at the Brooklyn Museum, he admitted that “there would be no problem if you had kept your clothes on.” [viii]

Cox’s response to her critics was not apologetic. “An African-American woman putting herself in a position of empowerment seems to be a national threat,” she said. “I’m not taking a backseat. I’m going to sit at the head of the table.” As for the nakedness, she insisted it was not her intent to eroticize a sacred scene. “I chose to play the Christ figure in the nude because it represents a certain sense of purity. I come to the table with nothing to hide.”[ix]

Juan de Juanes, The Last Supper (c. 1560).
Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin, The Last Supper (1996-8). Part of the Ecce Homo series.

The Last Supper by Swedish artist Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin is perhaps the closest parallel to the Olympics’ notorious tableau. Modeled after a 16th-century painting by Juan de Juanes, it populates the table with transvestite disciples and a Jesus of uncertain gender, wearing high heels and holding up a makeup sponge instead of the sacred Host. Created by a lesbian artist raised in the Church, it was part of a photographic series, Ecce Homo, featuring biblical scenes with LGBTQ models.

The Ecce Homo photographs, unsurprisingly, created a furor in the last years of the 20th century. The fact that they were exhibited in churches rather than museums served to fuel the outrage. The propriety of untraditional visuals in sacred space is a particularly fraught question. Placing Wallin’s Last Supper above the altar of a Zurich church prompted vandalism and bomb threats.

While I do wonder whether the cognitive dissonance of Wallin’s image competing for attention with the actual sacrament would deepen or disrupt a worshipper’s ocular piety, the radical inclusiveness conveyed by Ecce Homo was a blessing to many. “Thank you for this wonderful representation of the life and deeds of Jesus,” someone wrote in the Visitors’ book at the Zurich exhibition. “Through it, I can now identify with them, today, in the 21st century. I pray for all those who are rejected by our society: ‘The Last shall be the first!’” [x]

That’s really what it’s all about, isn’t it? Who belongs at the table? Who is welcome at the table? The Opening Ceremonies controversy was not about Leonardo vs. Jan van Bijlert, Mount Olympus vs. the Upper Room, pagan vs. Christian, Jesus vs. Apollo. It was about who gets to sit at Love’s table. And for those who think that the Last Supper represents anything less than that: You are in for a surprise.

Lcve bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, obeserving me grow slack
From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lacked anything.
A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.

I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.

— George Herbert, Love (III)

[i] The Inquisition transcript: https://web.archive.org/web/20090929022528/http://www.efn.org/~acd/Veronese.html 

[ii] Yan Zhuang, “An Olympics Scene Draws Scorn. Did It Really Parody the Last Supper?”, New York Times, July 28, 2024. I can’t help noting that any such outrage from the Christian right in America rings hollow. They have lost the credibility to speak on behalf of the friends of God. Their shameful worship of a depraved, and hate-filled sexual predator, convicted fraudster and would-be dictator as an instrument of divine will has brought more disgrace to Christianity than a thousand pagan parodies.

[iii] Nathalie Dietschy, The Figure of Christ in Contemporary Photography (London: Reaktion Books, Ltd.: 2020), 123.

[iv] Ibid., 128.

[v] Ibid., 167.

[vi] Ibid., 110.

[vii] Katharine Wilkinson, The Last Will Become First: Liberation of Race, Gender and Sexuality in Renee Cox’s “Yo Mama’s Last Supper”, quoted inDietschy, 254.

[viii] Dietschy, 256.

[ix] Ibid., 256, 257.

[x] Ibid., 261.

The Courage to Be Nobody: Simone Biles and the Art of Renunciation

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Aurélien Arbet and Jérémie Egry, I would prefer not to (2005).

“Wandering away from everything, giving up everything, not me anymore, not any of it.”

— Agnes Martin

In “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Herman Melville’s notoriously perplexing short story, his principal character speaks just thirty-seven lines, over a third of them variations on a simple declaration: “I would prefer not to.” Having taken a job copying documents in a law firm, he offers that same maddening reply to every request. He prefers not to perform assigned tasks, or to explain why. When finally discharged by his boss, he prefers not to leave the premises. When, in the end, he lands in jail, he prefers “not to dine,” and dies of starvation.

The story is narrated by his employer, who finds himself “strangely goaded on” to discover the motivation for Bartleby’s eccentric behavior.

“Bartleby was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable except from the original sources, and, in his case, those are very small. What my own astonished eyes saw of Bartleby, that is all I know of him.” [i]

For his employer, Bartleby remains an unknowable blank, an impenetrable opacity. His past is unknown; he is barely present in the here and now. As Elizabeth Hardwick describes him, “Bartleby is not a character in the manner of the usual, imaginative, fictional construction. And he is not a character as we know them in life, with their bundling bustle of details … He is indeed only words, wonderful words, and very few of them.” [ii]

Every attempt by the bewildered narrator to categorize or interpret his eccentric employee vanishes into the black hole of Bartleby’s essential unknowability. Neither reader nor narrator can solve the puzzle of his abiding negation. And what is true of Bartleby the character is also true of “Bartleby” the story. 

Literary critics and perplexed readers have been trying to explain Melville’s tale for 168 years. Bartleby is clinically depressed. He’s the existential resistance to a deadening, soulless economy. He’s the embodiment of modernity’s “sickness unto death,” the enervation of purpose and will. Or the story itself is Melville’s practical joke on the reading public, luring us down the hermeneutic rabbit hole of a world without reasons. We want to know why, but in Bartleby’s world there is no why. 

Bartleby came to mind this week when “the greatest gymnast in history,” Simone Biles, withdrew from the Olympic team competition after a flawed performance in her first event. The world immediately demanded explanations. Why did she prefer not to perform? Some were puzzled, even outraged, and, like Bartleby’s frustrated colleagues, they rushed to supply their own speculative interpretations.[iii] Unlike Bartleby, however, Biles made known her motivation. She told the press she was taking care of her mental health. Her body and mind had slipped “out of sync” in Tokyo, causing her to feel lost in midair during her twisting somersaults off the vault table. It’s not like dropping a pass or missing a putt. A mistake in gymnastics can mean a broken neck. 

“You have to be there 100%,” she explained in a press conference. “If not, you get hurt. Today has been really stressful. I was shaking. I couldn’t nap. I have never felt like this going into a competition, and I tried to go out and have fun. But once I came out, I was like, No. My mental is not there.”

Her decision was not only good for her. It probably helped the team, which might not have medaled had she continued to underperform. And she has been credited by many for making a memorable case for self-care—mental as well as physical—in the pressure cooker of elite public performance.

In Ethan Hawke’s 2014 documentary, Seymour: An Introduction, we meet Seymour Bernstein, a celebrated concert pianist who disappointed his public by quitting the stage at age 50 after becoming “a total wreck” from the pressures of performance. When Hawke first encountered Bernstein at a dinner party and learned his story, the actor/director found himself sharing his own anxieties with the older man. 

“I decided to confide with him that I’d been performing with a crippling stage fright,” said Hawke in an interview. “The bottom line of the conversation: most artists are not nervous enough .… Pianists have it worse than anybody in the world … If you have to play Carnegie Hall, and you know that one performance will define your whole life, and if you have a memory slip, or if your finger goes rogue, you’re going to be living with the ramifications of it for the rest of your life. They have anxiety like nobody else, and so he was the perfect person to talk to about how to pass through it.” [iv]

Few of us can even imagine the pressures of being the GOAT (Greatest of All Time) who is not allowed to fail, the face of the Olympics, America’s standard bearer, and the always dependable foundation of the team’s success. But her renunciation of these burdens, however temporary, may be her greatest achievement insofar as it helps athletes—and society as a whole—engage with issues of mental health and personal well-being as never before, without stigma or shame. 

William James defined renunciation as “a denial made on behalf of a deeper yes.” In refusing to be shaped by the images and expectations of the world, and by renouncing the projects, desires and identities which do not originate in our deepest place, we begin to affirm and become the truth of ourselves. Taken to its furthest point, this process is a matter of dying to self and living unto God. 

The medieval mystic Henry Suso taught “the science of Perfect Self-Abandonment,” the letting go of “self” in order to merge with the more of God. Until you consent to abandon your inauthentically constructed self, he counsels, “you are like a hare hiding in a bush, who is frightened by the whispering of the leaves. You are frightened every day by the griefs that come to you; you turn pale at the sight of those who speak against you; … when they praise you, you are happy; when they blame you, you are sad.” [v]

In his book, Renunciation: Acts of Abandonment by Writers, Philosophers, and Artists, Ross Posnock examines creatives who made “an exit from the public glare.” For figures of renown, self-erasure is a means of escaping the pressures of public attention, but it may also involve a more radical interior process: grappling with the ego in search of the authentic self. But dropping out of the fame game is suspicious behavior in America. If a gifted person doesn’t crave celebrity, we wonder what’s wrong with them. 

One of Posnock’s subjects is the painter Agnes Martin, who fled the New York art scene in her fifties for the solitude of a remote desert mesa in New Mexico. During her forty years in the wilderness (she died at 92), she continued to make art that was highly praised for its abstract mysticism and formal beauty, but she did her best to keep herself out of sight. When a prestigious museum proposed a major retrospective of her work, she refused, fearing it would be more about her than her art, for which she claimed to be simply a transparent medium. As she told the museum, “the idea of achievement must be given up” if we are “to live truly and effectively.” [vi]

An Agnes Martin could go off the grid without creating a stir, since she was not a cultural superstar. But when the writer J. D. Salinger began to recede from public view in the 1950s after the immense success of Catcher in the Rye, curiosity about his private life grew ever more insistent and, in his mind, more oppressive. 

Behind the walls of his New Hampshire hideout, he crafted his response to what Posnock calls “the culture’s defensive compulsion to label and control,” in the form of enigmatic narratives about the fictional Glass family’s spiritual quests and confusions. Like Bartleby, Salinger preferred his own life to remain a blank, letting the stories speak for themselves. “This blank is his way,” says Posnock, “of outwitting or baffling the arrogant paradigm of meaning production with its ‘menacing pressure’ to generate a legible identity for consumption …” [vii]

“A legible identity for consumption” could describe what the world has tried to make of Simone Biles, before she issued her brave and risky no “on behalf of a deeper yes.” What that deeper yes will be for her, God only knows. May she walk in Beauty.

But renunciation as a spiritual practice is something we all need to think about. Less ego. More grace. And if I were asked to find the right words for this cultural moment, I’d go with the passionate cri de couer of Salinger’s Franny Glass: 

“I’m not afraid to compete. It’s just the opposite. Don’t you see that? I’m afraid I will compete—that’s what scares me. That’s why I quit the Theatre Department. Just because I’m so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else’s values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn’t make it right. I’m ashamed of it. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I’m sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.” [viii]

[i] Herman Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener.” The employer’s failure to reach any solid conclusions about Bartleby makes him an unreliable narrator for a story he does not himself understand.

[ii] Elizabeth Hardwick, American Fictions (New York: The Modern Library, 1999), 9.

[iii] For the critics obsessed with national glory, Biles’ personal well being was of little use. One writer vilified her as proof that “we are raising a generation of weak people.” The deputy attorney general in her home state of Texas called her “our selfish, childish, national embarrassment.” But every gymnast, and I hope most of the public, knew better. 

[iv] Hawke took his title from J. D. Salinger’s story about the unexplained self-annihilation of the fictional Seymour Glass. The Today Show (March 2015) interview is online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqsdmR8fGoo

[v] Henry Suso (German, c. 1295-1366), cited in Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: The Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness(Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 1993/2008, originally published 1911), 405. I have modernized the pronouns.

[vi] Ross Posnock, Renunciation: Acts of Abandonment by Writers, Philosophers, and Artists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 376. Olivia Laing’s excellent piece on Martin in The Guardian is well worth reading: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/may/22/agnes-martin-the-artist-mystic-who-disappeared-into-the-desert

[vii] Posnock, 147.

[viii] J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1961/2014), 26.