A new video about one of the hundred masterpieces in the CODART Canon has been released earlier this month. Together with Peter Carpreau (former curator of M Leuven) we were invited to St. Peter’s Church in Leuven to study a highlight of Early Netherlandish Painting: Dirc Bouts’s Triptych of the Last Supper.

In 1464 the Confraternity of the Holy Sacrament commissioned Bouts to paint a large altarpiece for their chapel in St Peter´s Church. The painter used several new and ingenious techniques to engage the viewer in the story. This five-minute video shows how Bouts managed to depict the narrative of the Last Supper in an entirely new way and why this altarpiece was chosen as one of the hundred masterpieces of Dutch and Flemish art.

This is the seventh video in an ongoing series about masterpieces in the CODART Canon. Previously we published brief videos about a spectacular Enclosed Garden in Mechelen with Hannah Iterbeke, Van Dyck’s Iconographie with Joris Van Grieken, and Jan Borman’s five-meter-wide altarpiece in Brussels with Emile van Binnebeke and Marjan Debaene. Also available are videos about the fascinating Doll House of Sara Rothé in the Frans Hals Museum with Marrigje Rikken, a drawing of Spinario by Jan Gossart in the Print Room of the University Library in Leiden with Jef Schaeps, as well as a video on a pair of seventeenth-century Wedding Gloves in the Rijksmuseum with Bianca Du Mortier and Femke Diercks.

All videos are available with English subtitles on canon.codart.nl. In the near future, the series will be further expanded by a video with Ruben Suykerbuyk on Pieter Claesz.’s Breakfast Piece in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and the Tomb of Mary of Burgundy in Bruges with Nadia Vangampelaere.