Supper at Emmaus
(Luke 24:28–32)

The sequel to the Journey to Emmaus. Two disciples, Cleopas and one unnamed, were on their way to Emmaus, a village near Jerusalem. They were met by Christ who accompanied them, though they did not recognize him at once. At Emmaus they pressed him to remain with them, "For evening draws on, and the day is almost over." So he went in to stay with them. And when he had sat down with them at table, he took bread and said the blessing; he broke the bread, and offered it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight." It is a fairly late theme in Christian art, first found in French Romanesque churches of the 12th century Sometimes, as a. fitting "type" of the sacrament of Communion, it takes the place of representations of the Last Supper which customarily decorated the walls of monastic refectories. It was favored by the Venetian school in its great 16th century period, and there it becomes wholly secularized in feeling. Rembrandt in the next century made several versions which restored the religious sentiment. In its essential form it shows three figures seated at table. Christ, in the center, is in the act of breaking bread; on the faces of the other two is the dawning awareness of his identity. One tradition shows Christ, and sometimes the two disciples, dressed as pilgrims, he with a hat hanging at his back, and the pilgrim's staff and wallet lying on the floor. A cockleshell, the distinctive emblem of the pilgrim in the Middle Ages, may be seen on the cloak of one of the disciples. Though it is the proper attribute of James the Greater, here it alludes merely to pilgrims in general. Among Venetian painters the treatment is expanded not only as to the lavishness of the table but in the number of guests, servants and others, maybe as many as fifteen or twenty, in the midst of which the central figures may be all but lost. In the Netherlands of the 17th century a relationship developed between representations of the "Supper at Emmaus" and the Greek myth of Philemon and Baucis, a similar account of hospitality given to the gods, who reveal their identity to their two hosts in the course of a meal. The classical theme is not uncommon in Netherlandish art of the period and there is well-adduced evidence that painters, in particular Rembrandt, based their treatment of the "Supper" upon it. By a kind of cross-fertilization representations of the Philemon and Baucis theme, particularly in Dutch and German painting, came to acquire distinct Christian overtones.