Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 76 Page 77 Page 78 Page 79 Page 80 Page 81 Page 82 Page 83 Page 84Salvador Dalí, The Sacrament of the Last Supper, oil on canvas, 1955 Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) took most of the year 1955 to complete this painting, which he then donated to Washington’s National Gallery of Art the following Easter. Not long before, Dalí had re- embraced the Catholic faith of his upbringing after discovering the writings of Saint John of the Cross. As a result, in his artistic work he had turned to what he called “nuclear mysticism,” exploring the intersection of science, mathematics, and faith. Even in the atomic age, Dalí maintained, “not a single philosophic, moral, aesthetic, or biological discovery allows the denial of God.” While both Christian and secular viewers have found The Sacrament of the Last Supper jarring, even shocking, that is precisely the point. As Max Kramer said in a February 2010 sermon at St. John’s College, Cambridge: “Here we seem to have a bold artistic statement of the notion that we find in the creation story that man is made in the image of God–so even God the Father can be depicted in the image of man. . . . The apparent stillness of the painting is balanced by Jesus’ gesture of movement. As we are drawn closer into the paint- ing, we are drawn [to] the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit . . . to the place prepared for us at the table . . . not a place where we can stand or sit–both of those gestures would spoil the whole symmetry of the work and block the sight of Jesus. It is a place where the only correct posture is to kneel. “For it is by kneeling in prayer that we can share in the fellowship of Christ’s praying disciples, it is by kneeling in prayer that the light of Christ will fall upon us, it is by kneeling in prayer that the gifts of the eucharistic bread and wine that we see set on the table are offered to us–gifts which, so the centripetal force of the painting’s symmetry sug- gests, will draw us ever closer to Christ and through him into the love of the Trinity.“