A Modern Last Supper

As many of my faithful readers know, this page has been devoted to new revelations about Leonardo da Vinci and his two masterpieces, the Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. I will continue my story with astonishing new discoveries about the Mona Lisa in a few days, but I need to tell you about what happened this week when I visited the charming city of Den Bosch in the south of Holland.

Den Bosch has a lovely old town that boasts the only French-style Gothic cathedral in Northern Europe. But what really struck me is what I saw in a local gallery, called the Kruithuis (literally the “ammunition depot”). A vast canvas showed a group of young women in poses reminiscent of Leonardo’s Last Supper. The point of the work, artist-photographer Hanneke Lathouwers told me, is to celebrate the diversity of European society at a time of growing tension about immigration.

The women in the photo come from all parts of the globe — Africa, Asia, North America, and of course the many cultures of Europe proper. Ms. Lathouwers and her colleague, Cindy Langenhuysen, staged the elaborate scene in an abandoned railway station in the city of Tilburg, in an attempt to capture the same atmospheric effects of Leonardo’s original. The photo is quite breathtaking — the image on this post doesn’t do it justice, but I hope you get an impression of what these two talented artists set out to do.

Not surprisingly, Hanneke Lathouwers was recently named one of Holland’s most promising new photographers, and her work will appear shortly in a book. She hopes to take the vast photograph (printed on aluminum plate) to the United States and find a gallery to exhibit it. I hope she succeeds — we could certainly use it. For more information, contact @hanneke_lathouwers_fotografie on Instagram, or Cindy @cindylangenhuijsenfotografie.