[Sca-cooks] tablecloth, shroud or food cover?

[Adele de Maisieres]

Suey wrote:

>Can't find the message but someone said yesterday there is a 6th C 
>painting of the Last Supper with a tablecloth. Now I find this 
>confusing. Is this a symbolic reference to the Shroud of Turin? I do 
>find some Jewish references to a leather tablecloth and to clothes 
>covering food to keep the flies away but not to linen table coverings. 
>Does anyone have more data on the history of the tablecloth?
>Suey
>  
>

That would be me.  It's actually a mosaic, not a painting, and it 
appears in Roy Strong's _Feast_, and the subject is the Last Supper.  
There is a cloth on the table.  I don't have a lot of other material on 
this period in my posession, but I'm guessing that the depiction of a 
tablecloth isn't unique.  What this could have to do with the Shroud of 
Turin (which didn't surface 'til the 14th century) is beyond me.

-- 
Adele de Maisieres

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Habeo metrum - musicamque,
hominem meam. Expectat alium quid?
-Georgeus Gershwinus
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