Leonardo has a lot to answer for. It’s his painting of the Last Supper; you know, the famous one with Jesus in the middle and all the disciples lined up along the table on each side. It’s just so wrong in so many ways. All the characters of course look as if they would be more at home in Italy than Israel, but that was standard. What you might notice next, remembering the arrangements at the supper at Bethany and Mary and the feet, is that all the party are sitting at table, despite the text once again making it clear that they were reclining. And at a formal reclining dinner like this the tables were always in a special U-shape (rooms were specially designed to accommodate them), not one long line, and the host usually sat towards the end of one of the sides, not right in the middle. Read more of this post