Jesus’s outer garment, or mantle, is blue in Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper.
In the mural, Jesus wears a red inner robe beneath a blue outer mantle. The contrast helps make him visually distinct at the center of the composition, where the apostles’ gestures and expressions radiate outward after his announcement of betrayal.
Viewers sometimes reverse the colors because the red garment is prominent and the mural’s pigments have suffered centuries of deterioration. The blue mantle is also easy to confuse with the clothing of nearby apostles, especially in reproductions with altered color balance or heavy restoration.
Leonardo painted the work in tempera and related materials on a dry, prepared wall rather than using traditional buon fresco. That experimental method produced luminous effects but made the painting unusually vulnerable to humidity, flaking, and later repainting. A major restoration ran from 1978 to 1999.