The Wedding Feast at Cana
Paolo Caliari, known as Veronese (1528-1588) · 1562-1563
Turn away from the Mona Lisa and you face the largest painting in the Louvre, nearly ten metres wide and filled with about 130 figures. The subject is Christ's first miracle, the turning of water into wine at a wedding in Cana in Galilee, but Veronese stages it as a lavish Venetian banquet under classical architecture and a blue Adriatic sky. Christ sits at the centre of the long table with the Virgin beside him, small and still amid the noise. At the lower right a steward tastes the transformed wine; at the far left a servant pours. Dogs, dwarfs, parrots, musicians, turbanned guests and balustrade spectators fill every available space.
The composition is held together by a rigorous symmetry that the crowd almost disguises. A central vertical runs from Christ's head up through the balustrade to the sky, and the architecture provides a measured perspective grid. Veronese's colour is the point: shot silks in acid yellow, orange and blue, painted with lapis lazuli, cochineal and other costly pigments applied in a single confident layer. Look at the group of musicians in white and gold in the foreground, traditionally said to be portraits of Veronese himself on the viola da braccio alongside Titian, Tintoretto and Bassano. Above Christ's head, servants butcher a lamb, a deliberate reminder of the sacrifice to come.
The canvas was painted for the refectory of the Benedictine monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, designed by Palladio, where the monks ate their meals beneath it. French troops seized it in 1797, cutting it in half for transport, and it arrived in Paris in 1798. A major restoration in the early 1990s recovered the intensity of its colour.
Did You Know? Napoleon's troops sliced the canvas in two to get it out of Venice in 1797, and it has never gone back despite repeated Italian requests.
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