The Wedding Feast at Cana
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The Wedding Feast at Cana
Paolo Caliari, known as Veronese
According to the New Testament, Jesus performed his first miracle in a city called Cana in Galilee, where Mary and Jesus were invited to a wedding banquet and he turned the water into wine. The painter Veronese had been asked to paint this biblical scene on the wall of a Venetian monastery refectory; he did so, but he interpreted the story with great artistic freedom, painting a huge crowd of 132 figures combining biblical characters, Venetian aristocrats in 16th-century outfits and turbaned Orientals. He gave the painting a theatrical quality with a splendid architectural setting and dazzling colours made from costly pigments imported from the East by Venetian merchants.
Spot the dog!
This huge painting is full of details that are sometimes surprising – like the little dog standing on the table. It must have caught the eye of the ‘APES**T’ director, who included it in close-up in the video. Twenty years after The Wedding Feast at Cana, the Holy Tribunal of the Inquisition took an interest in anther painting by Veronese, the Feast in the House of Levi, also commissioned for a Venetian church. The Tribunal considered the presence of a dog inappropriate for a religious painting, and asked him to replace it with a sacred figure.