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The Wedding at Cana
Le Nozze di Cana
Veronese’s Venetian feast, the biggest painting in the Louvre, across the room from the Mona Lisa.
Veronese painted it for the refectory of the Benedictine monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, where the monks ate under it. Christ’s first miracle, turning water into wine, becomes a sixteenth-century Venetian banquet with more than 130 guests, servants, musicians, dogs and a cat.
Napoleon’s troops carried it off in 1797, cutting it apart to roll it up for the journey. When the looted art went back after 1815, the Louvre kept it and sent Venice a painting by Le Brun instead. Nearly ten metres wide, it covers a whole wall of the Salle des États. Stand before it in 3D ›
