Great art comes in many shapes and sizes, from por­trait minia­tures right up to mon­u­men­tal can­vas­es depict­ing epic scenes with casts of thou­sands. Today we’re going to look at an exam­ple of the lat­ter, one which hangs in the Lou­vre and deserves to have the same-sized crowd of admir­ers that per­pet­u­al­ly gath­er around the Mona Lisa there (and per­haps it does usu­al­ly, but I do have a mem­o­ry of being able to admire it unmo­lest­ed by oth­er peo­ple and able to take in its con­sid­er­able fea­tures). It’s Pao­lo Veronese’s The Wed­ding Feast at Cana (Nozze di Cana, 1562–1563), depict­ing the bib­li­cal sto­ry of the Wed­ding at Cana, in which Jesus mirac­u­lous­ly con­verts water into wine, thus jus­ti­fy­ing his invi­ta­tion sev­er­al times over.

It’s a whop­ping 6.77 m × 9.94 m and indeed as such it’s the largest paint­ing in the Lou­vre. Veronese exe­cut­ed his paint­ing slap-bang in the mid­dle of the peri­od in art known as the Man­ner­ist age (c.1520‑c.1600), in which there was a ten­den­cy of artists to take the ideals of the High Renais­sance (1490–1527) — pro­por­tion, bal­ance, ide­al beau­ty – and exag­ger­ate them such that arrange­ments of human fig­ures have an unnat­ur­al rather than a real­is­tic feel to them. It’s as if artists felt that every­thing that could be achieved had already been achieved by the likes of Da Vin­ci, Raphael and Michelan­ge­lo, and they need­ed a dif­fer­ent approach.

The can­vas was orig­i­nal­ly hung in the San Geor­gio Monastery in Venice, until Napoleon’s sol­diers nicked it as war booty in 1797. It depicts a crowd­ed ban­quet scene in the sump­tu­ous style char­ac­ter­is­tic of 16th cen­tu­ry Venet­ian soci­ety but framed in the Gre­co-Roman archi­tec­tur­al style of clas­si­cal antiq­ui­ty. There are 130 human fig­ures dressed fash­ion­ably in Occi­den­tal and Ori­en­tal cos­tume alla Tur­ca, and there are indi­ca­tions that we are post-feast, with guests sat­ed and await­ing the wine ser­vice.

In the fore­ground are musi­cians play­ing stringed instru­ments of the late Renais­sance, with leg­end hav­ing it that the musi­cian in the white tunic is a depic­tion of Veronese him­self and the oth­er musi­cians mod­elled on fel­low artists Jacopo Bas­sano, Tin­toret­to and Tit­ian. Behind the musi­cians are seat­ed Jesus of Nazareth, the Vir­gin Mary, and sev­er­al apos­tles. Amongst the wed­ding guests are depict­ed many his­tor­i­cal per­son­ages from Veronese’s day, such as Mary I of Eng­land, Holy Roman Emper­or Charles V, and Suleiman the Mag­nif­i­cent. There are so many quirky ele­ments to dis­cov­er– a lit­tle dog on the table here, a lady pick­ing her teeth there, a dwarf hold­ing a bright green par­rot – that to do so could take up some con­sid­er­able time.

Here are some details (click on them to enlarge), with the whole mas­ter­piece in its entire­ty below.