November 2023 - Occasional Glimpses of the Sublime

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.

Visitors to the Bowes Museum in the town of Barnard Castle in County Durham are regularly blown away by the treasures housed in this provincial town, miles away from the major cities where art collections of this quality may be expected. The building alone is worth the visit; it is elaborately modelled in the style of the French Second Empire, purpose-built to house the art collection of John Bowes, and opened to the public in 1892.

The collection contains paintings by El Greco, Goya, Canaletto, Fragonard and Boucher, as well as items of decorative art, ceramics, textiles, tapestries, clocks and costumes. The pièce de résistance, however, is today’s subject, the Silver Swan automaton, created by London jeweller James Cox and the inventor John Joseph Merlin.

The Silver Swan was first recorded in 1774 as a crowd puller at the famous Cox’s Museum of James Cox, an entrepreneur as well as a talented jeweller. The exquisitely crafted swan has an internal clockwork-driven mechanism with 2000 moving parts (designed by Merlin), and at an appointed time each day at Bowes Museum, the automaton is cranked up and goes through its 32-second performance.

The swan sits in a stream made of glass rods and surrounded by silver leaves, and small silver fish can be seen “swimming” in the stream. When the clockwork is wound, the music box plays and the glass rods rotate giving the illusion of flowing water. The swan turns its head from side to side, preens itself, and after a few moments bends down to catch and eat a fish. The swan’s head then returns to the upright position and the performance is over.

The Silver Swan was exhibited at the 1867 Paris International Exhibition, and it was here that John Bowes and his wife saw it, fell in love with it, and in 1872 had the opportunity to purchase it (for £200, or about £20,000 in today’s money, still an absolute steal). The American novelist Mark Twain also saw the Silver Swan at the Paris exhibition in 1867 and described it in his book The Innocents Abroad:

I watched the Silver Swan, which had a living grace about his movement and a living intelligence in his eyes – watched him swimming about as comfortably and unconcernedly as it he had been born in a morass instead of a jeweller’s shop – watched him seize a silver fish from under the water and hold up his head and go through the customary and elaborate motions of swallowing it…

If this inspires you to see the swan for yourself, leave it a few months: it is currently being restored but is expected to return to its public next year.