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Veronese’s vast canvas - nearly ten metres wide - hangs directly opposite the Mona Lisa in the Salle des Etats, and it is the painting that most visitors photograph without realising what they are looking at. It depicts Christ’s first miracle, the transformation of water into wine at the wedding feast at Cana, but Veronese treats the biblical story as an excuse for a Venetian banquet: some 130 figures, musicians, dogs, servants, marble columns and a sky of deep blue.
The painting was made in 1563 for the refectory of the Benedictine monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, where it was designed to sit behind the monks as they ate - a painted feast to accompany a real one. Christ sits at the centre of the long table, faintly haloed, while the bride and groom at the far left are almost incidental. The four musicians in the foreground are traditionally identified as Veronese himself, playing the viola da gamba, with the painters Tintoretto and Bassano and possibly Titian.
Napoleon’s armies took the painting to Paris in 1797 as war booty, cutting it in two to transport it. It was returned in 1815, but the French decided it was too fragile to move again and kept it, sending a full-size copy by Charles-Andre van Loo back to Venice in exchange. A 2007 restoration removed centuries of yellowed varnish and revealed the original cool silver-grey tonality.
Paolo Veronese (1528-1588), born Paolo Caliari in Verona, was one of the three great painters of sixteenth-century Venice alongside Titian and Tintoretto. He specialised in enormous, luminous narrative canvases for refectories and palace ceilings, and his taste for sumptuous costume and incidental detail twice brought him before the Inquisition - most famously for the Feast in the House of Levi, which he renamed rather than repaint.
Venice in the 1560s was the wealthiest city in Europe, and its painting was built on colour rather than Florentine drawing. Veronese’s banquet scenes were a form of civic self-portrait. The painting’s seizure by Napoleon in 1797 was part of the largest art confiscation in European history, and its retention in Paris after 1815 was one of the diplomatic grievances that shaped nineteenth-century museum politics.
Denon Wing · Level 1 · Salle des Etats (Room 711)
The Louvre is divided into three wings — Denon, Sully and Richelieu — reached from the hall beneath the glass pyramid.
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