The Wedding at Cana Veronese

The Wedding at Cana, or the Wedding Feast at Cana, by the late Renaissance slash early Mannerist Italian painter Paolo Veronese, is a huge painting, and that's why I've started with this image here, just so that you get a sense of how large this painting actually is. And it's today in the Musee di Louvre. It was commissioned originally by a Venetian monastery, and Veronese completed this work by 1563. It had been commissioned originally in 1662. So it remained in this monastery for centuries, until it was plundered by Napoleon in 1797. And one of the things that I want to talk about with this painting is how much damage it's gone through. It's had a rough life. When it was plundered by Napoleon in, as I said, 1797, it was cut actually in half, and then they brought it to Paris and stitched it back together, and you can see where it's cut right down the middle. If you go see the painting in the Louvre, you can see where they had originally cut it and then stitched it back together. During the Franco-Prussian War, they stored the painting in this huge box, and then during World War II, they took it out of the frame, rolled it up, and it was moved around France in a truck. Okay, so maybe it doesn't sound like that's been too rough so far, but then during the early 90s, the Louvre went through a series of renovations, and a leaky air vent splattered water all over the canvas, which required some pretty heavy-duty artistic restoration. And then, as if that wasn't bad enough, then when they were trying to rehang this one-and-a-half ton painting back on the wall, one of the support beams broke, and then the entire painting fell onto the ground, causing several tears, one of which was actually over four feet long. So anyway, as I said, it's had a bit of a rough past, but let's look now specifically at the painting. This is a great example of Greco-Roman architecture. You can see both Corinthian columns there, kind of in the background, and Doric columns in the foreground. The setting of the wedding is in an open courtyard. There's a low balustrade that kind of moves across the center of the painting horizontally. In the distance, there's this huge, almost kind of fanciful, arcaded tower, and you can see some birds flying to the left and then above that. In the center, foreground of the painting, is a group of musicians, and they're playing late-Renaissance instruments, early string instruments, lyres. And then Jesus is in the center of the painting, the halo. He's the only figure who's staring directly at the viewer. And he's seated next to his mother, Mary. She's to the left of him, from the perspective of the viewer. Also, she has a halo, and she's shown as an old woman. Now directly above Jesus, and this is where I'm going to begin to talk about some of the religious symbolism we see in this painting, is a group of men butchering some kind of meat. And notice that that knife is directly above Jesus' head. And then over on the right side of the painting, above the balustrade, you can see more meat being brought in of an unidentified animal. Art critics and historians typically argue that this meat is probably a lamb, right? Which fits with the symbolic representation of Jesus as Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God, the sacrificial lamb. And that accords nicely, as I said, with that knife positioned directly above Jesus' head as kind of a portent of his eventual fate. On the bottom right hand of the painting is where we see the subject matter that constitutes the biblical story that everyone knows as the miracle Jesus performed at the wedding at Cana. There is a man pouring wine from a large jug, and then right next to him there's a wine taster, or the head waiter, who's studying the glass of wine. And I think everyone has probably heard this story before, but I'll recap it briefly just in case. Jesus and his mother, they went to a wedding, and Mary said, hey, Jesus, they're out of wine, which of course would have been a very embarrassing thing, obviously, like a wedding today if they ran out of wine, or champagne, or whatever. And what Jesus eventually did was told the waiters to fill several jugs with water. And then when these jugs were then poured out, like you can see here in the painting, that water had been miraculously turned into wine. There's over 130 figures in this painting. There's also kind of some weird little idiosyncrasies. There's a lot of dogs in the painting. Over on the left hand side toward the end of the painting is a dwarf holding a parrot. One notable thing in this painting is that the religious symbolism really takes precedence over the banquet protocol. An obvious example of this is the fact that Jesus is seated at the center of the table. Obviously, since this wasn't Jesus's wedding, Jesus would not have actually been centered at the actual event. So that's more, as we said, for religious purposes, for religious symbolism. Also, the meal that's being eaten currently, based on the types of food on the table, which looks like fruit, would have been dessert. And it wouldn't really be making much sense then that they were preparing meats, like we see up on the upper level, when they had already moved on to dessert. So once again, the meat is probably for the purpose of the religious significance of Jesus as the Lamb of God. This is a very widely recognized painting. As I said, it's famous for its magnitude, its impressive size. And I know that it's one of my favorite religious paintings, and I hope that you've enjoyed it as well. Please do not forget to subscribe if you like art as much as I do, and in exchange you'll get a new video on a new painting every week. And other than that, thanks for watching, hope you have a great week, and we'll see you again next week, everybody.