The Wedding Feast at Cana (1563), by Paolo Veronese, is a representational painting that depicts the biblical story of the Marriage at Cana, at which Jesus converts water to wine (John 2:1-11). Eexecuted in the Mannerist style (1520-1600) of the late Renaissance, the large-format (6.77m × 9.94m) oil painting comprehends the stylistic ideal of compositional harmony, as practised by the artists Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo.
The art of the High Renaissance (1490-1527) emphasized human figures of ideal proportions, balanced composition, and beauty, whereas Mannerism exaggerated the Renaissance ideals -- of figure, light, and colour -- with asymmetric and unnaturally elegant arrangements achieved by flattening the pictorial space and distorting the human figure as an ideal preconception of the subject, rather than as a realistic representation.
The visual tension among the elements of the picture and the thematic instability among the human figures in The Wedding Feast at Cana derive from Veronese's application of technical artifice, the inclusion of sophisticated cultural codes and symbolism (social, religious, theologic), which present a biblical story relevant to the Renaissance viewer and to the contemporary viewer. The pictorial area (67.29 m2) of the canvas makes The Wedding Feast at Cana the most expansive picture in the paintings collection of the Musée du Louvre.
Video The Wedding at Cana
History
The commission
At Venice, on 6 June 1562, the Black Monks of the Order of Saint Benedict (OSB) commissioned the painter Paolo Veronese to realise a monumental painting (6.77m×9.94m) to decorate the far wall of the monastery's new refectory, designed by the architect Andrea Palladio, at the Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore, on the eponymous island. In their business contract for the commission of The Wedding Feast at Cana, the Benedictine monks stipulated that Veronese be paid 324 ducats; be paid the costs of his personal and domestic maintenance; be provided a barrel of wine; and be fed in the refectory.
Aesthetically, the Benedictine contract stipulated that the painter represent "the history of the banquet of Christ's miracle at Cana, in Galilee, creating the number of [human] figures that can be fully accommodated." That Veronese use optimi colori (optimum colours) -- specifically, the colour ultramarine, a deep-blue pigment made from lapis lazuli, a semi-precious, metamorphic rock. Assisted by his brother, Benedetto Caliari, Veronese delivered the completed painting in September 1563, in time for the Festa della Madonna della Salute, in November.
Composition and technique
In the 17th century, during the mid-1630s, supporters of Andrea Sacchi (1599-1661) and supporters of Pietro da Cortona (1596-1669) argued much about the ideal number of human figures for a representational composition. Sacchi said that only a few figures (fewer than twelve) permit the artist to honestly depict the unique body poses and facial expressions that communicate character; while da Cortona said that many human figures consolidate the general image of a painting into an epic subject from which sub-themes would develop.
In the 18th century, in Seven Discourses on Art (1769-90), the portraitist Joshua Reynolds (1723-92), said that:
The subjects of the Venetian painters are mostly such as gave them an opportunity of introducing a great number of figures, such as feasts, marriages, and processions, public martyrdoms, or miracles. I can easily conceive that [Paolo] Veronese, if he were asked, would say that no subject was proper for an historical picture, but such as admitted at least forty figures; for in a less number, he would assert, there could be no opportunity of the painter's showing his art in composition, his dexterity of managing and disposing the masses of light, and groups of figures, and of introducing a variety of Eastern dresses and characters in their rich stuffs.
As a narrative painting in the Mannerist style, the crowded banquet-scene depicted in The Wedding Feast at Cana was to be viewed upwards, because the bottom-edge of the painting was 2.50 metres from the refectory floor (where the wood wainscoting ends, and the wall begins); the over-sized dimensions (6.77m x 9.94m) and area (67.29m2) of the canvas were to entirely occupy the display-wall at the end of the great refectory that Palladio designed for the church of San Giorgio Maggiore.
The subject
Paolo Veronese's painting of The Wedding Feast at Cana (1563) depicts the New testament story of the Marriage at Cana described in the Gospel of John. In the story of the first Christian miracle, Mary, her son, Jesus of Nazareth, and some of his Apostles, attend a wedding in Cana, a city in Galilee. In the course of the wedding banquet, the supply of wine was becoming depleted; at Mary's request, Jesus commanded the house servants to fill stone jugs with water, which he then transformed into wine (John 2:1-11).
The banquet
The Wedding Feast at Cana represents the water-into-wine miracle of Jesus in the grand style of the sumptuous feasts of food and music that were characteristic of 16th-century Venetian society; the sacred in and among the profane world where "banquet dishes not only signify wealth, power, and sophistication, but transfer those properties directly into the individual diner. An exquisite dish makes the diner exquisite."
The banquet scene is framed with Greek and Roman architecture from Classical Antiquity and from the Renaissance, Veronese's contemporary era. The Græco-Roman architecture features Doric order and Corinthian order columns surrounding a courtyard that is enclosed with a low balustrade; in the distance, beyond the courtyard, there is an arcaded tower, by the architect Andrea Palladio. In the foreground, musicians play stringed instruments of the Late-Renaissance, such as the lute, the violone, and the viola da gamba.
Among the wedding guests are historical personages, such as the monarchs Eleanor of Austria, Francis I of France, and Mary I of England, Suleiman the Magnificent, tenth sultan of the Ottoman Empire, and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V; the poetess Vittoria Colonna, the diplomat Marcantonio Barbaro, and the architect Daniele Barbaro; the noblewoman Giulia Gonzaga and Cardinal Pole, the last Roman Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, the master jester Triboulet and the Ottoman statesman Sokollu Mehmet Pa?a -- all dressed in the sumptuous Occidental and Oriental fashions alla Turca popular in the Renaissance.
According to 18th-century legend and artistic tradition, the painter of the picture (Paolo Veronese) included himself to the banquet scene, as the musician in white tunic, who is playing a viola da braccio. Accompanying Veronese are the principal painters of the Venetian school: Jacopo Bassano, playing the flute, Tintoretto, also playing a viola da braccio, and Titian, dressed in red, playing the violone; besides them stands the poet Pietro Aretino considering a glass of the new red wine.
Symbolism
As a work of figurative art, The Wedding Feast at Cana (1563) is a painting of the Early Modern period; the religious and theological narrative of Veronese's interpretation of the water-into-wine miracle is in two parts.
I. On the horizontal axis -- the lower-half of the painting contains 130 human figures; the upper-half of the painting is dominated by Geæco-Roman architecture, which frames and contains the historical figures and Late-Renaissance celebrities invited to the celebrate the bride and bridegroom at their wedding feast. Some human figures are rendered in foreshortened perspective, the stylisation of Mannerism; the old architectural elements mirror the contemporary architecture of Andrea Palladio; the treatment of the religious subject is a cosmopolitan tableau of historical and contemporary personages fashionably dressed in costumes from the Occidental and the Oriental worlds known to Renaissance society.
Seated behind and above the musicians are the Virgin Mary, Jesus of Nazareth, and some of his Apostles. Above the figure of Jesus, on an elevated walkway, a man watches the banquet, and a serving maid awaits for the butcher to cut up an animal. To the right, a porter arrives with more meat for the feasting diners to eat. The butchered animals prefigure the sacrifice of Jesus (the Lamb of God) as he is aligned beneath the butcher's block and blade.
At the bottom-right-quarter of the picture, a barefoot servant pours the new red wine from a large, ornate oenochoe into a serving ewer. Behind the wine servant stands the poet Pietro Aretino, intently considering the red wine in his glass. In the bottom-left-quarter, the attendant, dressed in green, supervises the servant-boy proffering a glass of the new red wine to the bridegroom; at the edge of the nuptial table, a dwarf holds a bright-green parrot, and awaits instructions from the attendant.
II. On the vertical axis -- the contrasts of light and shadow symbolize the co-existence of mortality and earthly pleasures; above the Jesus figure, a lamb is butchered, beneath the Jesus figure are the musicians, and before them is an hourglass -- a reference to futile human vanity. As a function of the Benedictine commission, the protocol of religious symbolism supersedes the social protocol for a wedding banquet; thus the disparity of status, between the celebrants and the guests: Jesus, Mary, and some Apostles sit at the centre span of the banquet table, whilst the bride and bridegroom sit at the right wing of the banquet table. Moreover, despite the kitchen's continuing preparation of roasted meat, the main course of such a celebratory meal, the wedding guests are eating the dessert course, which includes wine, fruit, and sweet quince cheese, a comestible symbol of marriage; such culinary contradiction indicates that the animals are symbolic and not for eating.
Maps The Wedding at Cana
Plunder and re-installation
From the 16th to the 18th centuries, for 235 years, the painting decorated the refectory of the church of San Giorgio Maggiore, until 11 September 1797, when soldiers of Napoleon's French Revolutionary Army plundered the picture as war booty, during the Italian campaigns of the French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802). To readily transport the over-sized painting -- from a Venetian church to a Parisian museum -- the French soldiers horizontally cut the canvas of The Wedding Feast at Cana, and rolled it like a carpet, to be re-assembled and re-stitched in France.
In 1798, along with other plundered works of art, the 235-year-old painting was stored in the first floor of the Louvre Museum; five years later, in 1803, that store of looted art had become the Musée Napoléon -- the personal art collection of the future Emperor of the French.
In the early 19th century, after the Napoleonic Wars (1803-15), the repatriation and restitution of looted works of art was integral to the post-Napoleonic conciliation treaties. Appointed by Pope Pius VII, the Neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova negotiated the French repatriation of Italian works of art that Napoleon had plundered from the Papal States with the Treaty of Tolentino (1797) -- yet, the prejudiced curator of the Musée Napoléon, Vivant Denon, falsely claimed that Veronese's canvas was too fragile to travel from Paris to Venice, and Canova excluded The Wedding Feast at Cana (1563) from repatriation to Italy, and, in its stead, sent to Venice the Feast at the House of Simon (1653), by Charles Le Brun.
In the late 19th century, during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), The Wedding Feast at Cana, then 308 years old, was stored in a box at Brest, in Brittany. In the 20th century, during the Second World War (1939-45), the 382-year-old painting was rolled up for storage, and continually transported to hiding places throughout the south of France, lest Veronese's art become part of the Nazi plunder stolen during the twelve-year existence (1933-45) of the Third Reich.
In the early 21st century, on 11 September 2007 -- the 210th anniversary of the Napoleonic looting in 1797 -- a computer-generated, digital facsimile of The Wedding Feast at Cana was hung in the Palladian refectory of the Monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice. The full-sized (6.77m x 9.94m) digital facsimile is composed of 1,591 graphic files, and was made by Factum Arte, Madrid, on commission from the Giorgio Cini Foundation, Venice, and the Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Restoration
In 1989, the Louvre Museum began a painting restoration of The Wedding Feast at Cana (1563), which provoked an art-world controversy like that caused by the eleven-year Restoration of the Sistine Chapel frescoes (1989-99). Organised as the Association to Protect the Integrity of Artistic Heritage (APIAH), artists protested against the restoration of the 426-year-old painting, and publicly demanded to be included to the matter, which demand the Louvre Museum denied.
To the APIAH, especially controversial was the removal of a rouge marron red hue over-painting of the tabard coat of the attendant, who is standing in the foreground (left-of-centre). The removal of the red hue revealed the original, green colour of the tabard. In opposing that aspect of the painting's restoration, the APIAH artists said that Veronese, himself, had changed the tabard's hue to red, from the green colour of the initial version of the painting.
In June 1992, three years into the restoration of the painting, The Wedding Feast at Cana twice suffered accidental damages. In the first accident, the canvas was spattered with rainwater that leaked into the museum through an air vent. In the second accident, occurred two days later, the Louvre curators were raising the 1.5-ton-painting to a higher position upon the display-wall when a support-frame failed and collapsed. In falling to the museum floor, the metal framework that held and transported the painting punctured and tore the canvas; fortuitously, the five punctures and tears affected only the architectural and background areas of the painting, and not the faces of the wedding guests.
Notes
- Louvre Visitor's Guide, English version (2004)
Sources
External links .
- Article on Louvre website
- Article at Great Works of Western Art
Source of article : Wikipedia
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