The Wedding Feast at Cana by Veronese

About 8.8 million people visit the Louvre Museum in Paris each year, and the Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci is one of the most viewed paintings. On average each person spends 15 seconds looking at the painting.

The room was full when my sister and I went to see the Mona Lisa, but she was able to take the classic photo of me standing beside the painting. However, since I did not take that photo, my blipfoto today is a painting directly across from the Mona Lisa.

This huge canvas once adorned the refectory of the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. Here, Veronese, acclaimed as a colorist and for painting vast, multifigured scenes, chose to depict Christ’s first miracle, performed during the Marriage at Cana. Working the perspective so as to draw the spectator into the scene, he transposed the biblical episode to his own era, rich 16th-century Venice. Note the splendor of the fabrics, the sumptuous jewelry, silver and silver-gilt tableware, and the elegant Palladian architecture, which set a magnificent stage for this story, which is supposed to have taken place in the home of poor people who ran out of wine during a wedding feast. In the center, on Christ’s right, Mary holds an invisible glass in her hand to show that there is no wine left. In the right foreground, the figure in yellow pours water that has turned into wine from a jar, a miracle witnessed by the two figures behind him. A man clad in green hurries toward the newlyweds, on the left in front of the columns, to ask why the best wine was kept for the end of the banquet.
Another reading of the work moves vertically from the symbolic image of the butchers chopping up meat to the hourglass on the musicians’ table and the dog chewing a bone: it heralds the "sacrifice of the Lamb," the death of Christ, who revealed his true nature by performing this miracle. But the dogs are also an allegory of fidelity, that of Christians whose faith will sweep away the clouds.

It is a magnificent painting, so complex in contrast to the simplicity of the Mona Lisa and her emblematic smile.