The Wedding At Cana, Flemish school of the 18th century

Paolo Caliari, known as Il Veronese (Verona, 1528 – Venice, 1588) Follower
The Wedding at Cana

oil on canvas 96 x 127 cm. - Framed: 114 x 145 cm.

The painting, which depicts the biblical episode of the Wedding at Cana, is a magnificent interpretation of the masterpiece by Paolo Veronese (Verona 1528 – Venice 1588), one of the greatest Italian Renaissance painters; the original, painted in 1563 for the refectory of the Benedictine monastery at San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, is now housed at the Louvre Museum in Paris **.

The scene depicts Jesus’s first miracle, as recounted in the Gospel of John: the turning of water into wine during a wedding feast in Cana of Galilee, where he had gone with some of his disciples and his Mother: at one point, when the wine had run out, he had some jars filled with water drawn from the well brought to him and performed the miracle.

The artist reinterprets this Gospel episode as a sumptuous and crowded banquet in 16th-century Venice, set in the hall of a luxurious palace surrounded by imposing classical architecture.

Christ sits at the center of the table, flanked by the Virgin Mary, while in the very foreground stands out a group of musicians whom tradition identifies as portraits of the greatest Venetian painters of the era (including Veronese himself, Titian, and Tintoretto).

Thanks to its extraordinary fame and narrative richness, the work has been the subject of numerous period replicas, versions, workshop copies, and later derivations over the centuries, often destined for private collections to satisfy the extremely high demand from collectors and aristocrats of the time.

The episode, which opens the sequence of Christ’s miraculous deeds, transforms into a phantasmagoria of colors, illuminated by brilliant light and an extremely vivid color palette.

The painting is superbly decorative, of high quality in its execution, and characterized by a luminous composition, with lines accentuated by vigorous brushwork and a rather pronounced play of light and shadow. Moreover, the production of copies was very common in Paolo Caliari’s workshop (organized almost like a family business with his brother Benedetto and his sons Carlo and Gabriele), as it was characterized by practical, artisanal activity rather than by a “school” in the Renaissance sense.

Our version fits perfectly into this tradition, which—since the works were intended for the halls of noble palaces or private collections—required that the copies be drastically reduced in scale, while retaining the complex theatrical composition and vibrant color typical of the Veronese style.

Many contemporary or slightly later replicas were not, after all, slavish copies. In some variations, iconographic details were modified, and portraits of the patrons were inserted (in the form of the bride and groom or wedding guests).

In our case, the composition is quite faithful to the original and, above all—a detail that makes it particularly interesting from a collector’s perspective—it includes all of the more than 100 figures, with the exception of those in the background, some of whom have been omitted.

There are important versions officially cataloged as “Workshop of Paolo Veronese” in prestigious public collections, such as the canvas at the Ospedale di Santo Spirito in Sassia in Rome or the same subject, housed at the Museo del Prado in Madrid, which follows the iconography though with a more sober and minimalist composition. ** The Wedding at Cana, Paolo Caliari 1563, oil on canvas, 666×990 cm Louvre Museum, Paris