The Marriage Feast Of Cana Analysis

The Story Behind the Object: The Marriage Feast of Cana by Paolo Veronese

Appearing in the Gospel of John in the New Testament of the Bible, The Marriage at Cana tells the story of Jesus’s first miracle, the turning of water into wine. In the story, Jesus, his disciples, and his mother, the Virgin Mary, are invited to a wedding in Cana of Galilee, a region in northern Israel (John 2:1-12). When the wine at the wedding runs out, Jesus asks the attending servants to fill several pots with water. He then asked them to draw some of the water out and take it to the master of the feast. When the master of the feast tasted the water, it had become wine. The transformation of water into wine is recognised in Christianity as the first of the seven miracles,

One is its sheer size and scale, but the other is that it is one of the best depictions of a classic Renaissance banquet that we have surviving today. The silver tableware and vessels are distinctly 16th Century and very opulent, as is the individual place settings for every guest at the feast, with napkins and individual silver cutlery. The water pots used in the story in the Bible are ones used for Jewish rites of purification, and would have been very simplistic, made from stone with little to no decoration. The pots depicted in Veronese’s Feast for Christ’s miracle are ornate Ancient Greek wine jugs, known as ‘oenochoai’. Found in the bottom left and right corners of the composition, they are heavily decorated, and add to the blending of Biblical iconography and Renaissance celebration. Another evidence of blending of the two themes can be found in the middle of the composition. On the balcony directly above Christ, a butcher can be seen cutting an animal for meat, symbolising Christ’s role as the ‘Lamb of God’ (John 1:29), while at the table below, guests are being served quinces, a type of fruit the symbolises marriage due to its association with Aphrodite (François). The idea that the guests are eating dessert while animals are still being prepared serves as an implication that the animals are sacrificial, as opposed to being prepared as part of the feast. In addition to this, it is important to note that the religious nature of the commission and the content of the art work do slightly overshadow its depiction of a Renaissance banquet. Despite the presence of the musicians in the central bottom part of the composition, no one in the painting is speaking. A wedding would likely be a loud and frenetic environment, with lots of chatter and music. However, the painting was commissioned to dominate a silent refectory, where