The Wedding at Cana (Veronese)

At a sumptuous Venetian banquet some one hundred and thirty guests feast beneath a bright classical loggia while, almost lost at the center of the table, Christ performs his first miracle, turning water into wine (John 2). Veronese paints sacred history as worldly spectacle: servants, dwarfs, dogs, and a group of musicians said to include the painter himself among them in white. Made for the refectory of the Benedictine monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, the enormous canvas is the largest painting in the Louvre, carried off to Paris by Napoleon's troops in 1797 and never returned.