The Wedding at Cana

The Wedding at Cana, by Paolo Veronese, is a representational painting that depicts the biblical story of the Wedding at Cana, at which Jesus miraculously converts water into red wine (John 2:1, 11). Executed in the Mannerist style (1520 to 1600) of the late Renaissance, the large-format (6.77 m × 9.94 m or 22 ft 3 in × 32 ft 7 in) 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 to 1527) emphasised 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.