The Wedding at Cana
In this week’s letter, I wanted to briefly share something I found interesting.
The painting above has a few names — The Wedding at Cana, The Marriage at Cana, or The Wedding Feast at Cana. Created by Paolo Veronese in 1563, and with its staggering size, 6.77 x 9.94 meters, it is indisputably one of the most remarkable displays of human creative capacity and achievement the world has ever seen. Today, the painting hangs in the Louvre Museum in Paris, France, where it has been for over two centuries.
“This enormous canvas depicts the Gospel story of Jesus attending a wedding feast [at which Jesus miraculously converts water into red wine (John 2:1–11)]. But in Veronese’s vision, the humble ceremony is transformed into a lavish imperial banquet staged on a palace plaza overlooked by marble colonnades and gilded balconies filled with spectators. Scores of wedding guests in bright, bejeweled garments drink from great jugs of wine and eat from barges of food carried by servants in turbans and red slippers, while musicians play, courtesans jape, and well-fed dogs doze contentedly.” (Naifeh & Smith, 2011, p. 458)
Unfortunately, I do not possess the necessary eloquence or knowledge of painting to write any original descriptions of Paolo’s masterpiece. If you are interested in the easter-egg details of who the people in the image secretly represent or the genius symbolism hidden just behind a second glance, please shoot me a message, and we can explore the painting further in a private conversation. The purpose of this letter, however, is to propose a hypothesis about how this painting may have indirectly changed art forever.
In October 1885, the Louvre Museum had a unique visitor. An odd-looking man, hiding a sun-beaten face and wiry red beard under his sodden cap, had joined one of the guided museum tours. “He looked like a drowned tomcat,” one visitor recalled. As he strolled through the museum, whenever he saw something of interest, he would shout out loud, “Look!” before rushing through the crowd towards a painting in a different room. He spent the entirety of his day there, dashing back and forth, hollering incoherently, and disrupting the slow-moving crowds. Finally, he stood before the museum’s largest work, The Wedding at Cana. Transfixed, he would not budge. He examined the painting for hours, at one point even trying to touch it. Passersby scoffed at his disheveled look and seeming manic mental condition; little did they know they were standing before one of the soon-to-be most influential painters of all time, Vincent Van Gogh.
Van Gogh is known best for his transformative approach to painting, in which he used color to express emotion, instead of precision. However, for most of his life, he drew and painted solely in dark shades of gray and black. For years, he argued against the use of color, calling it tasteless and unrealistic. His painting The Potato Eaters, a dark, almost colorless, and somewhat unsettling image of a peasant family eating dinner, was his favorite personal work for most of his thirty-seven years on Earth. Only in the final years of his life did he explore the expansive opportunities of color. It appears to me now, during my unfinished and very brief study of Van Gogh, that his encounter with The Wedding at Cana was the inflection point at which he changed his mind on color. Here is what Vincent wrote of the painting in a letter to his brother Theo after his visit to the Louvre:
“When Veronese had painted the portraits of his beau-monde in the Marriage at Cana, he had spent on it all the richness of his palette in somber violets, in splendid golden tones. Then — he thought still of a faint azure and a pearly-white — which does not appear in the foreground. He detonated it on the background — and it was right . . . So beautiful is that background that it arose spontaneously from a calculation of colors. Am I wrong in this? . . . Surely that is real painting, and the result is more beautiful than the exact imitation of the things themselves.”
What I’m struggling with, is deciding whether or not I believe that a single event such as this can have such a profound impact on a person that it changes their life forever. Perhaps not everyone will change the world, but some will. Would Vincent Van Gogh have become Vincent Van Gogh if he had never seen The Wedding at Cana? What if he had seen it but had seen it at a time in his life when his brain was not primed to receive its beauty? Is the story of our lives and the history of the world a consequence of pivotal life-changing moments that define who we become? Or do we become who we are through the day-to-day micro-moments that pass us by without us ever noticing?
Well, that’s as far as I’ve got. Obviously, I’ve been reading about Van Gogh (if I haven’t told you already). Here’s what I’ve been reading: Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith.
Happy Friday.
-Ieuan
