‘The Wedding Feast at Cana’, the largest painting in the Louvre Museum

CAIRO – 19 June 2022: At over 6 meters high and nearly 10 meters wide, The Wedding Feast at Cana is the largest painting in the famous Louvre Museum in France.

The painting depict an extraordinary banquet with a crowd of around 130 different figures in a glow of light and color.

Italian artist Paolo Cagliari, famous for Veronese, painted the scene of the refectory of the monastery on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice in 1563.

In 1798 Napoleon's forces confiscated the painting and shipped it to Paris. When the French Empire fell in 1815, most of the confiscated paintings were returned to Italy, but it was feared that the return trip would damage this large work, which has been preserved in exchange for a painting by Charles LeBrun called The Feast in the House of Simon.

However, Veronese's monumental masterpiece had to be moved twice in subsequent years when Paris was at war in 1870 and 1939.

The painter Paolo Cagliari, known as Paolo Veronese, is considered one of the most prominent painters of the Renaissance in Venice, Italy. He lived in the sixteenth century between 1528 and 1588.

He is best known for his fictional or historical depiction of religious themes and mythology, like The Wedding Feast at Cana which he painted in 1563 and the painting The Feast In the House of Levi, painted in 1573.