The Wedding at Cana The Wedding at Cana The Wedding Feast at Cana (1563), by the Italian artist Paolo Veronese (1528–88), is a representational painting that depicts the biblical story of the Marriage at Cana, at which Jesus converts water to wine (John 2:1–11). Executed in the Mannerist style (1520–1600) of the late Renaissance, the large-format (6.77m × 9.94m) oil painting comprehends the stylistic ideal of compositional harmony, as practised by the artists Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo. The art of the High Renaissance (1490–1527) emphasized human figures of ideal proportions, balanced composition, and beauty, whereas Mannerism exaggerated the Renaissance ideals — of figure, light,
The Wedding at Cana 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. The visual tension among the elements of the picture and the thematic instability among the human figures in "The Wedding Feast at Cana" derive from Veronese's application of technical artifice, the inclusion of sophisticated cultural codes and symbolism (social, religious, theologic), which present a biblical story relevant to the Renaissance viewer and to the contemporary viewer. The pictorial area (67.29 m) of the canvas makes "The Wedding