The Wedding at Cana in his glass. bottom-left-quarter — the steward of the house (dressed in green) supervises the black servant-boy proffering a glass of the new, red wine to the bridegroom, the host of the wedding feast; at the edge of the nuptial table, a dwarf holds a bright-green parrot, and awaits instructions from the house steward. II. On the vertical axis — the contrasts of light and shadow symbolize the co-existence of mortality and vanitas, the transitory pleasures of earthly life; the protocol of religious symbolism supersedes the social protocol. In the wedding banquet proper, the holy guests and the mortal hosts
The Wedding at Cana figures and Late-Renaissance personages invited to celebrate the bride and bridegroom at their wedding feast. Some human figures are rendered in foreshortened perspective, the stylisation of Mannerism; the old architecture mirrors the contemporary architecture of Andrea Palladio; the narrative treatment places the religious subject in a cosmopolitan tableau of historical and contemporary personages, most of whom are fashionably dressed in costumes from the Orient — Asia as known to Renaissance society in the 16th century. Seated behind and above the musicians are the Virgin Mary, Jesus of Nazareth, and some of his Apostles. Above the figure of Jesus, on an