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 by Pope Pius VII, the Neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova negotiated the French repatriation of Italian works of art that Napoleon had plundered from the Papal States with the Treaty of Tolentino (1797) — yet, the prejudiced curator of the Musée Napoléon, Vivant Denon, falsely claimed that Veronese's canvas was too fragile to travel from Paris to Venice, and Canova excluded "The Wedding Feast at Cana" (1563) from repatriation to Italy, and, in its stead, sent to Venice the "Feast at the House of Simon" (1653), by Charles Le Brun. In the late 19th century, during the Franco–Prussian War (1870–71), "The