Banquet at the House of Simon

This is a wall of a painting, close to 7.5 meters wide, and it was made to hang in a refectory, the hall where a religious community took its meals. The scene is a meal too. Luke's Gospel tells of a dinner at the house of Simon the Pharisee, where a woman long identified as Mary Magdalene kneels at Christ's feet, and Strozzi crowds the table with servants, dishes, and glinting glass and metalware. Venice already had a tradition of enormous feast paintings for dining halls, above all by Veronese, whose own Feast in the House of Levi hangs a few rooms away in this same gallery. Strozzi's canvas came from Genoa, from the convent of Santa Maria della Passione, and the Italian state bought it in 1911 from a dealer in Vicenza.