The Feast in the House of Simon the Pharisee (Veronese, Turin)

Veronese was still in his twenties in the 1550s when monks at the church of Santi Nazaro e Celso in Verona asked him for this. It was meant for their refectory, the room where they ate, so the monks would sit down to their own plain meal beneath an enormous painted banquet. The subject is from the Gospels, a woman washing Christ's feet at the table of Simon, a Pharisee. But Veronese stages it as a lavish Venetian dinner party, with columns and servants and fine cloth, the kind of worldly splendour that would later get one of his other feast scenes questioned by the Inquisition. Here the guests lean and gesture as if caught in the middle of talking.