The Feast of Dives

The museum hears Venice in this table. In the previous century Paolo Veronese had made his name with vast banquets of silk and silver, and in 1573 the Inquisition questioned him for crowding a Last Supper with jesters and dwarfs. Mattia Preti, working in Naples between about 1655 and 1660, turns that kind of feast to the parable in Luke's Gospel of the rich man and the beggar Lazarus. The beggar in rags sits at the far end of the table on the left. The rich man, on the right, is gorged and deaf to his pleading, while the servants joke and mimic one another. In the parable the story has only begun, and the rich man will end in the torments of hell. Of everyone at the table, he alone turns his eyes out of the picture, towards us, as if he already sensed it.