The Marriage Feast at Cana

Hieronymus Bosch died in 1516, but demand for his strange, crowded pictures outlived him by decades, and workshops in the Low Countries kept turning out versions in his manner. This panel, painted around 1560 by an unknown hand once taken for Bosch himself, is one of them. The wood of the board shows it cannot be earlier than 1550, so its maker was working from Bosch's example rather than beside him. The subject is the wedding at Cana, where the Gospel of John says Christ turned water into wine. The feast is laid out like a real Netherlandish banquet, with servants and dishes and small odd details tucked into the corners, in just the way collectors of the time expected from anything sold under Bosch's name.