The Marriage Feast at Cana

This is the wedding at Cana from John's gospel, the feast where Christ is said to have turned water into wine, his first miracle. For a long time it hung under one of the most bankable names in early Netherlandish art, Hieronymus Bosch, the painter of teeming, unsettling worlds. That label is now doubted. Many scholars read it as the work of his workshop or a later follower, and the dating is contested too: the wood of the panel has been read both as just before 1500 and as too young to predate the mid-16th century, which would make this a copy after a lost original. It doesn't stand alone. Two other versions of the same composition survive, one in the Louvre and one in an abbey at Tongerlo in Belgium. The panel here was later sawn down, its top corners cut into steps.