The Marriage Feast at Cana

The scene is the wedding at Cana, where by the Gospel account Christ turned water into wine, his first miracle. Murillo painted it around 1672 in Seville, and he staged the holy story as a lavish contemporary feast, with servants filling seven big earthenware water jars of the kind used in the city at the time. There is a private reason for the splendor. The picture was commissioned by Nicolas Omazur, a wealthy Flemish merchant living in Seville who was Murillo's main patron in these years, and it was most likely made to mark Omazur's own marriage in 1672. The patron and his wife are worked into the crowd of guests, so the couple sit at a biblical banquet and at their own wedding at the same time.