The Parable of the Wedding Banquet

What survives here is a fragment, a single towering figure of a crowned king, cut from a far larger oval painting. Strozzi made the whole thing around 1636 for the ceiling of the church attached to the Ospedale degli Incurabili, a Venetian hospital, where it hung among other canvases, a Paradise and a set of Virtues now lost. The subject is Christ's parable of the wedding feast, in which a king invites guests to his son's marriage, is refused, then fills the hall with strangers gathered from the streets, and spots one man who came without a wedding garment and has him thrown out. In 1825 the church was deconsecrated and emptied, its pictures scattered, and much of the ceiling was sold at auction in 1865. The crowned king is the part of it that survived, and he now hangs in the gallery.