The Wedding at Cana

This is the largest painting in the Louvre, nearly 10 metres across, and it was not made for a wall in Paris at all. The Benedictine monks of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice commissioned it in 1562 for the end wall of their new dining hall, so the monks would eat every meal beneath a feast of some 130 figures crowded around the wedding at Cana, where Christ turns water into wine. Veronese fills it with his own Venice, with musicians, servants, dogs and gold plate. In 1797 Napoleon's soldiers took it as war booty and, because the canvas was too big to move whole, they cut it in half and shipped it to Paris, where it was sewn back together. It never went home. When the time came to return looted art to Italy, a French official claimed it was too fragile to travel, and Venice was sent a different painting in its place.