Le Repas chez Simon le Pharisien

Veronese painted this enormous banquet in 1570 for the dining hall of a monastery in Venice, San Sebastiano, a church he decorated across much of his career. The idea was that the monks would take their own plain meals beneath a painted feast, the Gospel supper where a woman washes Christ's feet, staged like a grand Venetian party with columns, servants and dozens of guests. He loved crowding these sacred meals with worldly detail, and a few years later a similar picture landed him before the Inquisition, asked to explain the dogs and drinkers he had added. This canvas left Venice when Napoleon's men suppressed the monastery. In 1817, after his fall, it was handed to the Brera gallery in Milan, where it hangs now, far from the refectory wall it was measured for.