FGC Nozze di Cana

With the app ‘The Wedding at Cana’, you can find out all about the story behind this great painting, one of the most famous in history. Painted by Paolo Veronese for the Island of San Giorgio, it was stolen by Napoleon’s troops and ‘returned’ as a facsimile in 2007.

The Wedding at Cana by Paolo Caliari, known as ‘Il Veronese’.

On 6 June 1562, the painter Paolo Veronese was summoned to the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore to paint the back wall of the Benedictine refectory of the architectural complex designed by Andrea Palladio and completed that same year. The understanding and collaboration between the painter and the architect were undoubtedly decisive for the prodigious final result, the fame of which crossed the Alps and led Napoleon Bonaparte to decide to take it away it as compensation for war expenses sustained in 1797 after the defeat of the Serenissima.

The canvas was removed from the wall on 11 September of that year, cut into several pieces and sent to the Musée du Louvre, where it is still kept in the same room as Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. The 1:1 scale facsimile of the painting, the dimensions of which are 994 × 677 cm, was carried out with the specially designed 3D ‘Cana’ colour scanner, ultra-high resolution technical equipment and cameras that produced 2,700 individual shots. The painting was split into 37 vertical and 38 horizontal sections, each of which was compared in detail with the Colour References book, which contains thousands of colour nuances and textures. The scanning process took two months. The printable 100×180 cm sections were subsequently assembled and retouched. It appears to be impossible to distinguish this reproduction from the Louvre original with the naked eye.

The app is available to the general public at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, with a view enhancing general accessibility and inclusiveness, providing short audio passages explaining the work, while spotlights focus on various details in sequence. On one hand, there is an explanation of the scene, i.e. the biblical episode of the turning of water into wine, while on the other hand it offers the chance to explore the collaboration between Paolo Veronese and Andrea Palladio. What’s more there is also an exploration of the creation of the facsimile by Factum Arte in 2007. The short audios reach visitors’ mobile devices via push notifications and, in future developments, it will also be possible to upload high-resolution details onto the app in order to view details of the work visible only at a certain distance ‘close up’.

This app will benefit all those members of the public who are not accompanied by a tour guide (also during major events), those who may require visual aids of various kinds, as well as the senior or junior target groups during independent visits by school classes or other group outings.