The Wedding at Cana
The largest painting in the Louvre — Paolo Veronese's dazzling vision of the biblical wedding feast, facing the Mona Lisa.
Completed in 1563 for the refectory of the Benedictine monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, the canvas is immense — about 6.77 by 9.94 metres, covering nearly 70 square metres. It reimagines the wedding at Cana, where Christ turned water into wine, as a sumptuous sixteenth-century Venetian banquet with some 130 figures.
Veronese filled the scene with musicians, servants, dogs and richly dressed guests beneath bright classical architecture. At the centre, dressed in white, Christ sits calmly amid the feast; below him a group of musicians is traditionally read as portraits of the great Venetian painters, Veronese among them.
Seized by Napoleon's troops in 1797 and brought to Paris, the painting is now too fragile to travel. It hangs in the Salle des États of the Denon wing — directly opposite the Mona Lisa, filling the wall behind the crowds.
- 🖼️TypeOil on canvas · 677 × 994 cm
- 🎨ArtistPaolo Veronese
- 📅Date1563
- 🏛️RoomSalle des États · Denon wing
- 📍LocationMusée du Louvre, 75001 Paris
About the Louvre
The Louvre is the world’s largest and most-visited art museum. Once the fortress and royal palace of the kings of France, it opened as a public museum in 1793 and today holds some 35,000 works spanning antiquity to the mid-19th century — from Egyptian antiquities and Greek marbles to the French Crown Jewels.
Since 1989, visitors enter beneath the glass Pyramid designed by architect I. M. Pei, which opens onto the museum’s three wings — Denon, Sully and Richelieu — arranged around the Cour Napoléon. The Louvre stands in the 1st arrondissement along the Rue de Rivoli, beside the Tuileries Gardens and the Seine.
The museum is open every day except Tuesday, from 9 am to 6 pm (with a late evening on Fridays). Timed tickets are strongly recommended and can be booked on the official site, louvre.fr; under-18s enter free, as do EU residents under 26. Nearest métro: Palais-Royal–Musée du Louvre (lines 1 and 7).
Where to see it — the Louvre and around
The Louvre (pulsing marker) at the centre. Toggle the filters to explore the heritage, gardens, restaurants and activities of the 1st arrondissement — and the hotels around it.