25 01 18 Obedience and the Wedding in Cana The Rev'd Dr James Lawson St Mary Magdalene Enfield скачать в хорошем качестве

25 01 18 Obedience and the Wedding in Cana The Rev'd Dr James Lawson St Mary Magdalene Enfield

Epiphany 2 2025 John 2. 1-11 If you’re ever in the Louvre Art Gallery in Paris and you join the crowd taking pictures of the Mona Lisa on their phones turn around and take a look at the painting behind you. It’s the biggest painting in the Louvre. It’s over 6 metres high and almost 10 metres wide. It’s a painting of the story we’ve just heard in the Gospel, The Wedding Feast at Cana by Paolo Veronese. Veronese imagines the scene in sixteenth century Venice. He paints a banquet for a crowd of some 130 different characters in a blaze of light and colour. In the lower half of the composition, finely dressed guests gesture, and eat at a banqueting table attended by servants and musicians. A black attendant offers a glass of miraculous wine to the bridegroom; behind him, a dwarf is holding a bright green parrot. Among the wedding guests are Veronese’s contemporaries: the King of France, the Holy Roman Emperor, the Queen of England and the Ottoman Emperor Suleiman the Magnificent, and also the last Roman Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury and Triboulet, the jester of the King of France. The guests are eating dessert, quinces, grapes and figs. Above them on a second level are the servers, carvers, and cooks who are busily attending to the food and dishes for the meal. Above them all is the blue sky with a few white clouds, between classical columns and architecture. Spectators peer down at all the activity below them. The colours are rich and varied. The clothing, instruments, and serving vessels are elegant and costly. This is a sumptuous work of art. It’s a painting of people who are devoted to earthly pleasures. It’s about the joy and splendour of life. But set in front of the musicians is an hourglass, a symbol of the transience of earthly pleasures and of human vanity. And the composition is organized around the figures of Jesus and His mother Mary...