The Feast in the House of Simon the Pharisee

This large canvas shows Jesus of Nazareth during a supper held in the house of a Pharisee, the episode that gives the painting its name. Veronese painted it in 1570 for the monastery of San Sebastiano in Venice, a Hieronymite community for which he also produced a cycle of works for the monastery church, which still survives. It belongs to a series of monumental banquet scenes designed for the refectories of Venetian monasteries, in which the painter treated gospel subjects with a crowded and lively staging.

The composition is framed by a huge trompe-l'oeil architecture modelled on the contemporary buildings of Palladio, with whom Veronese had worked on other decorative projects. On the far left, Mary Magdalene anoints Christ's feet with oil, a gesture placed at the margins of the main group. The canvas gathers a very large number of figures and, in the centre, a commotion involving animals, along with secular details that move away from the solemn tone usually expected of a sacred subject.

These very features were the ones questioned when Veronese appeared in 1573 before the Venetian Holy Inquisition. After the French occupation of Venice at the end of the eighteenth century, the monastery was suppressed and its works were dispersed; in 1817 the painting was assigned to the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, where it is now displayed. Its interest lies in showing the maturity of Venetian Mannerism and the tension between the painter's compositional freedom and the doctrinal demands of his time.

Painter

Paolo Veronese

Date

1570

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

275 × 710 cm

Museum

Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan

Movement

Mannerism

Genre

religious art

Depicts

Jesus Christ, man

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