In missionary schools, you are taught so much about the Bible and the miracles of Jesus Christ. These things hardly stay with you once you leave the school. But when I looked at the Veronese painting in the Louvre, there was a series of flashbacks in my mind and I was able to recollect the story of 'Galilea Vinodhan' (the miracle worker of Galilee), who at a wedding in a small town of Cana showed his magic prowess for the first time by turning water into wine.
Look at this massive painting by Veronese (which we struggled to capture even with a good SLR camera). Besides its huge size (262*390 inc :thanks wiki), rich colors and exorbitant number of characters, some things will strike you if you pay close attention:
-- No one is talking to anyone (well, dont know why this is so, but having experienced this myself in a few weddings, I can empathize with the folks in the painting :) )
-- It's hard to spot the bride and the groom as Jesus and his team (the Virgin, his disciples) are seated in the center of the table and garner all the attention (why does it remind me of my friend's wedding which was attended by the then Education Minister of Tamilnadu, who along with his partymen hogged all the limelight?)
--The louvre website tells me that the person seated with a viola in his hand in the painting, is actually Veronese himself (He must have been the precursor to the likes of K.S. Ravikumar). For that matter, even Da Vinci used to be one of the characters in some of his paintings.
Jokes apart, some other interesting things about this painting are the vertical axis portrayals of an animal being butchered (on the top), Jesus directly looking at you (in fact Jesus is the only person out of the whole bunch of characters looking straight into you), and the orchestra playing music. When I think of it bottoms-up, it means Jesus, who was a playful child yesterday and a holy man who displayed his actual self today will be the lamb of sacrifice tomorrow.
Well- magnificent, ain't it?
Look at this massive painting by Veronese (which we struggled to capture even with a good SLR camera). Besides its huge size (262*390 inc :thanks wiki), rich colors and exorbitant number of characters, some things will strike you if you pay close attention:
-- No one is talking to anyone (well, dont know why this is so, but having experienced this myself in a few weddings, I can empathize with the folks in the painting :) )
-- It's hard to spot the bride and the groom as Jesus and his team (the Virgin, his disciples) are seated in the center of the table and garner all the attention (why does it remind me of my friend's wedding which was attended by the then Education Minister of Tamilnadu, who along with his partymen hogged all the limelight?)
--The louvre website tells me that the person seated with a viola in his hand in the painting, is actually Veronese himself (He must have been the precursor to the likes of K.S. Ravikumar). For that matter, even Da Vinci used to be one of the characters in some of his paintings.
Jokes apart, some other interesting things about this painting are the vertical axis portrayals of an animal being butchered (on the top), Jesus directly looking at you (in fact Jesus is the only person out of the whole bunch of characters looking straight into you), and the orchestra playing music. When I think of it bottoms-up, it means Jesus, who was a playful child yesterday and a holy man who displayed his actual self today will be the lamb of sacrifice tomorrow.
Well- magnificent, ain't it?
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