The Wedding Feast at Cana

Christ and the Virgin sit at the centre of the wedding table as he raises his hand in blessing at the moment of his first miracle, the water turned to wine at his mother’s request; the golden jugs standing in the foreground are the proof of it, while servants arrive with plates of food behind the guests and a credenza piled with silver gleams against the left wall. Painted for private devotion on copper, the small panel is set in an elegant arcaded courtyard reached by a double staircase, the whole worked in thin layers with rich glazes to a polished, luminous finish. Lavinia Fontana of Bologna, among the first women to achieve international fame as a painter, made her reputation with precisely such small, exquisitely detailed religious and mythological pictures before her summons to the papal court in Rome. The painting is held in the J. Paul Getty Museum.