Wedding at Cana

Tisi Benvenuto called Garofalo

(Garofalo or Ferrara 1476 - Ferrara 1559)

This painting, considered partly autograph, is a slightly changed replica of a work by Garofalo now in the Hermitage (1531). The colonnade in the background of the wedding scene (John 2.1-11) is embellished with lush garlands, a typical motif in Ferrarese decoration. The precise rendering of some of the details points to the presence of autograph models by the master used by his workshop.

Object details

Commentary

This small oil painting is probably the work described in the inventory of the collection of Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini of 1603 as ‘the lord’s supper at a small table, by a good old hand’. It then reappeared unambiguously in the Borghese inventory of 1693, with an attribution to Garofalo.

The episode, described in the Gospel of John (2.1–11), in which Christ carries out his first miracle during a wedding feast at Cana, turning jugs of water into wine, is set in a sumptuous room with a row of smooth columns in the back alternating with lavish festoons and a table in the middle supported by richly decorated Corinthian capitals. The psychology of the participants is rendered through their expressions, which range from wonder to disbelief and fear, upon witnessing Christ’s simple but extraordinary act, calmly holding his hand above the large jugs.

Probably a slightly varied copy of or study for the painting of the same subject in the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, dated 1531 (inv. ГЭ-244), the clothing worn by some of the guests seem to date the painting to the 1520s (Herrmann Fiore 2002). The Borghese painting has been variously dated by Garofalo scholars: omitted from the monograph published in the 1990s (Fioravanti Baraldi 1993), it was attributed to Garofalo or his workshop, a suggestion that is not to be entirely excluded (Herrmann Fiore 2002), and considered datable to 1532, the year in which Giulio Romano began to design the tapestries for Francis I, which seem to have had a strong influence on this composition (Pattanaro 1995). The theory partially attributing the painting to the workshop had already been advanced in the 1960s (Berenson 1968), but most art historians considered it to be wholly autograph (Platner 1842; Venturi 1893; Longhi 1928; Della Pergola 1955).

Lara Scanu