The Wedding at Cana

After Maerten de Vos (1533–1603)

1st half of 17th c. Oil on canvas

Maerten de Vos (1532–1603), who worked in Antwerp, was one of the most successful artists in the Netherlands in the last quarter of the 16th century. His works achieved international renown. Paintings made in De Vos’s productive and well-organised big studio adorned church altars as well as luxurious interiors; his religious compositions repeated in prints spread all over Catholic and Lutheran Europe as models.

The altar painting “The Wedding at Cana”, commissioned in 1597 by the guild of winemakers for the Cathedral of Our Lady in Antwerp, is considered to be one of de Vos’s best works. The painting at the Kadriorg Museum is a high-quality repetition of the original. It follows the model as closely as possible in the overall positioning of the figures as well as in the choice of colour, but at the same time it is different in many aspects. The most striking difference between the copy and the original is the format of the painting: the original in Antwerp is vertical and also depicts the musicians’ balcony, which has been left out of the horizontal painting in Kadriorg. Different materials have also been used: the original is painted on wood, and the copy on canvas. The red primer used on the painting at Kadriorg is also noteworthy, because it is atypical of de Vos’s studio and contrasts with the general Dutch tradition of white oil ground. This has raised doubts as to whether the painting originates from de Vos’s studio. It is possible that the copy of Maerten de Vos’s “The Wedding at Cana” was meant to decorate a festive hall in some palace abroad and was produced by an artist representing the Italian school of painting.