JOHN BAPTIST JACKSON (AFTER VERONESE)
The Wedding Feast at Cana.

Chiaroscuro woodcut printed in dark brown, light brown and tan on two sheets of cream laid paper, 1740-45. 580x835 mm; 23x33 inches (overall). A good, dark impression of this large, scarce woodcut, with strong colors and the relief from the wood blocks distinct on the verso.

Jackson (1701-1780), the English woodcut printmaker who lived and worked in Paris and Venice, created this intricate color woodcut from the monumental oil painting, 1562-63, by Paolo Veronese (1528-1588), which depicts the Biblical Wedding Feast at Cana at which Jesus miraculously turned water into wine. The Black Monks of the Order of Saint Benedict commissioned Veronese in 1562 to adorn the San Giorgio Monastery, designed by the architect Andrea Palladio. The painting decorated the refectory of the San Giorgio Monastery until 1797, when soldiers of Napoleon's French Revolutionary Army plundered the painting as war booty during the Italian campaigns of the French Revolutionary Wars (1792–1802). The painting is now in the Louvre Museum, Paris, where it hangs opposite the wall with Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa.