I nominate Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana.
It’s somewhat well known as “the largest painting in the Louvre,” but not many people know much beyond that. And I know it’s underappreciated in person, because it’s in the same room as the Mona Lisa, literally on the opposite wall, facing Leonardo’s famous masterpiece. If you go to the Louvre and stand in that gallery, you will see hordes of people looking at the tiny little art celebrity, with their backs to the Veronese. Maybe one person in a hundred stops and gives the giant painting more than a few seconds of attention.
It deserves a lot more time and scrutiny than that. It’s a spectacular masterwork, endlessly rewarding.
The overall composition is beautifully structured and balanced, and within that structure is a bottomless well of detail. There are well over a hundred human figures in the painting (plus several animals), and every one of them is unique, engaged in a specific activity, interacting with the people around them in specific ways. Each shows an individual relationship to the celebratory event in which they’re participating. Just on a human level, it’s very entertaining.
Then as you keep looking, you realize that couched in the overall balanced composition, you find all of the specific thematic details are also balanced. For every symbolic representative of the sacred and elevated, there’s someone or something portraying the mundane or the profane, the grounded real world. The wedding couple enjoys their marriage being blessed by Jesus himself, but then in the background you’ve got possibly-drunk partygoers climbing rudely on the architecture. You’ve got the Virgin Mary making a gesture suggestive of the cup that caught Jesus’s blood, but you’ve also got a dog straining at its leash in its desire to launch itself at a cat.
It’s a spectacular piece of work. In multiple visits to the Louvre, I’ve spent probably an hour total looking at it, but if you put me in front of it right now, I could look at it for another hour.
But because it’s being displayed in close proximity to a world-famous painting, it gets overshadowed and overlooked and, yes, underappreciated.
So that’s my nomination.
(Here is a decent-sized jpg of the painting, if you want to glance it over, but believe me, for the real impact, you have to be standing in front of it.)
