Obra "As Bodas de Canaã" / "Nozze di Cana" de Paolo Veronese Retorna ao Refeitório da Basílica de San Giorgio Maggiore em Veneza, Itália, Mais de 200 Anos Depois - Artigo

Obra "As Bodas de Canaã" / "Nozze di Cana" de Paolo Veronese Retorna ao Refeitório da Basílica de San Giorgio Maggiore em Veneza, Itália, Mais de 200 Anos Depois - Artigo
Veneza - Itália
Fotografia

In September 2007, to coincide with the opening of the Dialoghi di San Giorgio - this year on the theme Inheriting the past. Traditions, shifts, betrayals and innovations - a

remarkable event was held in Venice. Organised in collaboration with the Louvre, the event concerns the large work entitled The Wedding at Cana - now in Paris - painted

by Paolo Veronese for the refectory of the Benedictine monastery. After an absence of 210 years, The Wedding at Cana ‘returned’ to its original setting in the Palladian

Refectory on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, thanks to the creation of a ‘second original’, i.e. a facsimile on a one-to-one scale, created thanks to the most sophisticated

reproduction techniques. The facsimile has all the elements of the original: the lines, nuances of colour, and even the flaws in the supporting canvas and signs of the

wear and tear of time. Moreover, thanks to meticulous documentary and historical reconstruction work and a virtual restoration, it is also possible to see what some

20th-century reworking of the painting covered up.

The facsimile was made with technology developed by Adam Lowe, a British artist and founder of Factum Arte,a workshop at the cutting-edge of reconstructing and

reproducing works of art. This project challenges the theory that the ‘aura’ of a work

decays. A physically and aesthetically perfect copy has been created and placed in the setting for which it was originally conceived and made in an ‘accord of ideas and

design’ between Veronese and Palladio. Part of the overall restoration of the monumental complex of San Giorgio Maggiore, this operation has the specific aim of reestablishing the original aesthetic harmony and so make this artistic ‘marvel’ by Palladio and Veronese become completely comprehensible. The remarkable operation is paradoxically meant to bring us closer to the authentic aura of the refectory, irremediably lost on 11 September 1797, when the French commissars of the Napoleonic army decided to include The Wedding of Cana among the works

to be sent to Paris as war booty.

Now 210 years later, on 11 September 2007, the fac-símile of The Wedding of Cana was  placed back in the Palladian refectory and unveiled to the public during the opening

ceremony for the exhibition The Miracle of Cana: the originality of re-production.

Organised in collaboration with the Musée du Louvre, Paris, the project was implemented thanks to support from Enel, Casinò di Venezia, Consorzio Venezia Nuova,

Fondazione Banco di Sicilia, and SanPellegrino.

This project consists in creating a full-size facsimile of Paolo Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana to be hung in the original setting: the Palladian Refectory on the Island of

San Giorgio Maggiore.

The work was created by Adam Lowe, a British artist and founder of Factum-Arte. An innovator in reconstructing and reproducing works of art, the company has become a

reference point for large cultural organisations for which the conservation and showing of art works and their digital recording are vitally important issues. Work began in

November and December 2006 with the scanning of the painting in the Musée du Louvre.

The recording was effected by a colour scanner rebaptised 'Cana', specially designed by Factum Arte for Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana. Mounted on a telescopic mast, the scanner only used LEDs to produce cold light. The painting was scanned at a distance of 8 centimetres from the surface. The data recorded with this system then became the initial master for producing the facsimile to be installed in the Palladian Refectory.

After scanning, the colours were chosen with the aid of a Colour Reference Book, a tool created by Factum Arte.

Each section of the painting was referred to a section of the book, and the colour samples – the outcome of a direct comparison with the surface of the painting – are

precisely fixed by corresponding points in the book.

Acquired in this way, the data is translated into printable sections (100 x 180 cm) for various trials on texture and finish.

Once the colour has been defined, the next stage is printing the facsimile, which lasts for several months and ends with the processes of fixing, filling, retouching and

glazing.

The project was completed in August 2007, when the facsimile of the painting was hung in the Refectory at the Giorgio Cini Foundation.

From September 2007, the work has been on public view.

The Wedding at Cana is an exceptional work for several reasons. Firstly on account of its size: the oil painting is almost seven by ten metres. Other remarkable features

include the extraordinary breadth of the composition,“praised by Vasari on, its innovation in the iconographic rendering of the evangelical subject, and the presence of

a large number of leading personalities, some of whom are clearly contemporaries of Veronese.

One of the stories from the life of Jesus, the episode is taken from the Gospel of St John. This first miracle took place in the village of Cana in Galilee, during a wedding feast. Jesus and his disciples arrive at the feast with Mary. When the host runs out of wine, Mary begs her son for help. Jesus orders that six large jars be filled with water so that he can bless them. On tasting the contentes of the jugs, the host discovers they have been turned into wine. The conventional iconography usually sets Jesus in the middle of the scene, with the guests arranged around the table, but at times the attention is focused on the gesture of blessing the water or tasting the wine. At times the bride and groom wear crowns, in keeping with the Greek Orthodox tradition. This theme was rare in medieval painting but became much more popular from the 15th century on in wall decorations for refectories, together with the Last Supper.

The story of the Marriage is inextricably bound up with the history of the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, and especially with one of the most striking places in the monumental Benedictine monastery: the Refectory (or Cenacolo) – the grandiose room built to a design by Andrea Palladio, and completed from 1560-1562.

“It's a pity that you could not have spoken beneath the light and colour of one of the most prodigious colourist miracles of Venetian painting – the Wedding at Cana by Paolo Veronese. Here it was in ideal harmony, or rather inspired symbiosis, with the composed architecture designed by Palladio for this Refectory. Veronese the painter, Palladio the architect, and André Malraux their poet...”

This was how Vittorio Cini complimented André Malraux on his enlightening introduction to “The Secret of the Great Venetians”, a speech given to officially open a

series of seminars entitled “The Venetian Civilisation of the Baroque Age”, held at the Giorgio Cini Foundation on 17 May 1958, just when General de Gaulle took power in

France.

The story of the Wedding is inextricably bound up with the history of the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, and especially with the Palladian Refectory (or Cenacolo).

One witness to this association was Damerini, who in his authoritative study L’Isola e il Cenobio di San Giorgio Maggiore wrote that "in the Refectory the principal

decoration became the canvas by Paolo Caliari called Veronese (1520-1588), who had been summoned on 6 June 1562 to fill the whole wall opposite the entrance to the room. This marked the beginning of the great painter’s collaboration with Andrea [Palladio], who soon took him to work in the Barbaro family villa at Maser."

There was undoubtedly a deep understanding between Palladio and Veronese (the work may even almost considered a joint project). Indeed it was at San Giorgio that Veronese revealed “his genius as an illusionist in interpreting architectural space, as he staged the sacred theme in a theatre setting through the dynamic arrangement of the planes to make architectural wings (unequivocally Palladian) with a background of a clear sky opening up the walls, and a very careful orchestration of the movements of groups of figures, while the whole is bathed in triumphant luminous hues” (Damerini op. cit.).

This masterpiece was so celebrated at the time that people went to San Giorgio only to see it. Cosimo III de' Medici went so far as to claim that it alone was worth a trip to Venice. Sovereigns and princes throughout Europe asked for a copy and many came to the island for the sole purpose of asking permission from the Benedictines to reproduce the painting. This generated so much interest that the friars, to avoid being disturbed by all these demands, convened the chapter on 17 December 1705 and decided that henceforth no one would be granted permission to reproduce the painting.

It was also the lasting chorus of praise and marvel that induced Napoleon and the French to seize the work in 1797 as war reparations. Having been cut up into several parts for the purpose of transport, the canvas was sent to Paris to be re-assembled and shown at the Louvre (where it still hangs today) on 8 November 1798.

Despite the agreements in the Congress of Vienna, the work was never to return on the pretext it was difficult to transport, and compensation was given in the form of a painting by Le Brun, notwithstanding Canova’s vehement protests.

Canova was not the only person who tried to bring the Marriage at Cana back to San Giorgio Maggiore, although he was the most authoritative. Vittore Branca, as himself often reminded, unsuccessfully engaged in diplomatic actions to re-establish the “former historical aesthetic and critical unity of the artistic collaboration between Palladio and Veronese at San Giorgio Maggiore.” But despite repeated failures, he never gave up his ambition to heal the wound and restore the “aura” to the Palladian refectory (of which Veronese’s work was an essential part) was never abandoned.

Indeed, the wound periodically bled again, as was significantly described by Alessandro Bettagno. Thus during the work to install the exhibition Paolo Veronese, Drawings and Paintings held in 1988 by the Cini Foundation, he noted that the subject was brought up on several occasions. “We have often heard a bitter complaint, a complaint that has almost become a kind a refrain: ‘what a pity that the large canvas of the Wedding at Cana is no longer in the Palladian refectory of San Giorgio Maggiore’. If the huge painting had remained in its natural home, it alone might have created a kind of ‘permanent exhibition’ offering the opportunity to interpret the work in the Palladian setting for which it had been conceived. It would thus have been possible to admire and understand the true essence of a masterpiece, part of a harmonious whole. Now dismantled, that whole can no longer be recomposed as an inseparable historical, aesthetic and critical element in Veronese’s association with Palladio and vice-versa.”

Bettagno’s resigned attitude may be explained by na awareness that having works of art stolen during wars returned was far too controversial a theme to be solved only by good will supported by reasons of aesthetic appropriateness. In this case it is precisely the “historical element” that was the insurmountable obstacle to recomposing the admirable “harmonious whole”.

But if there was no way round this historical element (the right of the Louvre and the French government to own the work can no longer be called into question), the aesthetic and critical elements are a different matter. In an age when we can achieve a totally perfect technical reproduction of everything (from human beings to Works of art), the aesthetic and critical harmony of the Palladian refectory can now finally be re-established. Today technology enables us to do what at the time of Bettagno’s claim (1988) was not yet possible: reproduce the Marriage at Cana with such accuracy that no

individual in the world could distinguish the original from a copy with the naked eye.

The unprecedented high quality of facsimiles today means that even the flaws in the canvas and damage caused by time to the materials can be reproduced to na approximation of around a thousandth of a millimetre.

This raises the issue of the aesthetic theory concerning the relation between original and copy, a subject on which many feel Walter Benjamin said the last word.

In his The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, the German philosopher introduced his celebrated notion of “aura”. Before the advent of the age of mechanical reproduction (therefore around the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century), according to Benjamin, the work of art enjoyed a status of authenticity and uniqueness. A work of art was an original unique piece (it could not be produced in series) authentic,

unrepeatable and therefore was meant to be enjoyed only in the place where it was kept. This aura of the work, its authenticity and unrepeatability, making its aesthetic

enjoyment unique, is what Benjamin called the “aura”.

In the case of the Wedding, the aura of the work of art is thus everything we have been describing above. But now in the age of the reproducibility of works of art, we find that works of art are subject to the process of the “decay of the aura”. Indeed, a painting is all the more unique, the weaker and more repeatable the photograph or any other

image reproducing it.