Greenaway exhibited his digital exploration of The Wedding at Cana by Paolo Veronese as part of the 2009 Venice Biennial. An arts writer for The New York Times called it "possibly the best unmanned art history lecture you'll ever experience," while acknowledging that some viewers might respond to it as "mediocre art, Disneyfied kitsch or a flamboyant denigration of site-specific video installation." The 50-minute presentation, set to a soundtrack, incorporates closeup images of faces from the painting along with animated diagrams revealing compositional relations among the figures. These images are projected onto and around the replica of the painting that now stands at the original site, within the Palladian architecture of the Benedictine refectory on San Giorgio Maggiore. The soundtrack features music and imagined dialogue scripted by Greenaway for the 126 "wedding guests, servants, onlookers and wedding crashers" depicted in the painting, consisting of small talk and banal chatter that culminates in reaction to the miraculous transformation of water to wine, according to the Gospels the first miracle performed by Jesus. Picasso's Guernica, Seurat's Grande Jatte, works by Jackson Pollock and Claude Monet, Velázquez's Las Meninas and Michelangelo's The Last Judgment are possible series subjects.Roberta Smith, "In Venice, Peter Greenaway Takes Veronese's Figures Out to Play", The New York Times 21 June 2009 online.
Greenaway exhibited his digital exploration of The Wedding at Cana by Paolo Veronese as part of the 2009 Venice Biennial An arts writer for The New York Times called it "possibly the best unmanned art history lecture you'll ever experience" while acknowledging that some viewers might respond to it as "mediocre art Disneyfied kitsch or a flamboyant denigration of site-specific video installation" The 50-minute presentation set to a soundtrack incorporates closeup images of faces from the painting along with animated diagrams revealing compositional relations among the figures These images are projected onto and around the replica of the painting that now stands at the original site within the Palladian architecture of the Benedictine refectory on San Giorgio Maggiore The soundtrack features music and imagined dialogue scripted by Greenaway for the 126 "wedding guests servants onlookers and wedding crashers" depicted in the painting consisting of small talk and banal chatter that culminates in reaction to the miraculous transformation of water to wine according to the Gospels the first miracle performed by Jesus Picasso's Guernica Seurat's Grande Jatte works by Jackson Pollock and Claude Monet Velázquez's Las Meninas and Michelangelo's The Last Judgment are possible series subjectsRoberta Smith "In Venice Peter Greenaway Takes Veronese's Figures Out to Play" The New York Times 21 June 2009 online