The wedding feast in Cana

The wedding feast in Cana in Galilee, set in a large hall with a table longways at the left and servants pouring wine into vases at the right; after the painting by Tintoretto in the Salute in Venice


Etching, 1612, signed and ettered below with a dedication by Fialetti to Opilio Versa.

Example of the second state, with the address of Remondini.

A fine impression, printed with tone, on contemporary laid paper, thin margins, perfect condition.

This print reproduces in the same verse and with fidelity a signed and dated 1561 painting, executed by Tintoretto for theRefettorio del Convento dei Crociferi, in Venice.

Following the dissolution of the corporation was transferred to the sacristy of the church of Santa Maria della Salute, where it is still located. Originally curved, the canvas was later transformed into a rectangular one during the eighteenth century.

In the upper corners of the print are the emblems of the Crociferi, a confraternity that commissioned the painting by Tintoretto and to which Father Opilio Verfa belonged, to whom the work is dedicated.

Odoardo Fialetti was born in Bologna on July 18, 1573, posthumously son of the Doctor Odoardo Fialetti; entrusted to his older brother, this one put him at the school of the painter G. B. Cremonini. Subsequently, at the age of nine years, he moved with his brother first to Padua and then to Venice, where he attended the workshop of Tintoretto. He probably also spent a period in Rome to perfect his artistic studies.

More than for his activity of painter, Fialetti is known for the vast graphic work, today constituted by about 240 etchings in which evident are the elements of Carracci's taste, in particular of Agostino, above all in the search of a balance between the graphic language and the pictorial and coloristic suggestions. The corpus of engravings is very varied in the subjects and includes engravings both of translation and of his own invention. Among the first, two prints should be mentioned, d'après Tintoretto, with a religious subject, Le nozze di Cana (from the painting in the sacristy of the church of La Salute) and a S. Sebastiano; a series of eleven pieces of friezes with trophies on an invention of Polidoro da Caravaggio; four mythological subjects from the frescoes of Pordenone for palazzo Tinghi in Udine; two series of grotesques, with vegetable and animal motifs united with mythological figures, derived from inventions of Polifilo Giancarli and collected under the title of Disegni varii di Polifilo Zancarli A benefitio di qualsivoglia persona che faccia professione del disegno: these plates, like others of this kind, constituted a vast repertory of models and decorative ideas taken from the contemporary workshops of carvers and ornamentists and widely used in France until the nineteenth century by the ceramic factories of Nevers.