PETER GREENAWAY

From June 6 to September 13, 2009 the San Giorgio Maggiore Island will host an extraordinary event:
The Wedding at Cana by Paolo Veronese. A Vision by Peter Greenaway, a multimedia performance is the result of the collaboration between Peter Greenaway, the Dutch director of photography and special effects wizard Reiner van Brummelen and the Milan-based production company directed by Franco Laera Change Performing Arts. The latest has organised and produced all the British artist’s recent multimedia events.

The Palladian Refectory on the San Giorgio Maggiore Island is the prestigious venue of the project on the initiative of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini and Change Performing Arts and with the technical collaboration of Mediacontech for the digital multimedia sector. In 2007 the Palladian Refectory saw the celebrated painting by Paolo Veronese “coming back” in the facsimile version realized on a 1:1 scale at Adam Lowe’s Factum Arte atelier. The original left for Paris in 1797 with the Napoleonic troups, cut in pieces to be set up in the Louvre where it still stands before the Gioconda.

The initiative is part of Peter Greenaway’s bold artistic project in which he intends to “visit” – with contemporary sensibility and employing cutting-edge image technology – “Nine classic paintings” among Western art history’s most renowned, from the Renaissance up to Picasso and Pollock. Launching his project with a vision of Rembrandt’s The Nightwatch at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (2006) and then with Leonardo’s The Last Supper in Milan(2008), Greenaway will now “visit” The Wedding at Cana by Paolo Veronese at the Palladian Refectory on the San Giorgio Maggiore Island.

The Wedding at Cana facsimile, set in the original architectural context for which it had been conceived – the Palladian Refectory – offers Peter Greenaway the opportunity for an innovative and original interpretation via a state-of-the-art interplay of images, lighting, music, voices and sounds that will seem to emerge directly from the painting and the walls of the Refectory. The performance – a true multimedia event lasting about 50 minutes – will make spectators relive the episode of the marriage feast at Cana where Christ accomplished his first miracle, as narrated in the Gospel of John. Greenaway will point out to the public the painting’s scores of characters, from the servants preparing dishes, to the banquet guests, to the guests of honor – Jesus Christ and his mother Mary – seated at the center of the painting’s architectural composition, in an on-going crescendo culminating in the narration’s crucial moment: the miracle of water turning into wine.

In order to truly bring to light this extraordinary painting depicting a throng of over one hundred figures, the British moviemaker will make use of cutting-edge multimedia technology provided by Mediacontech, Italy’s main independent service provider, leader in solutions for the creation and management of content for digital media, museums and cultural industry. In this field, Mediacontech has already collaborated with Peter Greenaway for Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper at the Refectory of the Dominican Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie and at Palazzo Reale in Milan.

As with Leonardo’s The Last Supper, public will access the event in groups and at a specific time (every hour, on the hour) to share a unique and fascinating experience which – involving theater, art and moviemaking – places Peter Greenaway amongst the greatest artists who experiment unflaggingly with new means of expression for the new millennium.

PRODUCTION DATES
Venice, Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore
Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Palladian Refectory
June 6 – August 2 / August 24 – September 13, 2009

Credits
P. Greenaway
Images
Press Release

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