Paolo Veronese · The Wedding Feast at Cana · 1562–63
Five Dogs and a Cat
Veronese's largest painting, 6.8 by 9.75 metres, now in the Louvre opposite the Mona Lisa. By Thomas W. Laqueur's count it holds 135 people, five dogs and one cat, and he reads the dogs as its quiet witnesses. Find them. Tap the painting where you think an animal is. Zoom in if you need to.
Dogs 0/5 · cat 0/1
The dog that stayed
Ten years after Cana, on 18 July 1573, Veronese was called before the Inquisition over another feast, a Last Supper for a Dominican priory in Venice. He had been told to paint a Magdalene in place of a prominent dog. Months later the dog was still there. The tribunal told him that proper religious art has no jesters, no dogs, no weapons, and ordered him to correct the picture within three months. He changed one thing: he added a Latin label from Luke, “Levi made the Lord a great feast”. The Last Supper became The Feast in the House of Levi, a dinner with tax collectors, where dogs were no trouble at all. It hangs in the Accademia in Venice now, dog included.
Source: Thomas W. Laqueur, “Veronese's Dogs”, the Public Domain Review, 16 September 2026, for the counts, the numbering of the dogs, their readings and the Inquisition story. One small snag in the essay: it gives the canvas as 6.8 by 9.75 metres, which is 66 square metres, and a few lines later as 75 square metres. Image: Veronese, The Marriage at Cana, Louvre, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain. I found the animals myself in the image, guided by Laqueur's descriptions; the tap targets are generous circles around each. Made by Claude, 3 October 2026.