TOM SCOTT and biggest painting in the LOUVRE MUSEUM Google Arts Culture

I've been invited to the Louvre in Paris. It is the biggest museum in the world, and we're here to look at the biggest painting in its collection. It's a painting that's been celebrated, torn, restored, threatened, mended, torn again, even duplicated. And now, it's what the Mona Lisa is staring at. This is the Wedding Feast at Cana, painted by Paolo Veronese. It's a painting of Jesus' first miracle, turning water into wine. And it is massive. Six and a half metres wide, ten metres high, including the frame, it weighs one and a half tonnes. It was commissioned by Benedictine monks in Venice in 1562 for their dining hall, where they traditionally eat in silence. And the painter, Veronese, he took 15 months to make this. He was allowed to fill the canvas with as many figures as he deemed necessary, more than 130 wedding goers. And his special touch is to set this biblical story in what was, at the time, modern Venice. Jesus, bloke with the halo there, is painted as if in a traditional, classical painting. But he's surrounded by guests and servants and musicians in 16th century Venice. So the modern-day equivalent would be a bit like painting Jesus having dinner in Trafalgar Square in London, and his dinner guests being Hillary Clinton, Queen Elizabeth, a couple of Kardashians, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Tiger Woods and Jay-Z. The painting was taken by Napoleon's forces during the Italian campaigns in the French Revolutionary Wars. And Napoleon had his troops transfer it to the refurbished Great Hall in the Louvre. But for ease of transport, they cut it in pieces to be reassembled and restitched in France. In fact, much of the work at the Louvre was acquired on Napoleon's many conquests, with about 5,000 of them later being returned as part of repatriation treaties. But when it came to returning the wedding at Cana, the canvas was too fragile to travel from Paris to Venice. So it stayed here, and another painting went in its place. A century later, with the threat of the Second World War looming, France evacuated its public art collections. The wedding at Cana was rolled up for storage and continually trucked to hiding places across Southern France. That exposed the painting to dust and more damage, but it survived. But after that, on top of 450 years of gradual decay, well, it made for a monumental restoration job. And as restoration continued, so did the painting's run of bad luck. A new face was revealed in the wedding scene. It was damaged by water from a leaky air vent. And gravity pulled it off the wall and ripped the canvas in four places. The restorers did an amazing job, but there will always be scars. Like that one, that runs right down the middle. In 2007, the painting was digitally scanned, which took 18 months. None of the historical damage was digitally removed. Those digital files are a reproduction of how the painting looks now, scars and all. From those files, a copy was made. And to the naked eye, the two pictures are identical. And that copy is back on the wall of the original monastery in Venice. Today, the wedding feast of Cana has hung on the walls of the Louvre for about as long as it was hung in that monastery. And here, 10 million people a year can see it, but it's still away from its original home. Does that matter? It's interesting to think about where it should belong, and whether that digital reproduction in Venice has righted a historical wrong. Standing in front of this mammoth of a painting, with all its battle scars, is powerful. Would it still be if this was the Ducal? For more like this, you can subscribe to the Louvre's channel, or over on the Google Arts and Culture channel, you can see a video about the man whose publicity stunts made the Louvre what it is today.