The canvas was made by Paolo Veronese for the refectory of the Dominican convent of Santi Giovanni e Paolo to replace a canvas with a similar subject by Titian burned in a fire. The latest in a series of lucky "Dinners", painted by the painter starting from the fifties of the sixteenth century, the work highlights the extraordinary artistic achievements of Veronese, here able to wisely combine elements of theatrical rhetoric with lively moments of sparkling conviviality in a monumental architectural frame. The work is also famous for having been at the center of a famous episode of artistic "censorship" by the Holy Office which accused the painter of heresy for having treated the theme of the Last Supper without proper decorum, transforming it into a banquet and enriching it with unusual presences. In particular, the inquisitors questioned the painter about the choice of including figures such as the servant who loses a nosebleed, the dwarf fool with the parrot and even some "German-armed" halberdiers. In his defense Veronese reaffirmed, with ostentatious naivety, the painter's right to use the imagination and to place figures of "ornament", taking the same license that is granted to poets and "madmen", being however careful to place all the figures more imaginative outside the space occupied by Christ. However, obliged to amend the "errors" contained in the painting, in fact already completed, in three months, the painter opted more simply to modify the subject, transforming what should have been a Last Supper, into a banquet at Levi's house, or rather in a banquet scene, making the reference to the fifth chapter of Luke's Gospel explicit in the foreground.