Paolo Veronese 1528–1588
NG 26 
The Consecration of Saint Nicholas

Nicholas Penny, 2008

Extracted from:
Nicholas Penny, The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings, Volume II: Venice 1540–1600 (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2008).

1562

Oil on canvas, 286.5 × 175.3 cm

Support

The dimensions given above are those of the stretcher. The canvas is of a coarse herringbone weave identical to that used for the altarpiece of Saint Anthony Abbot which the artist painted for the same church at the same date. Two vertical lengths of canvas are joined to the right of the centre of the painting (the seam passes through the right hand of the officiating bishop and coincides with the left edge of the shadow of the step below him). The narrower of the two strips is between 71 and 72 cm wide. The canvas is wax‐lined on a fine tabby‐weave canvas. The stretcher is of varnished pine, with one vertical and two horizontal crossbars. At no point does the canvas extend to the edges of the lining canvas. The margin is about 2 cm in most places.

The original canvas was cut diagonally at the upper corners, slightly more at top left (30 cm as against 29 cm from the corner on the upper edge).

A fragment of paper printed with a few words in French is stuck to the lower edge. This is likely to be the remains of a protective facing applied during the lining process.

Materials and Technique

The canvas is covered with a thin layer of gesso, not thick enough to obscure its texture, and over this there is a thin brownish priming layer of charcoal black, red ochre and lead white with a high proportion of medium. Red lake layers found in paint samples beneath the undergarment of the priest in the left foreground can be interpreted as preliminary sketching with a brush.¹

Two types of blue pigment were employed: ultramarine and smalt (from cobalt glass). The latter has discoloured (see below). Red lake derived from cochineal (probably ‘Polish cochineal’) was combined with vermilion for the cuffs of the bishop and for the robes covering his feet, and with lead white for the pink stoles worn by the two priests.² This lake was also combined with ultramarine to form a purple which has faded (see below). Two types of lead‐tin yellow were used: type 1 (the more common one) in the angel, and type 2 in the acolyte’s cangiante garment.³ The orange garment of the youth with a turban is of orpiment and realgar, with red ochre in the shadows. There is a green layer beneath which may indicate a pentimento, but a similar layer structure is found in NG 931.⁴ This green, like the kneeling saint’s drapery, is of verdigris mixed with a little lead‐tin yellow and white.

Incisions were made in the paint of the acolyte’s cangiante surplice with the pointed end of a brush – or some other sharp instrument. This technique is typical of Veronese, as are the diagonal brushstrokes ‘cut’ against the lines of the folds in the priest’s white surplice.

X‐radiography reveals no significant revisions to the composition, except for a slight change in the position of the bishop’s right hand. It is, however, tempting to speculate that the green foliage which is aligned with the clouds was improvised to provide a more effective foil for the fluttering white alb held by the angel and for the priest’s grey hair. Although the two heads behind that of the priest look like afterthoughts, they were not painted on top of the architecture.

Conservation

The painting is likely to have been cleaned at least once when in the abbey church of S. Benedetto: probably when it was reframed in the 1720s,⁵ perhaps also when it was moved to the pinacoteca of the abbey in the 1790s (see below). It would also have been cleaned and lined in France (see the end of the section on Support; see also the claims made in the mid‐nineteenth century, cited below) and it was presumably at that stage that the corners of the canvas were made up. There is no evidence of any dissatisfaction with the painting’s condition after its arrival in the National Gallery in 1826. Indeed, in 1834 John Landseer wrote that ‘in respect of the collocation of its colours, and the unity of its design … no praise can transcend its merits’.⁶ But less than twenty years later it was felt to be in need of cleaning. John Seguier relined the painting and then cleaned it during the Gallery’s six‐week closure of 1852. The outcry over its changed appearance and that of other National Gallery pictures treated at the same time led to the appointment of a select committee to investigate the methods employed. In evidence to the committee two artists (William Dyce and Charles Leslie) defended the treatment, but the connoisseurs and collectors Morris Moore and William Coningham, as well as the dealer John Nieuwenhuys, were highly critical and expressed their conviction that glazes had been removed. Coningham, for instance, claimed that the surplice of the more prominent priest had been ‘completely flayed’. Seguier in his evidence reported that he had removed a watercolour toning (‘I believe it was a solution of Spanish liquorice’) applied by a previous owner, Alexis Delahante.⁷

Seguier’s claim is highly credible and it does little credit to the critics of the cleaning that they never seem to have suspected that the harmony they had previously admired was at least in part artificial. As usual in debates of this kind, the connoisseurs assumed that the missing glazes had been removed in the most recent treatment, whereas the treatment may in fact have revealed what had long been lost. The allegations made with such authority can only have confirmed Charles Eastlake, the previous keeper and future director of the Gallery, in his unusual belief in the legitimacy (as well as prudence) of deceit. The practice of toning paintings after their cleaning was one which he would institute as director, not – or not only – to avoid a radical departure from a familiar appearance, or from the effect expected, or from the look of neighbouring pictures, but to compensate for earlier damage.⁸

It is impossible now to determine whether Seguier damaged the painting. But some of the abrasion described below was surely the result of earlier treatments.

In 1882 the painting was again lined, this time by ‘Morrill’. It was ‘surface‐cleaned’ in March 1938. Flaking [page 345][page 346]paint was secured in January 1940 and again in October of the same year. It was ‘polished’ in August 1946. Blisters were laid and the canvas was given its current wax lining in June and July 1953. It was cleaned in 1964, when the made‐up corners, as well as non‐original strips at the edge of the canvas, were removed.

Condition

The painting has been flattened and abraded, presumably in the process of lining. In a few areas, for example the ends of the bishop’s beard, the bare canvas is exposed. The greyer portions of the cloudy sky now have a scrubbed look, largely on account of the degraded smalt. The shadow beside Nicholas’s missal, which is cast by the step upon which the bishop stands, has been rubbed and is no longer legible as such. A thin red line on the gloved right hand of the bishop must originally have been part of a ring. Small lines on the neck of the acolyte are perhaps traces of a half‐eradicated chain.

Other, larger, changes to the painting were occasioned by unstable pigments. The darker areas of the bishop’s robe painted with smalt were originally blue. The only blue that survives is that of the lighter areas painted with ultramarine combined with a little lead white. And this blue was originally somewhat purple, since it contains red lake which has now faded.⁹ Similarly, smalt was employed for the undergarment of the more prominent priest and this must originally have been blue rather than the dark grey we now see, since it includes strokes of blue which are of ultramarine and white.¹⁰ By contrast, the greens are well preserved, except for the darkening of the copper green in the pattern on the stole flying up from the angel.

Subject

Saint Nicholas, who lived in the fourth century, was venerated in Constantinople by the sixth century. By the ninth century he had become popular throughout the Eastern Church and, by the eleventh, throughout the West. His relics were removed in 1087 from Myra in Lycia (by then under Turkish rule) to Bari in Apulia, where they remain (hence he is known as Nicholas of Bari).¹¹ Nicholas is the protector of sailors threatened by storms, of children, prisoners and pawnbrokers, and is a patron saint of Russia, Greece and Sicily as well as of many cities. Legends attached to him, the folkloric character of which was certainly evident to learned churchmen by the mid‐seventeenth century. Hence, perhaps, the decision by the Benedictines who commissioned NG 26 to focus on the one certain fact concerning him, that he was a bishop of Myra.

The episode represented by Veronese is that of Nicholas’s consecration. Bishops assembled at Myra to elect a new bishop, and a voice in the night revealed to the senior one among them that a pious youth called Nicholas had been divinely chosen and would be the first to appear at the cathedral door on the morrow.¹² Veronese depicts what must be the portico of the cathedral, with the senior bishop consecrating Nicholas, who kneels, flanked by two priests in white surplices. These priests will presumably carry him to the bishop’s throne, and may indeed be about to perform this task. Veronese has not attempted to represent dawn light or a congregation of bishops, but the turbans worn by two of the three witnesses must be intended to suggest a location in Asia Minor. Divine intervention is indicated by an angel descending with a crozier, a mitre and two stoles, one of white damask matching the mitre and the other of gold and (darkened) green which, since it is looped round the angel’s neck, may be intended as an ornament for the angel himself. An acolyte kneeling beside the officiating bishop helps to support a staff surmounted with a gilt cross such as is carried before an archbishop and is properly speaking a ‘crozier’ (although that word is commonly applied to the crooked pastoral staff of a bishop like that held by the angel here).

The consecration of Saint Nicholas is included in cycles of his life but in no other independent painting of the subject that is known to us.¹³ It seems to have been chosen to illustrate the importance of priestly vocation and of the sacred authority vested in a bishop.

Attribution

NG 26 is described by Vasari as a painting by Veronese,¹⁴ and is indeed (see below) a documented work by him. It is accepted as by Veronese in all official accounts of the Gallery’s collection and in all modern monographs on the painter. However, the French sculptor and collector Henri de Triqueti, who was certainly in touch with informed opinion in the art world of his day, declared in 1861, in his book on London’s museums, that it was ‘considered by many art lovers to be a work by Veronese’s son, painted after a sketch by the great master’, and hinted that this opinion found support in Boschini.¹⁵ One explanation for this is that in 1832 Ottley (see below) had given the painting the wrong provenance, associating it with the paintings in the church of S. Nicolò at the Frari in Venice, which were indeed only partly by Veronese, as Boschini and other Venetian authorities conceded. But it is also true that Veronese must have had assistants, and it would not be surprising – especially in view of the speed with which the picture seems to have been painted – if some preliminary level of painting or some subordinate parts were delegated to them. The drawing of the crook of the staff held by the angel is not good, and it is illogical for the tip of the angel’s wing to pass behind the column, since the scale of the angel suggests that he is the foremost figure in the composition. The angel is little varied from one in the high altarpiece for the church of S. Sebastiano that Veronese had only recently completed. Whether the angel is hasty work by the artist or inferior work by an assistant, it is painted with a boldness which can be explained by the fact that it would have been distant from the viewer.

Original Location and Circumstances of Commission

The painting was made for the abbey church of S. Benedetto Po (S. Benedetto in Polirone, by the Po and its tributary the Lirone), a few miles south of Mantua. This great Benedictine foundation of the eleventh century became, in 1419, a part of the reformed congregation (the Cassinese congregation) [page 347][page 348][page 349]of S. Giustina in Padua. During the following thirty years the abbey church was rebuilt. Pressure to carry out further renovation was stimulated by major bequests in the early sixteenth century. Giulio Romano directed extensive rebuilding and redecoration (including new altarpieces for the ambulatory), which were complete in 1547.¹⁶ Work then began on new choir stalls, and an organ, and the high altarpiece was commissioned from Fermo Ghisoni, a local artist, and Girolamo Bedoli, of local origin.¹⁷ In 1559 Antonio Beggarelli of Modena, himself a Benedictine, was commissioned to make a series of terracotta statues,¹⁸ and on 27 December 1561 three altarpieces for the side chapels were commissioned from Lattanzio Gambara (of Mantua), and three others from Veronese. The agreement (known only in a transcription) was between the Abbey (‘Monasterium’) and the artist (‘Paolo Cagliari of Verona’), distinguished painter (‘egregius pictor’) resident in Venice, and the subjects to be painted were identified simply as ‘de historia Sancti Nicolai, Sancti Antonii, et Sancti Hyeronimi’, to be done in the best available colours at the price of 35 scudi each, with 6 scudi extra allowed in each case for pigments (‘pro emendis coloribus’), the entire sum coming to 123 gold scudi (‘summa in totum est scutorum 123 auri in auro’).¹⁹

Veronese had worked for the Benedictines at SS. Nazaro e Celso in Verona shortly before this date and was also employed by the Benedictine abbot at S. Giustina in Padua during this period.²⁰ He was, in any case, well known in Mantua for his altarpiece in the Duomo of Saint Anthony Abbot.²¹ Veronese’s patron was the abbey, or at least its abbot, who was then Andrea Pampuro da Asola (who occupied the office between 1557 and 1562). No lay individual seems to have had a say in commissioning the painting, although one may have chosen the dedication to Nicholas, to whom no chapel had previously been dedicated in the abbey church.

Giulio Romano had given the church a unified architectural character, ingeniously masking irregularities occasioned by the previous structure, and providing stucco and frescoed decorations in all the chapels.²² The unity anticipates that which we expect in churches built by Palladio in Venice or reordered by Vasari in Florence after the reforms instigated by the Council of Trent. Especially notable is the absence of any concession to the independent initiatives or competitive instincts of families that acquired the rights to burial and private masses in the side chapels. Thus Veronese’s three altarpieces made for the first three chapels to be entered from the south side were identical in size and format. Light entered the chapels from large lunette windows above each altar but it was usual for artists painting altarpieces in side chapels to show the light in the picture as if coming from the entrance façade of the church. Veronese follows this convention, in each case painting the light as falling from the right.

The nearest of Veronese’s altarpieces to the west entrance depicted Saint Jerome (see fig. 3), the next one Saint Anthony Abbot and Paul the Hermit (fig. 2) and the third (NG 26) Saint Nicholas. The format must have encouraged him to provide a celestial element in each. The Virgin and Child look down from the clouds at Jerome. They appear again in the clouds above Anthony and Paul, who ecstatically acknowledge their appearance. In the third altarpiece an angel descends to supply Nicholas with his bishop’s mitre, crozier and stole. It is notable that the head of Jerome is placed relatively low. More remarkably, that of Nicholas is the lowest of all the heads in the third altarpiece. When NG 26 was placed above an altar, however, the beholder would still have looked up at Nicholas and the compositional device of a great open V would have worked far more effectively than it does when hung as a gallery painting.

Although Veronese would no doubt have welcomed the narrative elements in all of the altarpieces, the choice of episode was surely prescribed, and the treatment approved, by the Benedictines. Indeed, the scene of the consecration of Nicholas had already been selected for one of the frescoed decorations of the chapel.²³ It has also been plausibly argued that the emphasis on the Virgin (not generally associated with Jerome’s penitence or with the meeting between the hermits Anthony Abbot and Paul) was consistent with the need for the Benedictines to emphasise their orthodoxy at that date.²⁴

As stated above, Veronese was commissioned to paint these three altarpieces on 27 December 1561; on 30 March 1562, when he received final payment of 98 gold scudi, the abbey accounts refer to an advance of 25 gold scudi.²⁵ As Gould observed, ‘the resulting deduction, that the three altarpieces were all executed within three months, takes some believing.’²⁶ One explanation might be in the local calendar, for in Mantua the new year began on 25 December, so 27 December 1561 would be 27 December 1560 in our calendar. However, the scribe clearly indicated that he was using the date in the style preferred by notaries, and not following popular usage (‘stijllum notariorum, non autem secundum comunem usum modo loquendi’), so, unless the scribe wrote exactly the opposite of what he was instructed to write, we must suppose that Veronese either had some informal advance agreement concerning the commission or could work at astonishing speed.

Veronese was not paid much, although a little more than Lattanzio Gambara, who was given 102 gold scudi for his three altarpieces. The high altarpiece, admittedly a panel measuring 484 by 305 cm, cost 350 gold scudi.²⁷ Perhaps other Benedictine commissions were being dangled. Indeed, in 1562 Veronese also secured two altarpiece commissions for the abbey church at Praglia, near Padua, and, most importantly, he was commissioned to paint the gigantic Marriage Feast at Cana for the refectory of the Benedictine abbey of S. Giorgio Maggiore in Venice.²⁸

Removal from the Chapel and Removal from the Abbey

Veronese’s three altarpieces in S. Benedetto Po were highly praised by Vasari in the second edition of his Lives,²⁹ which should have guaranteed that they attracted special notice thereafter, but Carlo Ridolfi neglected to include them in his comprehensive list of the artist’s work. By 1763, when Giovanni Cadioli (a minor painter much employed at the abbey) published his guide to works of art in and around [page 350]Mantua, the Saint Nicholas altarpiece seems to have been considered much superior to the others: ‘so expressive, and so marvellously painted, that it truly surpasses many others by him which I have seen in Venice and elsewhere.’ This estimate was repeated by Pagliari in 1788.³⁰ Bellodi’s modern chronicle of the abbey of S. Benedetto dwells on misfortunes – the flooding of the Po, the rapacity of occupying armies, the reduction of privileges under Habsburg rule³¹ – but the wealth of the abbey throughout the eighteenth century is evident from the quantity of new art that was commissioned, which certainly included lavish baroque marble altar frames for Veronese’s paintings (discussed below). By Cadioli’s day the painting was no longer in the third chapel of the south aisle but had been replaced by Giambattista Cignaroli’s Last Communion of Saint Benedict, generally dated to about 1748, and moved to the fourth chapel.³²

In 1786 Mauro Mari was made abbot. This philosopher and mathematician, born in 1746, began radical reforms to the abbey and shortly after 1790 he instigated, in response to a proposal made by Don Benedetto Fiandrini, the abbey’s librarian and archivist, the removal of the greatest paintings – including NG 26 – from the abbey church to a pinacoteca in the abbey for the convenience of art lovers and because they were being damaged by damp and did not enjoy sufficient light.³³ They were replaced in the chapels in about 1792 by copies.

By September 1796 the monks had largely fled from the monastery, and the fall of Mantua to the French army seemed inevitable. General Bonaparte entered the city on 2 February 1797; the act suppressing the abbey was prepared on 11 February and Bonaparte signed it on 9 March.³⁴ The painter and collector Jean‐Baptiste Wicar was already in the area in his capacity as member of the Commission Temporaire des Arts, charged with extracting major paintings from conquered territory for the Musée Central (later Musée Napoléon) in the Louvre. The prefect of Mantua’s library handed over on 23 February a number of paintings including Mantegna’s Madonna della Vittoria and Veronese’s Temptation of Saint Anthony.³⁵ It would be surprising if Wicar did not also have a list of paintings to remove from S. Benedetto Po, with Veronese’s Saint Nicholas at or near the top of it. However, the need to raise money – ostensibly to compensate the local victims of the war but also to cover war costs and convert the abbey itself into a hospital – may have prompted the authorities to put as many of the abbey’s possessions as possible on the market.

Much of the property, including most, if not all, of the paintings not in the church, was acquired later in 1797 by Jean Frédéric Guillaume d’Amarzit, Comte d’Espagnac (1750–1817), and then sold by him to a Swiss merchant living in Milan, Giovanni Giorgio Müller, in June 1798.³⁶ One of these two may have exported two of the three Veroneses, the Saint Nicholas and the Saint Jerome, although it is also possible that they were stolen either by soldiers, peasants and monks, who were said to have raided the abbey’s stores, or by French officials in Mantua, who are alleged to have acted outside the law.³⁷

In any case, both paintings are conspicuous by their absence from the list of 176 pictures, mostly oil paintings, that was made in May 1800 as the property of Müller. Veronese’s altarpiece of Anthony Abbot, however, was in this list (valued at 2,250 lire) – it was probably sold soon afterwards (it is mentioned on a list of exported pictures compiled in 1814) and was then sold in France in April 1820 in the sale of the Comte d’Espagnac, who had presumably continued in some sort of financial partnership with Müller.³⁸ The painting seems to have remained in France until 1954 when it was acquired by Walter P. Chrysler Jr, who presented it to the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1971. Its provenance between 1814 and 1950 is not recorded.³⁹

By about 1810 Veronese’s other two altarpieces were in the hands of a French dealer, Alexis Delahante. Despite the war between Great Britain and France in these years Delahante found a way to bring paintings to London, and in 1811 he sold the Consecration of Saint Nicholas to the British Institution (as described below). The Virgin and Child with Saint Jerome in Penitence was offered by him at Phillips on 3 June 1814 (lot 41), where it fetched 310 guineas (£325 10s.).⁴⁰ It was then offered for sale ostensibly as part of William Beckford’s collection at Fonthill Abbey, but in fact it was still Delahante’s property. It was bought in the Fonthill sale (10–15 October 1823, no. 269),⁴¹ sold by Delahante again in 1831 (29–30 June, no. 81), and destroyed by fire at Yates’s galleries in 1836. It is striking that Delahante considered it better to sell altarpieces by Veronese in London, where perhaps there were more wealthy collectors who were prepared to accommodate old masters of this size, rather than Paris.

The Consecration of Saint Nicholas in the British Institution and the National Gallery

Veronese’s altarpiece was purchased in 1811 by the Governors of the ‘British Institution for Promoting the Fine Arts in the United Kingdom’. It was the first old master painting to be acquired by them and was intended as a painting which would adorn a ‘future National Gallery’. The full circumstances of this crucial step in the history of the National Gallery are described in the Introduction (pp. xvii–xix). The painting was included in the British Institution’s exhibition of Old Masters in 1812, chiefly as a model for art students, and then in more ambitious public exhibitions in 1816 (as no. 87), 1821 (as no. 106) and 1824 (as no. 160). On 13 June 1826 the governors at their annual meeting unanimously resolved that the Earl of Aberdeen be authorised to offer the painting to the Earl of Liverpool (the Prime Minister) for the National Gallery⁴² together with Parmigianino’s so‐called Vision of Saint Jerome (NG 33), which Holwell Carr had bought for the British Institution in 1823, and Benjamin West’s Christ healing the Sick in the Temple, which had been acquired by subscription at the same time as the Veronese (and for twice as much). Given the size of these paintings their display in the Gallery’s temporary premises at Angerstein’s house near the British Institution in Pall Mall cannot have been easy, but the fact that they were pre‐eminently [page 351]public works meant that they were admirably adapted to the Institution’s primary educational purposes.

We have one full account of the painting’s merits from John Landseer, an artist whose taste was formed in the early decades of the century. The scholarly antiquarian and accomplished engraver was especially enthusiastic about the colour. In his Descriptive, Explanatory, and Critical Catalogue of fifty of the earliest pictures contained in the National Gallery of Great Britain of 1834 he wrote:The emerald green colour which distinguishes the drapery of St Nicholas and which is judiciously spread about (or repeated, as painters technically say) in some parts of the performance, was bold and novel at the time when the Veronese artist first employed it, and is in brilliant opposition to the light ruby reds which play here and there through the picture: both seem to have the effect of electrically kindling the small portions of orange‐tinged yellow into sparks of golden splendour; and the crimsons in particular, that of conferring the beauty of harmonious brilliance on that effective white surplice which is so boldly introduced, cast into such picturesque forms, and is so tastefully pencilled.⁴³ The merits of NG 26 must have been somewhat obscured by the splendour of the paintings by Veronese that were subsequently acquired and, as noted above, the cleaning of the painting was highly controversial. In addition, although Alexis Delahante described the provenance, more or less correctly, as from ‘the Church of the Monastery of St Benedict, Mantua’, William Young Ottley, either ignoring this or doubting it, claimed instead in one of the earliest guides to the National Gallery that it was ‘from the Church of S. Niccolo de’ Frari’ in Venice,⁴⁴ doubtless because Ridolfi mentioned this subject among the ceiling paintings of that church, which was suppressed in 1806 (the canvas had in fact been inserted into the ceiling of the first sala of the Accademia Galleries in 1817).⁴⁵ Ottley’s error was repeated in the Gallery’s official catalogues and the correct provenance was not given until Fiocco’s monograph of 1928.⁴⁶

Provenance

See above (a, b). Abbey church of S. Benedetto Po until about 1790, and then the pinacoteca of the abbey, whence removed about 1797. By 1810 with Alexis Delahante. Sold by him in 1811 to the British Institution, by whom presented to the National Gallery in June 1826.

Copies

A full‐size copy of the painting was made for S. Benedetto Po soon after 1790, as described above. It is likely to be the work of Giuseppe Turchi from Romagna, who is documented as working in the abbey in 1792.⁴⁷ It is still there, now displayed in the nave aisle opposite the entrance of the fourth chapel on the right. The other copies of the painting are less than a third of the size of the original. One measuring 109 × 67.3 cm was lot 4 at Christie’s, London, 19 April 1973; another, [page 352]slightly smaller (87.9 × 56.5 cm), was lot 689 in the Christie’s sale at Castello de Bendinat, Majorca, 24–25 May 1999. Both of these are likely to be copies made at the British Institution, which encouraged copies of less than half‐size, or even at the National Gallery itself.

Exhibitions

London 1812, British Institution ; London 1816, British Institution (87); London 1821, British Institution (106); London 1824, British Institution (160); London 1947, National Gallery, Uncleaned Pictures Exhibition (41).

Framing

The painting would originally have had a frame designed by Giulio Romano. One altarpiece frame of similar size and almost certainly of similar, if not identical, pattern survives in the abbey church in the Oratory of Mary, also known as the Chapel of the Immacolata, beside the presbytery (figs 5 and 6). The principal ornament consists of a frieze with a dense garland of fruit and vegetables bound by a ribbon which is bordered by egg‐and‐dart ornament. This encloses a fluted hollow which is interrupted at the centre of each side by cherubim. The wood is gilded in parts and also partly painted green.⁴⁸ Clearly the white, green and gold would have related in an interesting way to Veronese’s painting.

The original frame was replaced by the imposing baroque marble frames that still adorn the church (see fig. 4). In this arrangement, coloured marble columns support a canted entablature that breaks in the centre to form a lunette supported by child angels, above which there projects another lunette. Essential to this design is the way that the upper corners of the rectangular altarpiece are cut, for the curving lines relate to the curving lunette.⁴⁹ The cut corners of Veronese’s two surviving altarpieces for the church have been supposed to be original, but there are no other examples of a sixteenth‐century altarpiece with this shape and the canvases were surely reshaped when the altars were given these baroque frames. Their date is not known but the style suggests the 1720s, and extensive work in the nave is documented to 1725–6.⁵⁰ An aversion to these very theatrical settings by Abbot Mari and Don Fiandrini, who had strong neo‐classical leanings, may have been one motive for removing Veronese’s altarpiece to a pinacoteca in the monastery.

A gilt neo‐classical frame with acanthus ornament in a deep hollow survives in the Gallery’s store, its press‐moulded ‘compo’ ornament somewhat damaged. This is the frame in which the painting was first shown in the Gallery and almost certainly the one given to it by the British Institution. Photographs show that this frame was still in use in the 1920s (see fig. 16, p. 376) and it was presumably on the painting when it was taken down for restoration in 1964. After treatment the painting was given the current carved and gilded frame (fig. 7).⁵¹ This is Italian, perhaps Venetian, and of the late sixteenth century, but extended on the sides and with spandrels and a narrow cavetto moulding at the sight edge added. The dense ornamentation is not unlike that of the original frame and is of a kind found also in ceiling coffering and on furniture: there is an outer moulding of acanthus, curling inward, with the inner moulding of bay leaf running from the centre to the corners and, between these, a pulvinated frieze consisting of a chain in which broad eight‐petalled flowerheads alternate with round six‐petalled rosettes.

Notes