Der Raub der Europa

The story is one Venice loved to paint. Europa, a Phoenician princess, lays a garland on a white bull so gentle she climbs onto its back, not knowing the bull is the god Jupiter, who then wades into the sea and carries her off to Crete. Veronese tells it across a single landscape, the calm scene up close and, far off at the right, the tiny figure already borne out into the water. He returned to this subject more than once, and for most of the last century this smaller canvas was taken for a mere copy of his huge version in the Doge's Palace in Venice. Thick brown varnish had hidden its quality. When it was cleaned in 1999, the paint underneath proved to be his own, and it may in fact be his first working-out of the subject, made before the great one.