Der Falkner

Around 1560 rich Venetian families were moving money out of eastern trade and into farmland on the mainland, and building villas to run the estates from. Those houses needed decorating, and Veronese spent those years doing it, most famously at the Villa Barbaro at Maser, where he painted false doors with servants, children and a dog stepping through them.

This panel did the same job in another house. It is more than two metres of painted wood, meant to stand near a real doorway, and a falconer pushes in through a half-open door with his bird and his hound, as though he had come straight from the fields. Falconry was a landowner's sport, so the figure belongs to the family's own world.

It is in Toulouse because an Argentine collector, Georges Bemberg, lent about 1,100 works to the city in 1994 for 99 years, and they are shown in a 16th-century merchant's mansion.