Die Vision des heiligen Paschalis Baylon

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo was the last great master of the bright, airy ceilings of Venice, and late in life he left them to work for the king of Spain. In 1767 Charles III set him to paint seven altarpieces for a new church at Aranjuez, the royal town south of Madrid. This was one of them. The subject is Paschal Baylon, a 16th-century Spanish Franciscan lay brother remembered for his devotion to the Eucharist, shown here in the vision of the sacrament his order treasured. Tiepolo finished the set and died in Madrid in 1770. Within five years the altarpieces were lifted down and carried into the convent next door, replaced by cooler, more polished work in the Neoclassical taste the court had come to prefer. What survives of this one is a fragment, now in the Prado.