Untreue

These figures were never meant to be met at eye level. Veronese painted this around 1570 as one of four canvases set into a ceiling, probably in a Venetian palace, and he built the scene to be looked up at: the bodies tip and foreshorten as if you stood on the floor beneath them. A nude woman sits between two men and slips a small folded note into one of their hands. The name Unfaithfulness is not his. It was attached in 1727, someone's later guess at how these four pictures fit with the others, Scorn, Respect and Happy Union. Veronese left no key, and the thread meant to link them is still argued over. By 1648 the set had drifted north, into the Prague collection of the Holy Roman Emperor.