Adoration of the Magi

The family who paid for this picture, the Cuccina, were Venetian cloth merchants, and according to the Dresden gallery they held the import monopoly on cochineal, a crimson dye made from insects and shipped from Mexico. It coloured costly fabrics, and it also went into painters' reds. Veronese used it generously in this cycle. He painted the Adoration around 1571 as one of four large canvases for the family's palace on the Grand Canal. The Virgin sits with the Child at the far left, one king kneels before her in a heavy gold brocade, and the rest of the retinue crowds in from the right with horses and a dog, a standing king in deep red at its centre. By 1645 all four canvases belonged to the Dukes of Modena. In 1746 they came to Dresden, when the Saxon elector Augustus III, who was also king of Poland, bought the best of the Modena collection.