Anzia and Abrocome meet at the Feasts of Diana

Most painters of Tiepolo's day reached for the Bible or for Greek myth. This scene comes from somewhere much stranger, an ancient Greek novel. It is the Ephesian Tale, written by Xenophon of Ephesus well over a thousand years earlier, one of the oldest romance stories to survive. Its two teenage lovers, Anthia and Habrocomes, meet for the first time in a procession honouring the goddess Diana and fall instantly, helplessly in love, then spend the whole book being separated and searching for each other. Tiepolo paints the meeting, the moment before all the trouble starts, as a bright open-air pageant. He made it in the 1740s, and his son Giandomenico, then a young man learning the trade in his father's workshop, is thought to have had a hand in it.