Assumption of Mary

This one was an altarpiece, made for the high altar of the Venetian church of Santa Maria Maggiore, where worshippers stood in front of it rather than under it. It has been in this gallery since 1812. Veronese sets the scene on a flight of steps with columns rising on either side, grand architecture that gives the crowd room to move. At the bottom the apostles gather around the Virgin's empty tomb, some peering in, some already looking up. Above them Mary floats free of the ground, carried by angels toward a burst of golden light. The subject is the Assumption, the belief that Mary was taken bodily into heaven, and the drama Veronese builds sits in the gap between the two zones, the earthbound men and the weightless woman. He painted it late in his life, in the 1580s. Notice how the empty stone tomb anchors the whole rising motion.