Assumption of the Virgin

Veronese painted this in Venice around 1580, when he ran one of the busiest workshops in the city and was decorating churches and palaces all across the lagoon. What hangs in Dijon, though, is not the whole thing. At some point the canvas was cut down, so the Virgin rising among her cherubs is really a surviving piece of a larger composition. It traveled a long way from Venice. By the 17th century it belonged to Everhard Jabach, a wealthy banker in Paris, and in 1671 Louis XIV bought his collection for the crown. The painting reached Dijon in 1803. A recent cleaning lifted away old overpaint and brought back the rounded top the canvas had lost.