Bathsheba at her bath

By 1552, when Domenico Riccio painted this in Verona, the city had a mannerist style of its own, a little apart from Venice down the road, and Riccio was one of its leading hands. The subject comes from the Old Testament. Bathsheba is at her bath when King David, watching from his palace roof, is struck by her and sends for her, a chain of events that ends with her husband dead on David's orders. Painters returned to the moment again and again because it let them set a nude inside a story. Riccio keeps the drama quiet and stages it almost like a scene of his own day, the servants and the fine cloth belonging more to a Veronese household of the 1550s than to ancient Jerusalem.