Christ carrying the Cross

This was painted for a house, not a church. Around 1571 the Cuccina, a merchant family grown rich in Venice, ordered four enormous canvases from Veronese for their palace on the Grand Canal. Three are scenes from the Gospels and the fourth shows the family itself, kneeling with their children in front of the Virgin, which tells you how the room was meant to work. This one is over four metres wide and about a metre and a half high, a shape cut to sit above the doors of a Venetian reception hall. The pictures stayed in the palace for some 70 years. In 1645 they were sold to Francesco d'Este, Duke of Modena, and in 1746 Augustus III of Saxony bought the Este pictures almost entire, close to 100 paintings in one purchase, and had them carted to Dresden, where the four still hang together.