Christ meeting the wife and the sons of Zebedee

In the mid-1560s Veronese was the painter Venice turned to for scale and spectacle, filling refectory and church walls with crowded, richly dressed scenes. This is a Gospel episode most painters left alone: the mother of the apostles James and John kneeling before Christ to ask that her two sons be given the best places beside him. Veronese sets it as a Venetian encounter, a press of figures in bright cloth against open sky, and makes the two young men strikingly boyish among the older, bearded apostles. The canvas is more than three metres wide, built for a wall where a viewer would meet it almost life-size, the whole group caught mid-gesture as the request is made.