Christ on the Mount of Olives

Greece had no national gallery until 1900, and the pictures the state owned sat in the University and the Polytechnic. On the 28th of July that year the Polytechnic handed 258 of them to the new gallery's first director, the painter Georgios Iakovides, and this canvas is still recorded as a gift of the University.

It is a Venetian painting of the hours in the garden at the foot of the Mount of Olives, Christ at prayer through the night while the apostles he brought with him sleep. Pietro della Vecchia worked in Venice in the middle of the 17th century, earning part of his living from pictures done in the manner of the great Venetians of 100 years earlier, which is one reason his own chronology sits so loose. The museum's record gives this one no date at all, and catalogues place it somewhere between 1650 and 1660.