Crucifixion

Veronese did not put the cross in the middle of this Crucifixion. He crowded all three crosses against the left edge, set at angles to one another, and gave half the canvas to a heavy, clouded sky over a distant city. Below the cross the Virgin has fainted into the arms of the women, and beside them stands a figure wrapped head to foot in yellow. Who she is has long been argued over. She has been read as Mary Magdalene, as a personification of the Synagogue, and, by the historian Carlo Corsato, as one of the other Marys, placed so that anyone looking from the right is led from the Virgin up to Christ. In 1660 the picture hung in Venice in the house of a collector named Garzoni. By 1662 it was in Paris, where the banker Everhard Jabach sold it to Louis XIV.