Isaiah

This is one half of a pair. Veronese painted two Old Testament prophets, Isaiah and Ezekiel, as companion canvases, and this is Isaiah, the prophet whose words Christians later read as foretelling the coming of Christ. He is shown alone, a single robed figure, the kind of monumental one-man image Veronese could turn out with great confidence. The two paintings were cleaned and studied together in 2018, scanned in three dimensions before and after the restoration so conservators could see exactly what the cleaning had uncovered. Little else about the pair's early history is firmly settled. Seen on its own, it is a big, solid prophet built to hold a wall by himself.