Jupiter and a Nude

Jupiter is easy to recognise here, because his eagle is with him. The woman is harder. The king of the gods had many loves, and painters usually gave each one something to know her by, a swan, a bull, a shower of gold. This nude carries nothing at all, so nobody can say for certain who she is. The museum suggests she may be Dione, who in Homer's Iliad is the mother of Venus by Jupiter.

The setting can be pinned down more easily than the woman. The buildings in the picture are classical in the newest fashion of the 1560s, the manner of Andrea Palladio, the architect Veronese knew and worked alongside. In those years Palladio was building villas for Venetian patricians on the mainland, and in 1566 he began the church of San Giorgio Maggiore, across the water from St Mark's.