Jupiter with Gods and Goddesses on Olympus

In November 1658 clerks in Genoa drew up an inventory of the pictures left by Giovanni Battista Raggi, a Genoese patrician who had died the year before. Among them were five long, narrow canvases by Paolo Veronese with scenes from Roman mythology. Two days later a list of works to be sent to his brother, Cardinal Lorenzo Raggi in Rome, called them simply five oblongs by Paolo. This is one of them. Jupiter appears among the gods on Olympus on a strip of canvas 27 centimetres high and a metre long, painted in the 1560s and probably meant to run as a frieze around a room.

By 1780 most of the set was back in Genoa, in the palace of a later Raggi, now described as various friezes with little figures by Paolo of Verona. Over the following centuries it came apart. One of the five, a Rape of Europa, is in a private collection in Milan. The other four, this one included, were bought in 1930 by the Boston collector Mrs. Edward Jackson Holmes, and between 1959 and 1964 she gave or left all four to the Museum of Fine Arts.