Martyrdom of Saint Agatha

In 1736 Tiepolo was about 40 and the most sought-after painter in Venice, still years away from the ceilings he would go on to paint in Würzburg and Madrid. That year he finished this altarpiece for a chapel in the Basilica of Saint Anthony in Padua, commissioned by the Buzzaccarini family, and it went up on the new altar early in 1737. Agatha kneels in a light that falls only on her, arms opened, while the executioner beside her sheathes his sword and Saint Peter looks down from the clouds. Connoisseurs came to admire it. Then a fire tore through the chapel in 1772, and later a restorer stripped the space back to bare Gothic and moved the painting out. It now hangs in the basilica's own museum, a survivor of the room it was made for.