Queen Zenobia before the Emperor Aurelian

Zenobia ruled Palmyra against Roman pressure from 262 until 272, when the emperor Aurelian beat her and took her prisoner. That is the moment on this canvas, five metres of it. Tiepolo painted a whole set of scenes from her life for a room in the Palazzo Zenobio in Venice, and the point of the commission was the name: the family that owned the palace was called Zenobio, so the queen became their ancestor by pun. The Prado dates the picture to around 1717, which makes it the work of a painter barely into his twenties and the earliest of the museum's dated Tiepolos. It reached Madrid late and by a strange route. The Spanish state bought it from a dealer in 1975, and the acquisitions register entered it under the wrong story altogether, as the continence of Scipio.