Resurrection of Jesus

Paolo Caliari, the painter Venice knew as Veronese, built this Resurrection around one blaze of colour. Christ lifts out of the tomb wrapped in a red that Venetian painters guarded almost like a trade secret, arms thrown up, while the soldiers set to guard the grave tumble back into the dark below him, some of them still asleep. Look to the far background and Veronese has quietly folded in a second moment of the Easter morning: an angel and the women arriving at the empty tomb, a scene that in most paintings would get a canvas to itself. He made it around 1570, at the height of his Venice, a city then near the peak of its wealth and its appetite for exactly this kind of stagecraft. The picture hangs in Dresden today, among the largest gatherings of his work anywhere outside Italy, bought for the Saxon court in the 18th century.