Simbolo dell'Evangelista Luca (toro)

When Titian painted this winged ox around 1542, it was the symbol of Luke the Evangelist set into a church ceiling, one of a ring of roundels looking down on the island church of Santo Spirito in Venice. He was working out how a figure should read when seen from far below, foreshortened against the sky. A century later that island church was closed, and its ceiling was taken apart and carried across the water to the sacristy of Santa Maria della Salute, the domed church Venice had just built in thanks for surviving the plague of 1630. So the ox came to rest inside a monument to one epidemic, made by a painter who died in another, for Titian was taken by the plague of 1576. Look up in the sacristy now and the ox is still tilted, still made for a ceiling it no longer has.