Supper at Emmaus

Veronese took a quiet Gospel moment — the risen Christ recognised by two travellers as he breaks bread at an inn in Emmaus — and staged it as a grand Venetian household of his own day. Around the sacred table he crowds servants, dogs and a scatter of well-dressed children, several of them thought to be his own family. This was the first of the enormous banquet scenes that made his name in Venice in the 1550s. The habit eventually got him into trouble: years later the Inquisition summoned him to explain why he had filled a Last Supper with jesters and drunkards, and he replied that painters take the same liberties as poets. Here that instinct is already at work. On the far left, tucked into the background, he even painted the road to Emmaus with an ancient Roman ruin standing along it.