The Anointing of David

Veronese came to Venice from his home town of Verona in the early 1550s, and this is one of the large canvases of his first years there, painted around 1555, when he was 27. The prophet Samuel anoints the shepherd boy David as the future king of Israel. The museum points out how Veronese spreads many figures across a canvas more than three and a half metres wide and holds them together through colour and movement, with landscapes on either side standing like stage scenery around the event. It is some 30 years older than the other Veronese canvases of the so-called Buckingham series hanging in this room, yet it reached Vienna by the same route, in 1649.