The Dead Christ Supported by Angels

Nearly a century before this picture, the Venetian painter Giovanni Bellini had painted the dead Christ held up by angels several times. Veronese took up the same old subject in the last decade of his life, the 1580s. He was famous for vast, crowded, colourful canvases for the palaces and churches of the city, and here there is nothing but the body and the angels, on a canvas less than a metre high.

The museum draws attention to one contrast. A cold light sharpens the pallor of Christ's skin, and against it lies the warm, rosy hand of the angel who clasps his wrist. The museum adds that this intimate scale and meditative mood appear only in Veronese's late work.

The Museum of Fine Arts bought the painting in 1930 from Durlacher Brothers, dealers in New York.