The Patron Saints of the Crotta Family

Around 1750 the Crotta, a wealthy Venetian family, wanted a picture that tied their name to an ancient legend, and they hired the most in-demand painter in the city to make it. Tiepolo obliged by turning old religious history into pure theatre. The scene shows Saint Grata, whom the family claimed as an ancestor, presenting her pagan father with the severed head of the martyr Alexander of Bergamo. In place of blood, sweet-smelling flowers spring from the wound, and at that sight her father is said to have turned to Christianity. Tiepolo sets it all in a bright, airy stage of columns and steps, the figures posed with sweeping gestures under a clear sky. The painting hung in the family's palazzo until 1902, when the Städel in Frankfurt bought it.