The Queen of Sheba and Solomon

This canvas is 58 centimetres high and 205 wide, close to four times as long as it is tall, which is the shape of a frieze rather than of a picture. It was painted around 1555 for a secular room, and the Prado's catalogue is blunt about what that did to the subject. The biblical story has lost its weight and is mostly a pretext for exotic clothing, court ceremony and bare skin. The queen of Sheba arrives at Solomon's court with her gifts, and the Bible never gives her a name. The Prado indexes her under Nicrotis, one of the names that later tradition supplied. Five other canvases of the same shape have not left its side since they entered the Spanish royal collection in 1651, sharing one colour scheme and a rhythm of curving forms that carries the eye from one of them to the next.