Venice receives the homage of Hercules and Ceres

This started life on a ceiling in the Doge's Palace, in the offices of the men who managed Venice's grain, the Magistrato alle Biade. Their work was unglamorous and vital, keeping a city built on water supplied with bread. Veronese gave them Venice enthroned as a woman, receiving two visitors out of myth. Hercules, all muscle, stands for strength, and Ceres, goddess of the harvest, holds out a sheaf of wheat. Painted around 1575, only a few years after Venice and its allies broke the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto, it is the republic telling itself a flattering story, powerful and never hungry. Because it hung overhead, Veronese built the figures to be read from below, their weight tipping toward you as you look up. The canvas left the palace in 1895 and now hangs here at eye level, so you meet it the way the grain officials never could.