The story
In 1556 the procurators of St Mark's, the officials who ran the Venetian Republic's grandest buildings, gave the ceiling of their new library to seven painters, three roundels each. When the 21 paintings were finished in February 1557, judges chosen with Titian and the architect Jacopo Sansovino named Paolo Veronese the best, and he was given a gold chain. His three roundels, Honour, Music, and Arithmetic and Geometry, are still in the ceiling of the main hall.
The building is primarily a library, the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, and its paintings came with the architecture. Sansovino designed it facing the Doge's Palace across the Piazzetta, and building began in 1537. It was meant to house the Greek and Latin manuscripts that Cardinal Bessarion, a scholar born in the Byzantine world, had given to the Republic in 1468.
The decoration went on for years. Titian painted the figure of Wisdom for the ceiling of the vestibule around 1560. In the following decade Veronese, Tintoretto and others filled the walls of the main hall with ancient philosophers. Visitors reach these monumental rooms through the Museo Correr on St Mark's Square, and among the library's treasures is Fra Mauro's map of the world, drawn in Venice in the mid-15th century.
