Tentación de San Antonio

In 1552 the young painter from Verona, barely 24, won a commission from Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga for a chapel in Mantua Cathedral. What he delivered is muscular and almost violent, a hermit saint wrestled to the ground, a demon hauling at his cloak, a woman leaning in to tempt him. It is the young Veronese showing off everything he had absorbed from Giulio Romano, who had shaped the whole artistic scene in Mantua. The picture stayed on that altar for nearly 250 years. Then in 1797 French commissioners following the revolutionary armies stripped it out and shipped it north. Since 1806 it has hung in Caen, in Normandy, far from the cathedral it was made for.