La Résurrection du jeune homme de Naïm

Veronese painted this gospel scene the way a wealthy Venetian of his own century would have staged it. The story comes from the gospel of Luke. Christ meets a widow burying her only son outside the town of Nain and brings the young man back to life. But the grieving mother here wears the light-blue silk of an aristocratic Venetian lady, and the crowd around her is dressed for 16th-century Venice, not ancient Galilee. That was the taste of the city that paid him. Christ's robes, pale pink and pale blue with a faint metallic sheen, show exactly what people mean by Venetian colour. The dead boy, pale and barely lit, is tucked into the lower corner, while the eye is pulled to his mother at the centre. Archduke Leopold Wilhelm acquired the picture for the Habsburgs in the 17th century, and it hangs today in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum.