Sainte Famille avec sainte Dorothée

Saint Dorothy went to her execution in Roman Cappadocia, around the year 304, promising a man who mocked her that she would send roses from the garden of paradise. The story says a child then delivered them. Veronese folds that legend into a quiet domestic scene, where the Christ Child himself hands Dorothy the basket of roses that became her sign in art ever after. What a Venetian of the 1550s would have noticed first, though, is how modern she looks. Veronese gives the ancient martyr the braided hair, pearls, and fair colouring of a fashionable Venetian beauty of his own day, set in a clear range of pinks, greens, and soft blues. The picture later climbed high: it entered the collection of Louis XIV, and in 1683 it hung at Versailles among four Veroneses the king kept in his cabinet of rarities.