La Famille de Darius devant Alexandre

The scene is from 331 BC. Alexander the Great has beaten the Persian king Darius, and here he stands before the defeated man's terrified family. Darius's mother kneels and, by an old turn in the story, bows to the wrong man, mistaking Alexander's companion for the king himself. Veronese set all this in his own Venice, dressing the Persians in the shot silks and brocades that rich Venetians actually wore in the 1560s, against pale columns like the ones going up along the Grand Canal. It hung for centuries in the Pisani family's palace. When Goethe passed through Venice in 1786, this was the one painting he stopped to describe, repeating the tale that Veronese had painted it to thank the Pisani for putting him up.