Adorazione dei Magi

Veronese made his name on enormous canvases, banquet scenes wide as a wall and packed with servants, dogs, and guests in Venetian silk. This is the opposite in scale, a small telling of the Three Kings visiting the newborn Christ, painted around 1570 on a plate of copper barely larger than a sheet of paper. Even shrunk to this size, his instinct is the same. The manger turns into a crowded arrival, the kings and their retinue sweeping in with rich fabrics and armor. Venice in these years was the great hinge between Europe and the East, its harbor thick with foreign merchants and Eastern goods, and Veronese dresses these visitors from far away as the wealthy strangers a Venetian would really have seen down on the quays. The oil lies smooth and bright on the metal, nearer to enamel than to the loose weave of his big canvases.