Predica di San Giovanni Battista

Paolo Veronese painted this around 1562, when Venice was the richest painting city in Europe and colour was its great pride. He gives us John the Baptist as a monument, a big twisting figure in loose red robes and rough furs, barefoot on a rock among thin trees under a pink dusk sky. In his hand is a staff with a white banner carrying one Latin word, ECCE, behold, the cry with which John announced Christ. Veronese sets the listening crowd across three receding planes so the eye travels back into the wood. The painting left Venice in 1607 as a gift to Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the art-hungry nephew of the pope, and it has hung in his Roman villa ever since.