L'assassinio di san Pietro martire

In 1252 a Dominican friar from Verona, Peter of Verona, was ambushed and killed on a road for preaching against heresy, an axe left in his skull. Giovanni Bellini painted the moment around 1507, when he was an old man near 77. What makes the picture strange is the wood around the killing. As the friar falls, a line of woodcutters in the background calmly swing their axes at the trees, felling the whole grove. The rhyme is the point, the men chopping timber and the men chopping down the holy man moving to one rhythm. Down in the valley sits a walled town, probably Verona itself, where the friar had come from. A later cleaning brought back the cleaver in his head that darkened varnish had hidden for years.