魚に説教する聖アントニウス

A few years before this, Veronese had been called before the Inquisition in Venice. The inquisitors objected that his enormous Last Supper was too full of dogs, dwarfs and drunkards for a sacred scene, and rather than repaint it he simply renamed it The Feast in the House of Levi. Around 1580 he took up a legend well suited to a man who had been told how to preach. Saint Anthony of Padua, ignored by the townspeople, turns instead to the river, and the fish rise to the surface to hear him. Veronese sets him on a jutting rock shaped like a ship's prow, so the preacher reads as a helmsman guiding his church. The saint holds his lilies but looks hard at the human bystanders, not the fish, as if the reproach were meant for them.