O Batismo de Cristo

Around 1555 Veronese was in his mid-twenties and still fairly new to Venice, a young painter from the mainland town of Verona making his way in a city ruled by the aging Titian. This is one of his treatments of the Baptism of Christ, a subject he returned to many times across his life. John the Baptist tips water over Christ's head at the edge of the Jordan, the two of them set among big soft trees and a wide Venetian sky rather than any bare desert. The colour is already unmistakably his, warm and abundant, the cloth painted to look costly. It reached North Carolina as a gift from the Kress Foundation, which spread hundreds of old Italian paintings among American museums.