In 1575, Paolo Veronese, the celebrated sixteenth-century Venetian painter, executed for the Benedictine monks of St Justina in Padua the largest altarpiece of his entire career: The Martyrdom of St Justina. The artist depicted the events of the life of St Justina as though they were unfolding above the high altar of the basilica. And around the martyrdom and death of the saint, he orchestrated a proto-Baroque spectacle. The work, conceived as the glorification of the triumphal act of a young female martyr, and through her of the Catholic church as a whole, constitutes one of the highpoints of Veronese’s art. An art, to adopt the words of Henry James, in which “all things were interfused with a sort of silvery splendour delicious to look upon”.
