Between March 19 and June 15, Paolo Veronese’s masterpiece The Martyrdom of St George, revered at the Chiesa di San Giorgio in Braida, Italy, will be on show at the National Gallery of London’s exhibition Veronese: Magnificence in Renaissance Venice.
Veronese was an Italian Renaissance painter based in Venice, most famous for large history paintings of both religious and mythological subjects.
The painting is one of the most attractive at the church. In 1442, the monastery next to the Adige River in the city of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was given to the Canonicals of St Giorgio in Alga of Venice, who rebuilt the church.
The bond between the northern city of Verona and the Queen of the Adriatic goes back hundreds of years. It turns out that Verona was then the largest possession of Venice on mainland Italy. It was only with the rise of the Doge’s Republic of Venice that the Verona’s autonomy came to an end, and the city was conquered by Venice in 1405.
This made Veronese a subject of the Venetian Dodge. In 1553 Il Veronese moved to Venice after obtaining his first state commission.