A study for this painting is in the British Museum (inv. no. Pp,3.192) and a reversed chiaroscuro print after the drawing was made in London by Elisha Kirkall in 1723. It is possible that the present painting was made for a member of the monastic community of SS. Nazaro e Celso in Verona in 1592. The snail on the rock below the seated saint shown in the drawing was used by Farinati as an emblematic signature. In the finished painting the rock and snail have been replaced by a skull.

Farinati was the leading painter in Verona in the later sixteenth century, especially once his compatriot Paolo Veronese moved to Venice in the 1550s. He and Veronese were trained in the same circle of artists. Farinati was a notably prolific artist, a painter as well as a draftsman and a designer, with a role in Verona akin to that of Giulio Romano in Mantua (Farinati was much influenced by Giulio, having worked in Mantua early in his career). He produced works not only for Verona but also for Venice and for smaller towns across northern Italy.


The collection of art historian Terence Mullaly (1927-2020):

The scholar and art critic Terence Mullaly was born in 1927. The son of an army colonel, Mullaly was educated in India, England and Canada. He graduated from Cambridge University and then made several archaeological excavations in Tripolitania and Sicily. In public life, he was best known as The Daily Telegraph’s art critic, where he was one of Britain’s leading voices writing on art for over thirty years from 1956 to 1987.

He was also a considerable scholar and became a leading expert in Veronese art. In 1966, he organised an exhibition in the Museo di Castelvecchio in Verona on Ruskin’s experience of that city, as recorded in his writings and paintings. In 1971, he curated an exhibition on Veronese drawings of the sixteenth century and published an accompanying catalogue (Disegni Veronesi del Cinquecento) that is still cited today as an authoritative guide on attributions in that area. He was a regular contributor to The Burlington Magazine and Old Master Drawings art journals.

His collecting habits followed his interests in Veronese art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and he acquired rare works by Veronese artists such as Paolo Farinati (1524-1606), Orlando Flacco (1527-1593) and Marco Antonio Bassetti (1586-1630).