In 1566, the acclaimed painter Paolo Caliari, known as Veronese after his birthplace, was commissioned to paint five canvases for a small, recently completed chapel on the island of Murano, in the Lagoon northeast of Venice. The patron, Francesco degli Arbori, was a priest, the chaplain of the Augustinian nuns of the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli. He had been given the small plot of land next to their church, where he had his chapel constructed. The modest building, dedicated to Saint Jerome, was simply furnished, with two of Veronese’s paintings, Saint Jerome in the Wilderness and Saint Agatha Visited in Prison by Saint Peter (both 1566–67), hung above the altar and above the doorway opposite, respectively. Three smaller works, now lost, were probably installed as a kind of predella below Saint Jerome. The two surviving large devotional pictures remained little known to the general public because of their location—off the usual art tourist path, on an island known chiefly for glassmaking. Up to now, they have never left Italy, but through March 25 they can be seen at the Frick Collection in “Veronese in Murano: Two Venetian Renaissance Masterpieces Restored”—one of those tightly focused, revelatory, one- or two-picture shows that the museum does so well—organized by Xavier F. Salomon, the museum’s Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator and a Veronese scholar.1 He is also the author, along with two colleagues, of the appealingly small, extremely informative catalogue that accompanies the exhibition.

Even scholars and passionate Veronese