Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery

Alessandro Varotari, called Il Padovanino, was a Paduan painter who developed an almost archaic devotion to the style of Titian in the early seventeenth century, deliberately reviving sixteenth-century Venetian manner against the grain of contemporary Baroque trends. His Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery (c.1630) translates a scene of moral complexity and divine mercy — Christ writing in the dust while the accusers bring the adulteress — into the warm, contemplative key of Venetian classicism. The choice of this subject, with its emphasis on forgiveness over condemnation, suited the devotional climate of Counter-Reformation Venice.

Varotari arranges the figures in a frieze-like composition reminiscent of Veronese or Titian — the figures large, the architectural background spacious. His palette is warm and Venetian — reds, golds, warm greens — applied in the layered glaze technique he consciously revived from the previous century.