The nimbus around the head indicates the saint; the palm branch and the pincers indicate St. Agatha, who was "bound and beaten with rods, and her tender bosom was cruelly torn with iron pincers; and as her blood flowed forth, she said, 'O thou tyrant! shamest thou not to treat me so--- thou who hast been nourished and fed from the breast of a mother?' And this was her only plaint." See also under 20. 25. ST. JOHN IN THE WILDERNESS. _Annibale Carracci_ (Eclectic-Bologna: 1560-1609). _See_ 9. "And the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, and was in the deserts till the day of his shewing unto Israel" (Luke i. 80). In his left hand is the standard of the Lamb, the symbol of his mission, for which he is preparing himself in the desert solitude, while with his right he catches water in a cup from a stream in the rocks, symbolical of the water by which that mission, the baptism unto repentance, was to be accomplished. 26. THE CONSECRATION OF ST. NICHOLAS. _Paolo Veronese_ (Veronese: 1528-1588). Paolo Caliari (called Veronese from his birthplace) stands, says Ruskin, in the forefront of the great colourists. "Titian, Veronese, and Tintoret were the only painters who ever sought entirely to master, and who did entirely master, the truths of light and shade as associated with colour, in the noblest of all physical created things, the human form." With Veronese, "the whole picture is like the rose--glowing with colour in the shadows, and rising into paler and more delicate hues, or masses of whiteness, in the lights." Contrasting the aims of Veronese with those of the great chiaroscurists, Ruskin says: "Veronese chooses to represent the great relations of visible things to each other, to the heaven above, and to the earth beneath them. He holds it more important to show how a figure stands relieved from delicate air, or marble wall; how as a red, or purple, or white figure, it separates itself, in clear discernibility, from things not red, nor purple, nor white; how infinite daylight shines round it; how innumerable veils of faint shadow invest it; how its blackness and darkness are, in the excess of their nature, just as limited and local as its intensity of light; all this, I say, he feels to be more important than showing merely the exact _measure_ of the spark of sunshine that gleams on a dagger-hilt, or glows on a jewel. All this, moreover, he feels to be harmonious,--capable of being joined in one great system of spacious truth. And with inevitable watchfulness, inestimable subtlety, he unites all this in tenderest balance, noting in each hair's-breadth of colour, not merely what its rightness or wrongness is in itself, but what its relation is to every other on his canvas." In the tone of his colouring Paolo retained, as Sir F.