Parable of the Good Samaritan

When Fetti came into contact with Paolo Veronese’s clear, luminous colours on his arrival in Venice, his delicate naturalism, which clearly owed a lot to Caravaggio, took a richer turn and he found an ideal vehicle for his airy unrestrained inventiveness in paintings of small dimensions such as the celebrated ‘parables’. In the ‘Parable of the Good Samaritan’ in the collection of the Accademia Galleries the gospel story is used (even more so than in the previous versions in the collections of the Gemäldegalerie of Dresden, the Metropolitan Museum of New York and Boston Museum) as a pretext for a skilful, rapid setting of a natural everyday scene caught in the lyrically evoked moment of sunset.