National Gallery of Victoria audio guide,
five stops, free.

Three and a half metres of white marble, gold, silk and a blue Venetian sky, and in the middle of it all a woman holding something very small between two fingers. That is the whole story. The woman is Cleopatra, the man in the red cloak and helmet is Mark Antony, and the small thing is a pearl.

The tale comes from Pliny's Natural History. Cleopatra bet Antony that she could stage a feast more extravagant than anything Rome had seen. He laughed at the first course, so she called for a glass of vinegar, took one of her two pearl earrings, dropped the pearl in, and drank it. Lucius Plancus, the umpire, put his hand over the second pearl before she could do it again and declared Antony the loser. The NGV's own essay on the picture adds the detail nobody at the table mentioned: no vinegar dissolves a pearl. She simply swallowed it, and presumably got it back.

Tiepolo painted this in Venice in 1743 and 1744, borrowing the staging from Veronese's great feast pictures of the previous century, and it is the first of three versions he made. It was probably ordered by Joseph Smith, the British consul in Venice. Before it was finished, Count Francesco Algarotti walked into the studio, shopping for Augustus the Third of Saxony, and talked Tiepolo into finishing it for Dresden instead. On the fifth of March 1744 the painter was paid three hundred zecchini, and the canvas left for Germany.

It kept moving. Twenty-two years near Dresden, thirty-five in private hands after an auction in Amsterdam, and then a hundred and thirty-one years in the Russian imperial collection in Saint Petersburg, where for a while it was nailed to a ceiling. In 1932 the Soviet government sold it, an English dealer bought it, and the Felton Bequest brought it to Melbourne, where it has been the centre of the collection ever since. Before it sailed, it was propped against a wall in a shabby exhibition room in South Kensington, and a London paper called it dirty and unkempt.

In 1955 it went back to London by ship to be cleaned by Horace Buttery, the restorer to the Royal Collection, who worked on it for three months in a room at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The gilded frame in front of you was carved that same year by Frederick Pollak for three hundred and fifty pounds. A Melbourne newspaper reported that the National Gallery in London was interested in swapping a great Rembrandt and a Turner for it. It stayed, and it has not left Australia since.

Now look at the tablecloth. It is the only pure white in the whole painting, and Tiepolo used it to pull your eye straight to the glass. For decades a yellowing varnish had dulled it, until conservators spent twelve months on the canvas in 2002 and 2003 while this building was closed for rebuilding. Their X-rays turned up a small confession: the greyhound beside Antony's chair is copied from a Veronese in Florence whose dog has no tail, so Tiepolo had to invent one, and he tried two positions before settling on the tail you see, pulled up beside the dog's back leg.

Two men, one book, and a single beam of sunlight. The old man in white has turned to make a point, the man in red has his finger on the page, and the light from the right picks out a face, a beard and an open book while the rest of the room falls into brown shadow. This is how Rembrandt painted at twenty-two, in his home town of Leiden, three years before he moved to Amsterdam and became famous. The habit of lighting one thing and hiding everything else stayed with him for the rest of his life.

Nobody is sure who the men are. They might be philosophers, perhaps Hippocrates and Democritus. In 1969 the scholar Christian Tümpel argued they are the apostles Peter and Paul, and the Rembrandt Research Project accepts that reading. But the earliest record we have is blunter. In 1641 the painting turned up in the will of Rembrandt's friend Jacques de Gheyn the Third, described simply as two little old men who are seated and disputing. That is the title the NGV has kept, and it is hard to improve on.

Look at the table. Books, quills, a globe. The gallery reads them as an essay on the wisdom of age, and there is something touching about a young man in his early twenties painting old men and their learning with such attention: the wrinkled skin, the white beard, the pages of the book catching the sun.

The frame has its own small drama. When the panel was bought for Melbourne through the Felton Bequest, the dealer sold it with what he called the antique seventeenth-century frame he had found in Paris. It turned out to be a later French frame cut down from something bigger. In 2005 the gallery replaced it with what you see now, a reproduction of a plain black Dutch box frame from 1618, ten years older than the painting, chosen because the box shape leads your eye into the room the two men sit in. The painting itself was cleaned and restored in 2017, so the beam of light is as bright as it has been in a long while.

Before you move on, find the lower left corner. There, in grey paint, are the letters R E and then nothing legible. It is what remains of the signature of a twenty-two-year-old who did not yet know he would become Rembrandt.

Two women asleep on straw in a stone cell, one pale, one dark, one of them chained. A shackle hangs from the wall above them, and there is a heavy door to the right. Nothing else. The title tells you how to read it: this is the night before a Roman execution, and the sleepers are Christian martyrs who will be sent to the wild beasts in the morning. Their faith, the title says, has already won.

The painter, Saint George Hare, was Irish, born in Limerick in 1857, and he had a taste for exactly this kind of subject: undressed women, chains, a soft light, a title that made it all respectable. He showed this one at the Royal Academy in London in 1891, then sent it to the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893 and to the Paris Salon in 1894. He kept it for thirteen years. In 1903 it went back to the Royal Academy under a new title, Miserere Domine, Lord have mercy, and in 1904 it hung in an exhibition of Irish painters at the Guildhall in London. The next year someone gave it to Melbourne. The NGV has never named the donor, and after a hundred and twenty years that anonymity has become part of the picture.

People have never agreed on what they are looking at. In 1894 an American religious magazine praised it as an impressive depiction of Christian faith and steadfastness and described the two women in a sisterly embrace. A century later the art historian Kobena Mercer read the same embrace as an interracial lesbian couple, and set the painting beside Jules Robert Auguste's Les Amies. Both readings are in the room with you. Hare, who knew what sold at the Academy, probably intended the ambiguity.

Look at the lower left corner. The signature reads HARE, and there is a line painted straight through it. Then step back and look at the frame, which is the original, made by Chapman Brothers in London. Its profile was popular for twenty years on both sides of the world, and the Melbourne framer John Thallon used the same basic form, more roughly, for Frederick McCubbin's paintings, which now hang in the other NGV building at Federation Square, though the NGV notes this frame arrived too late to have been his model. The gallery's own note is dry about it: the London frame is more carefully made than the Melbourne ones.