The painting was purchased as a work by Gaspare Diziani, an early 18th-century painter from the Veneto region, and the attribution is confirmed in the descriptions by Zuffi and Spiriti.

Stylistic analysis does indeed reveal the characteristic elements of Diziani’s mature production, when he had abandoned the academic classicism of his first master Gregorio Lazzarini, not least through the influence of Sebastiano Ricci, and returned to the legacy of 16th-century Venetian painting, especially Tintoretto’s handling of light.

Nocturnal settings thus feature in a substantial proportion of these works with a strong chromatic contrast that focuses attention on the central episode while bathing the background figures and landscape in a warm and golden light. These characteristics are present in the canvas examined here. The figure of Christ, to whom the angel presents the chalice and announces the imminent Passion, is flooded with light from the heavenly messenger and the rays from same source spread out all around to reveal the sleeping apostles in the foreground and the walls of Jerusalem in the background. Bodies and objects tend to lose their precise outlines shapes in this intense light and become shapes hazily picked out in colour.

The closest terms of reference are some works dating from the mid-1740s, including the series of Metamorphoses at Palazzo Minucci in Vittorio Veneto and the Madonna of Mount Carmel in the parish church of Borbiago di Mira. Attention is drawn in particular to the similarities in scenic layout and definition of the cross in the Saint Helena and the True Cross in the School of San Silvestro, Venice. A drawing in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, can perhaps be identified as a preparatory study for the figures of Christ and the angel [1].