"What is the meaning of life? The great revelation had never come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark..."

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- Train of thought of deep-thinking painter Lily Briscoe in Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse

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The thinking person's lucky life abounds in surprises, in the sorts of sudden "illuminations" of the unexpected that are always quickening Lily Briscoe's pulse.

Why, on just one morning this week my inner-Lily was thrillingly astonished by two contrasting discoveries.

One was the news that One Nation seems set to become the major opposition party in federal parliament. The other was reading that all this time there have been not the obvious two but in fact six (six!) six dogs in Paolo Veronese's 1563 masterpiece The Wedding Feast at Cana.

There's not room for everything in this petite newspaper column. So we put what new Redbridge polling shows of the rise and rise of Pauline Hanson's masterpiece One Nation aside for the moment and focus for now on Veronese's masterpiece.

Yes, although there is, sadly, only one Jesus Christ in his teeming-with-people painting of the Wedding Feast (the Bible's story of Jesus turning water into wine), the painting boasts an abundance of dogs. I had only ever noticed two in all my years of looking at reproductions of the work but in his just-published The Dog's Gaze: A Visual History, the dashing American historian Thomas Laqueur points out all six. He discusses Veronese as one of many great painters who have enriched their works with lots of dogs.

It takes time to find all six dogs in Veronese's painting but with painstaking Googling (I've used........

© Canberra Times