Paolo Veronese

Paolo Caliari (1528 – 19 April 1588), known as Paolo Veronese (

His most famous works are elaborate narrative cycles, executed in a dramatic and colorful style, full of majestic architectural settings and glittering pageantry. His large paintings of biblical feasts, crowded with figures, painted for the refectories of monasteries in Venice and Verona are especially famous, and he was also the leading Venetian painter of ceilings. Most of these works remain in situ, or at least in Venice, and his representation in most museums is mainly composed of smaller works such as portraits that do not always show him at his best or most typical.

He has always been appreciated for "the chromatic brilliance of his palette, the splendor and sensibility of his brushwork, the aristocratic elegance of his figures, and the magnificence of his spectacle", but his work has been felt "not to permit expression of the profound, the human, or the sublime", and of the "great trio" he has often been the least appreciated by modern criticism.

Birth and names

Veronese took his usual name from his birthplace of

By 1541, Veronese was apprenticed with Antonio Badile, who was later to become his father-in-law, and in 1544 was an apprentice of Giovanni Francesco Caroto; both were leading painters in Verona.^[5] An altarpiece painted by Badile in 1543 includes striking passages that were most likely the work of his fifteen-year-old apprentice; Veronese's precocious gifts soon surpassed the level of the workshop, and by 1544 he was no longer residing with Badile.^[7] Although trained in the culture of Mannerism then popular in Parma, he soon developed his own preference for a more radiant palette.^[8]

In his late teens he painted works for important churches in Verona, and in 1551 he was commissioned by the Venetian branch of the important

In 1552 Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga, great-uncle of the ruling Guglielmo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, commissioned an altarpiece, Temptation of St. Anthony for Mantua Cathedral (now at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen in Caen, France), which Veronese painted in situ.^[10] He doubtless used his time in Mantua to study the ceilings by Giulio Romano; it was as a painter of ceiling frescos that he would initially make his mark in Venice, where he based himself permanently from the following year.^[11]

Venice

Veronese moved to Venice in 1553 after obtaining his first state commission, ceilings in fresco decorating the Sala dei Consiglio dei Dieci (the Hall of the

The Wedding at Cana, painted in 1562–1563, was also collaboration with Palladio. It was commissioned by the

In 1573 Veronese completed the commission for The Feast in the House of Levi, a last-supper painting for the rear wall of the refectory at the Basilica di Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Castello, Venice. Originally titled The Last Supper, the painting was to replace a Titian painting burnt in a fire; Veronese's oversized (5.55m x 12.80m) replacement depicted a Last Supper banquet scene that included German soldiers, dwarves, and animals – the human and animal exotica usual to Veronese's representational narratives.^[22] Artistically, The Feast in the House of Levi indicates Veronese's technical development in using intense and luminous colors for texture, attention to narrative coherence, the acute representation of human emotion, and the psychologically subtle interplay occurring among the characters who crowd the scene.^[23]

Given the subject of the painting, the biblical

A decade earlier, the Benedictine monks who commissioned The Wedding at Cana (1563) had directed Veronese to freely include as many human figures as would fit in the banquet scene. In contrast, a decade later, Veronese encountered legal, religious constraints that determined the suitability (theological, political, sociological) of who and what he depicted in a painting—thus, on 18 July 1573, Veronese was summoned before the Venetian Holy Inquisition to explain the presence of what Church doctrine considered characters, animals, and indecorum extraneous to an image of the Last Supper of the Christ.^[24]

The tribunal's interrogation of Veronese was cautionary, rather than punitive; political, rather than judicial; nonetheless, Veronese explained to the Inquisitiors that "we painters take the same liberties as poets and madmen" in telling a story. Although the Inquisition's tribunal ordered Veronese to repaint the last-supper scene, he opposed their remedy to his theological offences, yet was compelled to re-title the painting from the sacramental The Last Supper to The Feast in the House of Levi.^[25] That an artist, such as Veronese, had successfully perdured against the Inquisition's implied accusation of heresy, indicated he had the discreet political support of a patrician patron of the arts.^[26]

Assessment

An artist's biography of Paolo Veronese was included in the second edition of the Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1568), by Giorgio Vasari, with improved coverage of the painters of the Venetian school.

A fuller biography of Veronese had to await Le maraviglie dell'arte ovvero le vite degli illustri pittori Veneti e dello stato (1648), by

In 2014, the art historian Charles Hope wrote of Veronese's strengths and weaknesses: "He is notable above all as a colorist who used a range of bright hues with a boldness unmatched in his time and scarcely equaled since", but because his use of color "was often calculated to create a harmonious overall effect rather than to single out the main protagonists", his paintings convey little narrative drama. According to Hope, "the effect is sumptuous, seductive but ultimately excessive and a little monotonous, rather like a visit to a patisserie."^[28]

In Paintings in the Louvre (1987), Lawrence Gowing’s modern assessment of Paolo Veronese’s artistic achievement is that:

The French had no doubts, as the critic Théophile Gautier wrote in 1860, that Veronese was the greatest colorist who ever lived—greater than Titian, Rubens, or Rembrandt because he established the harmony of natural tones in place of the modeling in dark and light that remained the method of academic chiaroscuro. Delacroix wrote that Veronese made light without violent contrasts, "which we are always told is impossible, and maintained the strength of hue in shadow".

This innovation could not be better described. Veronese’s bright outdoor harmonies enlightened and inspired the whole nineteenth century. He was the foundation of modern painting. But whether his style is in fact naturalistic, as the

Impressionists thought, or a most subtle and beautiful imaginative invention must remain a question for each age to answer for itself.^[29]

Gallery

• 
  The Sacrificial Death of Marcus Curtius, c. 1550–1552
• 
  Juno Showering Gifts on Venetia, c. 1554–1556, Doge's Palace
• 
  Saturn (Time) and Historia, Villa Barbaro
• 
  Nobleman in Hunting Attire, Villa Barbaro
• 
  Allegory of Painting, 1560s
• 
  Saint Jerome in the Desert, c. 1584
• 
  Lucretia, 1580s
• 
  Leda and the Swan, c. 1585

Working practices

In addition to the ceiling creations and wall paintings, Veronese also produced altarpieces (The Consecration of Saint Nicholas, 1561–62, London's

He headed a family workshop, including his younger brother

Veronese was one of the first painters whose drawings were sought by collectors during his lifetime.[33]

Selected works

Veronese in popular culture

• The Monty Python sketch "The Last Supper" from Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl is based on the story of Veronese's painting The Feast in the House of Levi.
• An imaginary Veronese painting called La Morte dil Cesare is prominently featured in a story arc of the award-winning comics series 100 Bullets.

Veronese in religion

• Theosophical authors have identified Paolo Veronese with the Master of Wisdom or Mahatma known as "The Venetian," who is the
  Head of the Third Ray.^[36]
• Elizabeth Clare Prophet repeated this information in her "Ascended Masters" teachings.^[37]

See also

• Holy Family with Saint Catherine and Saint John the Baptist
• List of Orientalist artists
• Orientalism
• Portrait of Iseppo da Porto and his son Adriano

Notes

References

• Freedberg, Sydney J. (1993). Pelican History of Art (ed.). Painting in Italy, 1500–1600. Penguin Books Ltd. pp. 550–60.
• Ilchman, Frederick, et al., Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto: Rivals in Renaissance Venice, MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2009,
  ISBN 978-0878467396
• ISBN 1857099133
• Rearick, W. R., The Art of Paolo Veronese 1528–1588, National Gallery of Art, 1988
• ISBN 0521565685
• ISBN 978-1857095531
• ISBN 009174637X

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Paolo Veronese.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Paolo Veronese.

• 69 artworks by or after Paolo Veronese at the Art UK site
• Art view; Homage to a Gentleman of Verona [1]
• Veronese biography on Web Gallery of Art with link to images of many of his paintings
• Paolo Caliari – Biographical article in the 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia
• Rossetti, William Michael (1911). "Paul Veronese" . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 20 (11th ed.). pp. 965–966.
• Gallery at Museum Syndicate