Veronese, Paolo

(Paolo Caliari; 1528-1588)

   Master from the Venetian School who competed for commissions with Tintoretto and Titian. Veronese was from the city of Verona, hence his surname, where he was trained by a local painter named Antonio Badile. In 1553, at 25, he moved to Venice where he became one of the city's leading and most innovative masters. Veronese particularly excelled at rendering illusionistic ceilings, as the Triumph of Mordecai (1556) at San Sebastiano and the Triumph of Venice in the Hall of the Great Council at the Doge's Palace (c. 1585) demonstrate. In 1560, the artist traveled to Rome and upon his return he received the commission to paint a series of allegorical and contemporary scenes in the Villa Barbaro at Maser for Marcantonio and Daniele Barbaro. These works show that Veronese closely studied Raphael's frescoes in the Villa Farnesina, Rome (1513-1518), as some of the figures are borrowed from that source. In 1563, Veronese worked on the Marriage at Cana in the refectory of the Benedictine Monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, a scene that depicts Christ's first miracle as a contemporary Venetian banquet. The figures are dressed in sumptuous costumes and engaged in eating and conversation. In the foreground, the three musicians who entertain the crowd are portraits of the artists Jacopo Bassano, Titian, and Veronese himself. With this, Veronese compared the art of painting to music to argue for the placement of his craft, which until then was considered a manual labor, among the liberal arts. Veronese's Mars and Venus United by Love (c. 1570; New York, Metropolitan Museum), Allegory of Love (1570; London, National Gallery), and Rape of Europa (1580; Venice, Doge's Palace) exemplify his ability to render sensuous and luxurious mythological and allegorical scenes.

   In 1573 Veronese painted the Feast in the House of Levi (Venice, Galleria dell' Accademia) for the refectory of the Dominican Monastery of Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Venice, for which he was summoned to the tribunal of the Inquisition. Its judges deemed the presence of buffoons, dwarfs, inebriated figures, and animals in the painting to be inappropriate for the depiction of the Lord's Last Supper, the work's original subject. Veronese was able to avoid the charges of heresy levied against him simply by changing the painting's title.

   Veronese's di sotto in sù experiments had much to do with the development of illusionistic ceilings in Italy, as it paved the way for the grand Baroque ceiling frescoes of Giovanni Lanfranco, Pietro da Cortona, and later Giovanni Battista Gauli and Andrea Pozzo. His mythologies, with their exceptional colorism, shimmering fabric effects, and lush brushwork, were also a major force, inspiring artists such as Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck.