VERONESE, PAOLO

VERONESE, Paolo: translation

One of Venice's greatest decorative painters, Paolo Veronese invented a Man­nerist pictorial language uniquely suited to large-scale decorative styles. Born in Verona, Italy, into a family of artisans, Veronese entered the workshop of Antonio Badile by the age of fourteen. A precocious artist, Veronese was already working on his own four years later. He was working in Mantua in 1552; the art of Giulio Romano,* with its sculptural tendency and dramatic foreshorten-ings, heavily influenced Veronese's work in the ducal palace in Venice one year later. Not long after, his paintings for the Church of San Sebastiano showed his mastery of illusion by this time and a new and active approach to painted ar­chitecture that became united with the subject of the painting.He was a con­summate scenic designer, and his architectural constructions reflected not just the architecture of Sanmicheli, but also an awareness of Sebastiano Serlio's recently published work on theatrical scenery. Veronese utilized an artificial and decorative approach to coloring in which accents are produced with contrasting tints frequently possessing pale and acidulous qualities. Not yet thirty, Veronese participated in the decoration of the Marciana Library, and according to tradi­tion, Titian* judged Veronese's work the most beautiful and awarded him a golden chain. In the Villa Barbaro at Maser, designed by Andrea Palladio* for Marcantonio and Daniele Barbaro,* Veronese gave pictorial form to Daniele's complex humanist program exalting the universal harmony of the cosmos as he continued to explore classical culture in many details.

Back in Venice, Veronese worked on several commissions and produced a series of paintings of huge sumptuous feasts showing an unparalleled scenic grandiosity and choral effect. In 1573 Veronese completed his Feast in the House of Levi (Venice, Accademia), in which he painted a Venetian feast with soldiers, banqueters, buffoons, and exotic animals. The painting was originally intended as a Last Supper, but Veronese was forced to change the name of the composition to avoid charges of heresy and the destruction of the painting by the Inquisition. Back in the ducal palace after the devastating fires there, Ve­ronese extolled the virtues of the good government of the republic in the Sala del Collegio and painted the Triumph of Venice in the Sala del Maggior Con-siglio. Veronese's decorative approach to color with its unique synthesis of color and light, his sound sense of design and drawing, his skill in the staging of figural groups, and his incorporation of painted architecture combined to form an artistic language perfectly adapted to such glorifying, monumental decorative projects. As Veronese's fame continued to grow, he received requests from various courts like that of Rudolf II* at Prague. Despite the heavy demands and Veronese's extensive use of workshop assistants, among whom were numbered two of his sons and his brother, the quality of the studio's production remained high. Later in his life, Veronese revealed an increasing religious emotionality in his paintings, which may have resulted from various influences, including the Council of Trent's demand that artists should identify with the emotional themes they represented, the death of one of his sons, and his own declining health.

T. Pignatti and F. Pedrocco, Veronese: Catalogo completo dei di pinti, 1991.

W. Rearick, The Art of Paolo Veronese, 1528-1588, exhibition catalog, 1988.

D. Rosand, Painting in Cinquecento Venice: Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto, 1982.