Paolo Veronese

PAOLO VERONESE. - Painter, b. in Verona to Gabriele Caliari, a stonecutter of Lombard origin, in 1528, d. in Venice on 9 April 1588. His first master was Antonio Badile, whose niece Elena he later married.

The Veronese tradition, which through Badile goes back to Caroto, to Cavazzola, to Girolamo dai Libri, and thence to Mantegna, is therefore the primary foundation of P.'s culture, with its preferences for a somewhat tart color, for metallic timbres, for a sure and clean drawing, in a limpid and precise vision. Preferences that also explain his singular position in the Venetian painting of the time and his contacts with the more provincial, or rather mainland, currents, such as the Brescian and Bergamasque, as well as certain affinities with the highly original art of Lorenzo Lotto. At his debut (1548), the Bevilacqua-Lazide altarpiece (Verona, Castelvecchio) shows sure signs of this formation (e.g., in the typical half-length portraits of the donors), alongside a new genius for dissolving and moving the composition, enlivening it even vivaciously, by means of arrangements of shadow and light (the figure, in shadow, of the angel). The commission from Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga for an altarpiece in the cathedral of Mantua (the Temptations of St. Anthony, 1552, now at Caen) offers the young painter the occasion for a more direct acquaintance with Tuscan-Roman Mannerism (Giulio Romano at Mantua) and Emilian Mannerism (Parmigianino), whence a more intense interest both in problems of "action," that is, in the study of the human body in movement, and in scenic arrangement. Thus the paths open to his prodigious activity as a composer, in the decoration of churches, palaces, and villas mostly by Sanmicheli or Palladio. In that undertaking, already the year before, together with Zelotti, in the "Soranza" at Treville near Castelfranco, those highly complex schemes of scenographic and illusionistic inventions are already outlined, of open and pierced walls and ceilings, with glimpses of sky, with views of landscapes populated by figures, among architectural framings rich in ornaments and statues, and even with some playful "trompe l'oeil" of slippers or brooms left in a corner. Schemes that, through experiments and variations, such as that of Palazzo Trevisan at Murano (1556-58), reach their most harmonious and complete fullness in the Villa Barbaro at Maser (ca. 1560), with a triumphant sonority of timbres, with a solar luminosity of tones, which marvelously fuses the extraordinary richness of motifs and invention and attunes it to the breath of the surrounding landscape setting through an unprecedented freshness of pictorial interpretation with swift, sure, open brushstrokes, in a most refined colorism complicated by iridescences, reflections, subtle variations, as on a continuously shifting scale of fractions of tone. Motifs of inspiration and their genuine and coherent pictorial realization, which are achieved not only in the relatively rare and precious easel paintings, such as the portraits (to be remembered, among the hundred, the Bella Nani of the Louvre) or the small Martyrdom of St. Justin of the Museum of Padua or the Deposition of Castelvecchio or the Venus and Adonis of Darmstadt, but also in the large canvases for ceilings or for walls of halls, for altarpieces or for the sides of presbyteries. Already in 1553, having transferred the center of his activity to Venice, P. had begun, at the moment when the Mannerist "fashion" was spreading widely there, to receive important commissions and to gather growing successes: in the Libreria, in the Doge's Palace, in the church of S. Sebastiano, which was "his" church, in which he gave his passionate work, in successive periods of his life (sacristy, organ, ceiling, presbytery) and where he was buried. And here are the great sacred or biblical or historical or mythological compositions, from the Madonna of the Cuccina (at Dresden) to the Family of Darius (in London), from the repeated Findings of Moses to the various Rapes of Europa; from the Centurion (at the Prado) to the many Suppers or Banquets, which became perhaps the most clamorous motif of his fame. Most clamorous and famous among these, the Marriage at Cana in the Louvre; it is perhaps not the most organic and "realized" and indeed, owing to a certain unmastered dispersion of episodes, the only one that appears, even with splendid pictorial passages, somewhat congested and cumbersome and lets one glimpse some sign of unusual fatigue in the lush facility of Paolesque creation. One would almost think, for this more celebrated Banquet, of a moment of less fervid inspiration, between those At Emmaus (Louvre) and In the House of Simon (Turin), splendid for richness and spontaneity of compositional invention, for pictorial vividness (both from the most felicitous moment around 1560); and that equally well-known In the House of Levi (Venice) of 1573, which was the occasion for the inquisitorial trial against P.: "We painters take the license that poets and madmen take" was P.'s justification, a candid vindication of the artist's freedom and proof of his good faith in the face of suspicions of heterodox intentions. And besides, it does not appear that the Holy Office itself gave much weight to the matter, since all the requested modifications were not carried out. Some years after this judicial adventure a true upheaval is perceived in P.: richer and denser psychological interests, a more penetrating and more deeply felt religiosity, a warmer human dramatic quality; which finds its expressive path in a simplification of compositional schemes, in an intensification of the range, quintessentialized in harmonies of extreme refinement and kindled in the contrast of a vigorous chiaroscuro, almost an incandescence of gem in the night. Thus, after the prelude of the tranquil, burnished lunar silveriness of the Adoration of the Magi at Corona di Vicenza (contemporary with the Supper of Levi), there will be the "sublime" and "attractive" chromatic lyricism of the small Agony in the Garden of Brera, the passionate fervor and radiant luminosity of the S. Pantaleone in the church of Venice, the agony of the face blanched in the exquisite harmonies of amethyst and emerald of the Lucretia of Vienna. Last example of his "sumptuous" style, and not among the best, also owing to the large involvement of that group of collaborators and relatives who after his death continued to turn out paintings signing them "Haeredes Pauli," the enormous central panel of the hall of the Maggior Consiglio in the Doge's Palace with the Triumph of Venice. That style, on the other hand, which one might call "spiritual," becomes established and ever better defined roughly in the last fifteen years of the Master's life, cut short by a very brief illness, with a series of masterpieces among the highest if not among the most celebrated, and whose value is recognized especially by the most recent criticism. This evolution of the mature, but not yet very old P., is analogous to that, at approximately the same years, of the very old Titian. And in both it is quite probable that the example of the Tintorettesque luministic language, so suited to the expression of these new sentimental situations, contributed to the clarification of this their own final language: an example that, in P., will sometimes be recognizable also in certain compositional attitudes, as, among a few other works, in the Crucifixion of the Accademia of Venice. - See pl. LVII.

Luigi Coletti