PAUL VERONESE – Painter, born in Verona to Gabriele Caliari, a stonecutter of Lombard origin, in 1528; died in Venice on 9 April 1588. His first master was Antonio Badile, whose niece Elena he later married.
The Veronese tradition, which through Badile traces back to Caroto, Cavazzola, Girolamo dai Libri, and thus to Mantegna, is therefore the primary foundation of P.’s culture, with its preferences for a sharp color, metallic timbres, a sure and clean drawing, and a clear and precise vision. These preferences also explain his singular position in Venetian painting of the time and his contacts with more provincial currents, or rather those of the mainland, such as Brescian and Bergamasque, as well as certain approaches to the highly original art of Lorenzo Lotto. At his debut (1548), the Bevilacqua-Lazise altarpiece (Verona, Castelvecchio) shows clear signs of this training (e.g., in the typical half-length portraits of donors), alongside a new genius for loosening and animating the composition with lively movement through light and shadow contrasts (the shadowed figure of the angel). The commission from Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga for an altarpiece in the cathedral of Mantua (The Temptations of St. Anthony, 1552, now in Caen) gave the young painter the opportunity for more direct acquaintance with Tusco-Roman Mannerism (Giulio Romano in Mantua) and Emilian (Parmigianino), whence a more intense interest both in problems of “action,” i.e., the study of the human body in movement, and in scenic composition. Thus the paths opened to his prodigious activity as a composer, in the decoration of churches, palaces, and villas, most of them Ammannati or Palladian in style. In the work he had already carried out the previous year with Zelotti at the Villa Soranza in Treville near Castelfranco, those complex schemes of scenographic and illusionistic inventions already took shape—walls and ceilings open and pierced, with glimpses of sky, prospects of landscapes populated by figures, framed by richly adorned architectural structures with statues, and even some playful trompe-l’oeil of slippers or brooms abandoned in a corner. Through experiments and variations, such as those at Palazzo Trevisan in Murano (1556–58), these schemes reached their
(photo Abraeti)
fullest and most harmonious expression at the Villa Barbero in Maser (c. 1560), with a triumphant sonority of timbres and a solar luminosity of tones that wonderfully fused the extraordinary richness of motifs and invention with the surrounding landscape through an unprecedented freshness of pictorial interpretation in swift, sure, confident brushstrokes, in a most refined and complex colorism of iridescences, reflections, and subtle variations, as on a scale continuously shifting by fractional tones. The motifs of inspiration and their straightforward, coherent pictorial realization are found not only in the relatively rare and precious easel paintings—such as portraits (among a hundred, the Bella Nani in the Louvre), the small Martyrdom of St. Justine in the Padua Museum, the Deposition in Castelvecchio, or Venus and Adonis in Darmstadt—but also in large canvases for ceilings or wall panels, altarpieces, or the sides of presbyteries. Already in 1553, having moved the center of his activity to Venice, P. began—at a time when Mannerist “fashion” was widely spreading—to receive important commissions and to achieve growing success: in the Library, in the Doge’s Palace, and in the church of San Sebastiano, which was “his” church, where he worked passionately over successive periods of his life (sacristy, organ loft, ceiling, presbytery) and where he was buried. Here are the great sacred, biblical, historical, or mythological compositions, from the Madonna of the Cuccina (Dresden) to the Family of Darius (London), from the repeated Finding of Moses to the various Rape of Europa; from the Centurion (Prado) to the many Suppers or Banquets, which perhaps became the most notorious motif of his fame. Most notorious and famous among these is the Wedding at Cana in the Louvre; it is not perhaps the most organic and “realized,” and indeed, due to a certain uncontrolled dispersion of episodes, it appears, despite splendid pictorial passages, somewhat congested and contrived, revealing an unusual sign of fatigue in the otherwise abundant ease of Paul’s creativity. One might almost think that this more celebrated Banquet represents a moment of less fervent inspiration, between those of the Supper at Emmaus (Louvre) and the Supper at the House of Simon (Turin), magnificent in the richness and spontaneity of their compositional invention and pictorial vitality (both from the exceptionally happy period around 1560); and the equally well-known Supper at the House of Levi (Venice) of 1573, which occasioned
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the inquisitorial trial against P.: “We painters take the same license as poets and madmen,” was P.’s justification, a candid assertion of the artist’s freedom and proof of his good faith in the face of suspicions of heterodox intent. Moreover, it does not seem that the Holy Office itself attached much weight to the matter, since none of the requested modifications were carried out. A few years after this judicial episode, a true upheaval is discernible in P.: richer and denser psychological interests, a more penetrating and heartfelt religiosity, a warmer human dramatic quality; which found its expressive outlet in a simplification of compositional schemes, an intensification of the palette, distilled into agreements of extreme and fiery refinement in the contrast of vigorous chiaroscuro, almost incandescent like a gem in the night. Thus, after the prelude of the tranquil, burnished lunar silveriness of the Adoration of the Magi at Coronata in Vicenza (contemporary with the Supper at the House of Levi), there will be the “sublime” and “heart-rending” chromatic lyricism of the small Agony in the Garden in the Brera, the passionate fervor and radiant luminosity of St. Pantaleon in the church of Venice, the agony of the blanched face in the exquisite accords of amethyst and emerald in the Lucretia in Vienna. The last example of his “sumptuous” style—and not among the best, also because of the extensive involvement of that group of collaborators and relatives who, after his death, continued to produce paintings signed “Haeredes Pauli”—is the enormous central panel in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio in the Doge’s Palace with The Triumph of Venice. The style that might be called “spiritual,” however, was asserting itself and becoming ever more defined in roughly the last three lustra of the Master’s life, cut short by a brief illness, with a series of masterpieces among the highest if not the most celebrated, and whose value has been recognized especially by more recent criticism. This evolution of the mature, though not yet elderly, P. is analogous to that of the very old Titian in roughly the same years. In both, it is highly probable that the clarification of this final language was influenced by the example of Tintoretto’s luministic language, so suited to the expression of these new emotional situations: an influence that in P. is sometimes recognizable even in certain compositional attitudes, as, among a few other works, in the Crucifixion in the Accademia in Venice. – See pl. LVII.