Paolo Veronese

• 1. Introduction

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  Paolo Veronese stood before the Venetian Holy Inquisition on the 18th of July 1573 and told his interrogators that painters take the same liberties as poets and madmen. It was not the response the tribunal expected from an artist defending a depiction of the Last Supper crowded with German soldiers, dwarves, and animals. The painting had already hung in a Venetian monastery; it was already ten meters wide. And Veronese, rather than repainting it, simply changed its name.

  Born Paolo Caliari in 1528 in Verona, he would become the third pillar of Venetian painting alongside Titian and Tintoretto, forming what critics have called the great trio that dominated Venetian art in the sixteenth century. His canvases were immense, his colors blinding, and his crowded banquet scenes so full of life that the Church itself could not ignore them.

  What was it about this man's method that made him indispensable to Venice's grandest buildings, yet suspicious to its religious authorities? How did a stonecutter's son from Verona end up painting for monasteries, doges, and noble villas? And why has he so often been the least appreciated of his trio, even as Rubens, Delacroix, and Renoir counted themselves among his admirers?

• 2. A Stonecutter's Son

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  Verona in 1528 was the largest possession of Venice on the mainland, a city under Venetian dominion and proud of it. A census from that city records that Paolo was born the fifth child of Gabriele, a stonecutter, and his wife Caterina. The Venetian word for his father's trade was spezapreda, and by the custom of the time, that word became the boy's surname: Paolo Spezapreda.

  The name did not last. His mother, it turned out, was the illegitimate daughter of a nobleman named Antonio Caliari, and Paolo eventually adopted that lineage instead, becoming Paolo Caliari. His earliest known painting is signed "P. Caliari F.," described by scholars as the first instance in which he used this surname. He later spent years signing his work "Paolo Veronese" in Venice, then after about 1575 returned to signing as "Paolo Caliari" again.

  The "Veronese" name stuck in public use partly to avoid confusion with another painter from Verona: Alessandro Veronese, now known as Alessandro Turchi, who was born in 1578 and lived until 1649. By the time Turchi arrived, the name was already taken.

  By 1541, the boy was apprenticed to Antonio Badile, one of Verona's leading painters. In 1543, Badile painted an altarpiece that contains passages scholars believe are the work of a fifteen-year-old apprentice whose gifts were already outrunning the workshop. By 1544 Veronese was apprenticed briefly to another leading Verona painter, Giovanni Francesco Caroto, and was no longer living with Badile. He would eventually marry Badile's daughter Elena in 1565.

• 3. Arriving in Venice

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  In 1552, Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga, great-uncle of the ruling Duke of Mantua, commissioned an altarpiece from Veronese for Mantua Cathedral. The work, Temptation of St. Anthony, now hangs in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen in France. Veronese painted it on site, which gave him the opportunity to study ceilings by Giulio Romano in Mantua. Ceilings, it would turn out, were precisely where he would first make his name.

  The following year, 1553, Veronese moved to Venice after securing his first state commission: ceiling frescoes for two rooms in the Doge's Palace, the Sala dei Consiglio dei Dieci and the adjoining Sala dei Tre Capi del Consiglio. These rooms were being rebuilt after a fire in 1547. His panel Jupiter Hurling Thunderbolts at the Vices, painted for the Hall of the Council of Ten, is now in the Louvre.

  He followed that with a History of Esther on the ceiling for the church of San Sebastiano in 1556-57. Then came his paintings of 1557 for the Marciana Library, for which he received a prize judged by Titian and Sansovino themselves. These ceiling works established him as a peer among Venice's greatest painters. His ability to balance the subtle foreshortening of figures in the manner of Correggio with the heroic scale of Michelangelo was already visible in these early Venetian commissions.

  In 1551, before settling in Venice, he had also received a commission from the Venetian branch of the Giustiniani family to paint an altarpiece for their chapel in the church of San Francesco della Vigna. He worked that same year on the Villa Soranzo near Treviso alongside fellow Veronese painters Giovanni Battista Zelotti and Anselmo Canneri. Only fragments of those frescoes survive, but a description written by Carlo Ridolfi nearly a century later confirms that one subject was The Family of Darius before Alexander, a composition Veronese would return to on a grander scale. That painting now hangs in the National Gallery, London.

• 4. The Great Banquets

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  The Wedding at Cana, completed in 1563, covers nearly 66 square meters of canvas. The Benedictine monks of San Giorgio Maggiore who commissioned it required that size explicitly in the contract. They also specified the quality of the pigments: the blues had to contain lapis-lazuli, a precious mineral. The contract further required as many figures as the composition could hold. Veronese obliged, placing portraits of Titian, Tintoretto, and himself among the crowd of celebrants. The scene depicts the first miracle attributed to Jesus in the New Testament Book of John, the making of wine from water at a wedding in Cana, Galilee. The painting was a collaboration with the architect Andrea Palladio, who designed the San Giorgio Maggiore Monastery where it was to hang. It now resides in the Louvre.

  In these refectory paintings, Veronese developed a compositional logic that suited their function perfectly. He arranged the architecture to run parallel to the picture plane, emphasizing a processional, horizontal movement of figures rather than dramatic depth. The art historian Lawrence Gowing later wrote that Veronese "made light without violent contrasts," citing Delacroix's observation that this was "always told is impossible."

  Veronese worked on his first monumental banquet scene, the Feast in the House of Simon, from 1556 until 1570. Critics found its composition too scattered. But the later Family of Darius before Alexander, painted between 1565 and 1570, showed a more refined version of his horizontal pageant method. These paintings, as Veronese himself understood, were meant not to stir deep emotion but to function as vivid, colorful diversions in the rooms where monks and nobles took their meals.

  In 1565 Veronese married Elena Badile, the daughter of his first master. By then the exaltation of incandescent light and color that defined his refectory work was inseparable from his daily life.

• 5. The Inquisition

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  The Feast in the House of Levi measures 5.55 meters tall and 12.80 meters wide. Veronese completed it in 1573 for the refectory at the Basilica di Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Venice. It was meant to replace a Titian painting lost to fire. Originally called The Last Supper, the canvas included German soldiers, dwarves, and animals alongside the biblical figures, the kind of human and animal exotica that was standard in Veronese's narrative paintings.

  The Inquisition had other concerns. By the 1570s, Counter-Reformation theology had given the Roman Catholic Church new legal authority over religious imagery in Venice. On the 18th of July 1573, Veronese was summoned to explain himself. The tribunal wanted to understand why a depiction of the Last Supper included figures the Church considered indecorous and irreligious.

  Veronese's defense was disarmingly direct. Painters, he told the Inquisitors, take the same liberties as poets and madmen. The tribunal's approach was more cautionary than punitive, more political than judicial, according to the source. They ordered him to repaint the scene. He refused that remedy but was compelled to solve the problem differently: he renamed the painting The Feast in the House of Levi, a biblical banquet scene that required no such piety. The figures, the dwarves, the German soldiers all remained exactly where they were.

  That he survived this encounter without serious punishment suggested to observers that he had the quiet backing of a powerful patrician patron. A decade earlier, the monks who commissioned The Wedding at Cana had told him to include as many human figures as the canvas could hold. The Inquisition was now drawing a line his patrons had never drawn before.

  Carlo Ridolfi, writing in 1648, called The Feast in the House of Levi "by far, the most important source for our knowledge" of Veronese's art, writing that it "gave rein to joy, made beauty majestic, made laughter, itself, more festive."

• 6. The Workshop and the Legacy

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  Veronese headed a family operation that included his younger brother Benedetto, born in 1538, as well as his sons Carlo and Gabriele, and his nephew Luigi Benfatto, also called dal Friso, born in 1559 and died in 1611. After Veronese's death in Venice in 1588, the workshop continued for roughly a decade, signing its productions "Haeredes Pauli," meaning Heirs of Paolo, and continuing to draw on his preparatory sketches. The art historian Nicholas Penny noted that after 1580 it is rare to find a work where Veronese's was the sole hand involved.

  Veronese was also among the first painters whose drawings collectors actively sought out during his own lifetime. A significant body of compositional sketches in pen, ink, and wash survive, alongside figure studies in chalk and chiaroscuro modelli.

  His pupils included Zelotti, who had worked alongside him at the Villa Soranzo in 1551, and later Giovanni Antonio Fasolo, Sigismondo de Stefani, and Anselmo Canneri. A descendant, another Paolo Caliari, published the first monograph on his ancestor in 1888, three centuries after the painter's death.

  Giorgio Vasari included a biography of Veronese in the second edition of his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects in 1568. The art historian Charles Hope, writing in 2014, praised Veronese as a colorist who used bright hues with a boldness unmatched in his time and scarcely equaled since, but noted that his colors were often calculated for harmonious overall effect rather than to single out key figures, giving his paintings little narrative drama. Hope compared the experience to a visit to a patisserie: sumptuous, seductive, but ultimately a little monotonous.

  The French critic Théophile Gautier argued in 1860 that Veronese was the greatest colorist who ever lived, ranking him above Titian, Rubens, and Rembrandt. Lawrence Gowing, writing in Paintings in the Louvre in 1987, described Veronese's bright outdoor harmonies as the foundation of modern painting. Whether his style was truly naturalistic, as the Impressionists believed, or a magnificent imaginative invention, Gowing wrote, must remain a question for each age to answer for itself. The Apotheosis of Venice, a canvas measuring 904 by 579 centimeters, still hangs in the Doge's Palace where Veronese first proved himself more than sixty years before its completion in 1585.