The Gentleman of Verona

In 1551 a young painter from Verona, Paolo Spezapreda, appeared for the first time in Venice, the wealthiest city in Italy, second only to Naples in population, and an artistic center of ever-growing international importance. As the chief port where merchandise from Germany and Asia met the markets of Italy, Venice had developed its own distinctive artistic traditions, many of them rooted in the city’s connection with sailing, like the gracefully curving wooden vaults of its churches, built along the lines of ships’ hulls, and the preference for painting with oil on canvas rather than tempera on wood. Canvas, used for sails, was easy to come by, and so were pigments from every corner of the globe, giving Venetian painters a well-deserved reputation as masters of color.

The dominant artist in 1551 was unquestionably the aging Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), then just over sixty, whose patrons included the Venetian state, the pope, and the king of Spain. Recently, however, a sensational new talent had emerged: the thirtyish whirlwind Jacopo Robusti, better known as Tintoretto—“the little dyer”—for his father’s profession, or il Terribile for his frenetic personality. For the young painter from Verona, Titian was a living idol, especially now that Tintoretto’s daring experiments with paint and perspective had driven the older master to push his own ideas about painting in startling new directions. Contemporaries marveled that Titian and Tintoretto could imitate each other’s work so closely that they could fool a casual observer. Their rivalry, an evident source of mutual inspiration, must have exerted an irresistible attraction for an ambitious painter of twenty-three.

Paolo, by every account a precocious learner, had already developed his own style in Verona, independently of what Titian and Tintoretto had been contriving in Venice. His elegant draftsmanship, precise detail, and limpid colors did, however, recall to Venetians the way Titian used to paint back in the days before his lighting turned dramatic, his backgrounds dark, and his brushwork ever more coarsely abstract.

He signed his first contracts as Paolo Spezapreda—“Paul Stonecutter”—for that had been his father’s job in Verona. Though spezapreda (Veronese dialect for spezzapietra) literally meant “rock splitter,” Gabriele Spezapreda was not a burly quarryman but a refined finisher of stone who dressed and carved—that is, sculpted—marble, snow-white local limestone, and ruddy Verona jasper for architects like the brilliant and illustrious Michele Sanmicheli. Gabriele married well: Paolo’s mother was the illegitimate daughter of an aristocrat.¹ Sanmicheli took the very young Paolo under his wing, supplying him with commissions and fostering his contacts with local scholars, artists, and aristocrats. By 1556, the year of his marriage, Paolo had taken his mother’s surname, Caliari, but at that point he already had commissions for the Venetian state, and he was so well known that his birthplace sufficed to identify him. “Paolo Veronese,” or “il Veronese,” as the Venetians called him, had become as familiar a sobriquet as “Titian” or “Tintoretto,” whose two-way rivalry he had swiftly turned into a triangle.

From the 1550s to the twentieth century, Veronese’s popularity as a painter equaled that of Titian and Tintoretto, but in more recent decades his placid personal life, the consistency and sophistication of his style, and the glittering opulence of the imaginative world inhabited by his figures have all told against him. He has been less intensively studied than either Titian or Tintoretto, let alone the antihero of our time, Caravaggio. “Paolo Veronese (1528–1588),” an exhibition at Madrid’s Museo Nacional del Prado curated by Enrico Maria Dal Pozzolo of the University of Verona and Miguel Falomir, the Prado’s director, aims to restore him to a place of higher honor in the history of painting. For any viewer, the beauty and virtuosity of his extraordinary works reliably speak for themselves, but the exhibition also takes pains to present the artist in a way that might appeal to a contemporary public, emphasizing how bravely and inventively his paintings addressed the troubles—political, social, and religious—that had long since sent the Most Serene Republic of Venice into inexorable decline. (It has been described in these pages as “the nervous republic,” with good reason.)

Epic in scale (105 objects) and including some of the artist’s largest canvases (and a masterpiece by Tintoretto), the exhibition comes with an ambitious, bountifully illustrated catalog that stands as a scholarly benchmark but is also a delight to read, with an extensive, intriguing variety of topics. Veronese may have been, like Raphael and Rubens, a painter of impeccable manners and an expert pleaser of patrons, but along with those manners came striking sensitivity, wit, and a wicked sense of humor. Nor has every twentieth-century artist passed him over. The redoubtable painter Alex Katz (still active at ninety-eight) acknowledges that Veronese, in many ways, is his true mentor. The paintings, he maintains, project their energy vigorously outward, dominating the space in front of them—our space—rather than pulling in the viewer, a bit of magical stagecraft performed with a confidence no other painter can match: “There is no strain, it just keeps moving toward you. I still think of him as having the largest controlled gesture. The paintings are impersonal, elegant, and powerful.”²

The curators and the catalog essays also emphasize the importance of the artist’s Veronese origins—and hence his position as an outsider—to his consistently distinctive artistic development. Verona, founded as a Roman colony at the junction of several ancient roads, still nestles among Roman ruins, including a stupendously preserved arena, a theater, two city gates, and a commemorative arch. Because of its position along a major river, the Adige, in the borderland between the Po Valley and the foothills of the Alps, the city has never lost its importance as a regional center, and though by the sixteenth century it was part of the Venetians’ inland empire, it retained close contact with Rome and the papacy. In the orbit of progressive Venice, Verona was a bastion of conservatism (a reputation it retains today).

Amid such conspicuous reminders of the ancient past, the artists and architects of Verona, like their contemporaries who gravitated to Rome, sharpened their skills by drawing ancient monuments as well as living models. Veronese’s mentor Sanmicheli had moved from Verona to Rome around 1505 and after a prolonged stay in Rome and Orvieto returned in 1527, eager to impart the latest classical style to the buildings of his native city. Paolo, too, from the outset, apprenticed to the local artist Antonio Badile (his future father-in-law), learned to use drawings as the means to work out his projects at every stage of their creation, from the sketchy glimmers of an initial idea to the painstaking series of adjustments that led at last to a completed work. Veronese artists also looked south for more contemporary sources of inspiration, to the latest developments in Rome, Florence, Parma, and Bologna, as well as east to Venice, making their city the most vibrant, cosmopolitan artistic center in the region aside from La Serenissima.

The first section of the exhibition demonstrates how the young Veronese’s first efforts reflected his close study of artists like Raphael and Parmigianino, as well as the architectural drawings of a former stonecutter from nearby Vicenza, Andrea Palladio, the great architect with whom he would forge a memorable partnership designing and decorating villas on the Venetian mainland, the terraferma. Yet even these earliest works, some painted when Veronese was only eighteen or so, reveal a fully formed artistic personality (and a fully formed career, as he was already taking commissions in his own right): fair-haired women clad in sumptuous satins, as reserved as they are beautiful; elegant bearded men, often dressed as turbaned citizens of the Ottoman Empire; children and animals who go about their business oblivious to the agendas of grown-ups.

To the doings of children, dogs, cats, and horses Veronese devoted just as much attention as he did to the ponderous acts of grown-ups, and with them he invariably departs from the detachment with which he portrays the world at large, that “big and impersonal” distance that so struck Alex Katz. Take the inquisitive greyhound who sticks his pointed nose into one of the artist’s earliest known commissions, the portrait of an unidentified mother and her son, dated 1546–1548. The dog has intruded casually into the right side of the painting, so we see only a portion of his head, but already the mother’s left hand, poised protectively in front of her son’s shoulder, has begun gravitating toward the canine’s furry face, while the little boy, attention riveted on his pet, clutches the tidbit that drew the dog here in the first place.

Veronese was always the most industrious of painters, his focus never flagging from the center of a canvas right out to its corners, which often present some clever, unexpected detail. His work demands an equal intensity of concentration from his viewers. Rather than holding to a single perspective, like Vittore Carpaccio or Tintoretto, he relied, like the ancient Romans, on multiple vanishing points and kept his figures busy in the foreground, preventing us from seeing too far into his painted world. Instead, he staked his confident claim on our own time and space.

Verona may have shaped Paolo Caliari’s style, but Venice gave his work a new scale, new ideas, and a new sense of higher purpose. Whether he was ostensibly painting a portrait, a story from the Bible, or a classical myth, the city itself became one of his main subjects as the list of his clients lengthened to include patrician families, religious orders, and the Venetian state. Sixteenth-century Venice, vividly brought to life in the catalog essays, continued to regard itself as a maritime republic, the only major political unit on the Italian peninsula that was still ruled by a collective rather than a monarch, warlord, or pope. But that collective had long since become a tightly limited oligarchy, constantly threatened by the armies of other European powers as well as the expanding Ottoman Empire. Sixteenth-century warfare, powered by a Chinese invention, gunpowder artillery, had become more deadly than ever. As political fortunes shifted on the high seas, the Venetian fleet faced fierce competition from the Ottomans, Spain, Portugal, and, increasingly, England. The republic’s efforts to maintain its overseas territories in Cyprus, Crete, and Dalmatia began to falter.

Venice had built its commercial empire on contact with Germany, Constantinople, and Greece, but that contact also brought vulnerability to the spread of strong convictions as well as to military force. The Protestant Reformation swept swiftly south from the German states to the republic and its territories on the terraferma. The Italian Alps had provided refuge for Waldensian dissenters since the Middle Ages, and after 1532 they joined forces with the Reformers. Vicenza, at the foot of the Alps, became a Protestant stronghold, and several of Veronese’s early patrons, like Iseppo da Porto of Vicenza, were stout opponents of the papacy. The University of Padua, founded by rebellious students seceding from the University of Bologna, had always welcomed foreign students, Jews, and new ideas, and Venice, poised between Roman Catholicism and Greek Orthodoxy, had always insisted on its independence from the Papal States if not from the pope. When Roman Catholicism began to assert itself against the Reformation, the republic found itself caught in the middle.

To this unsettled new world of invasions, naval battles, and religious turmoil, Venetians responded by retreating into patriotic fantasy, a myth of Venice that corresponded only in part to its disturbing reality, and no one proved more adept at giving visual form to that dream than Veronese. The Prado exhibition suggests that the majesty, the serenity, and the surreal opulence of his imaginary world served both to comfort his Venetian patrons and to proclaim the vibrancy of their republic to outsiders. The gentleman of Verona, moreover, could comfort troubled souls through images on any scale, from intimate to monumental, executed with breathtaking skill.

Jesus, in Veronese’s hands, reliably exudes an imperturbable calm. He always looks as if his mind is elsewhere, as of course it was, from an early Conversion of Mary Magdalene (circa 1548), in which the Lord has only begun to notice the gorgeous, painfully young woman who has collapsed at his feet in her satin gown of powder blue and gold. He cannot see, of course, that her transformed face is a miracle of foreshortening or marvel at the way the light of his halo ignites luminous reflections from the pearls in her golden necklace. He is a sojourner on this earth.

A painting from Rome’s Borghese Gallery, Saint John the Baptist Preaching (circa 1562), focuses its attention on the ascetic saint as he replies to a curious crowd of turbaned men and satin-clad women. (In the Book of John the women do not appear; the men are priests and Levites sent from Jerusalem to discover who this strange man is.) No, he is not Elijah; no, he is not the Prophet. “Then said they unto him, Who art thou?… What sayest thou of thyself?” Gaunt John points backward with an angular arm at an oblivious Jesus, wandering quietly at the very edge of the precipitously angled painting, and says, “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness: Make straight the way of the Lord.”

The Lord, however, pays no heed to the state of his craggy, twisting path. Unaware of the crowd gathered farther up the road, he presses on against the backdrop of a marvelous, foggy landscape, a delicate symphony of rose-tinged, sandy colors appearing through a web of leafy branches, as mysterious and evanescent as an ancient Roman wall painting. Veronese painted that enigmatic vision in smalt—cobalt blue, a piercingly bright pigment that breaks down over time to the color of sand. The landscape was once a seascape, a distant view of the Venetian lagoon standing in for the Sea of Galilee. Fortunately only one other painting in the exhibition, an Annunciation from the Uffizi, has suffered this degree of transformation. Veronese used every kind of blue pigment he could find in the emporia of Venice, and most of them have held their color.

The exhibition’s most capacious hall places a huge canvas by Veronese, Christ among the Doctors in the Temple (circa 1550–1556), directly across from an equally monumental work by Tintoretto, The Washing of the Feet (1548–1549), an endlessly revealing feast for the eyes. Christ among the Doctors shows Veronese at his most classical, the solid columnar structure of the temple clearly inspired by his long association with Sanmicheli and Palladio. Tintoretto’s Maundy Thursday scene is set in a fanciful version of a Venetian palazzo rather than ancient Jerusalem, with perspective views receding deep into high-placed vanishing points and an elegant spotted dog lounging front and center. Tintoretto painted animals with the same loving attention as Veronese.

The solemn setting of the temple compels Veronese to maintain a sense of gravitas, but another monumental canvas on display, The Feast in the House of Simon (circa 1556–1560; see illustration at top of article), complete with a dog and a voluptuous Mary Magdalene, reinforces the contrast between the two great artists: Veronese keeps his vanishing points low, his architecture solid, and the action up front. No one could paint a milling crowd with such mastery, massing multiple figures in intricate compositions, but Veronese used the same ingenuity to choreograph a series of sexy, small-scale mythological paintings, intertwining classical gods and goddesses in an endless variety of sinuous embraces, the most amusing of which shows a curious horse poking his head into the alcove where Mars and Venus have withdrawn for some private business. These images, too, provided their own form of solace for their owners, as did the small religious paintings that provided nervous Venetians with a focus for their prayers.

To achieve these effects, large and small, Veronese employed virtually every kind of color and technique available in his day, smooth, rough, finished, crude, glazed, opaque. His industry was as ferocious as Tintoretto’s, and so was his sense of humor.

The most striking example of that humor emerged, of all places, during his interrogation in 1573 by the Venetian Inquisition, which summoned him to its offices after the Dominican friars of the Basilica of Saints John and Paul (in Venetian, San Zanipolo) complained about the gigantic Last Supper he had just completed for the back wall of their cavernous medieval refectory. It was one of his enormous “banquet paintings,” with a theatrical classical setting, a cinematic cast of dozens, silken costumes, golden vessels, African servants, lords, beggars, and, of course, animals. The three inquisitors composed their report of the interview in Latin (and, unusually, in a neat humanistic script); he answered in vernacular. The Venetian Inquisition was milder than most, but it was fully empowered to condemn perceived heretics to death:

He was asked about his profession.

He replied: I paint and make figures.

He was asked: Do you know the reason why you have been summoned?

He replied: No, your lordships.

He was asked: Can you imagine?

He replied: Imagine? I certainly can.

He was asked: Tell us what you imagine.

He replied: Because of what I was told by the Reverend Fathers, that is the Reverend Prior of San Zuan Polo, whose name I don’t know, who said he’d been here and that the Reverend Fathers had ordered him to make me replace a dog with Mary Magdalene, and I’d answered that I’d do anything for my honor and that of the painting, but that I didn’t think Mary Magdalene was appropriate there for many reasons, which I will tell you if I’m given the chance.

The accused was not given the chance. The interrogation moved on to other topics, including the crowd of extra characters, human and animal, thronging what had always been portrayed as a solemn meal with only Jesus and his twelve disciples taking part:

He was asked: What are those men in German armor doing, one with a halberd in his hand?

He replied: I’ll need twenty words to tell you!

He was told: Tell us.

He replied: We painters take the same license that poets and madmen do: so I made those two Halberdiers, one drinking, and the other one eating on the stairs, and put them where they could be handy, and it seemed appropriate to me, because I had been told that the owner of the house was great and rich, and he ought to have that kind of servant.

In the end Veronese was given three months to “improve” his Last Supper, which he did by painting a fictive inscription on a balustrade reading “Feast in the House of Levi” and the biblical reference to that gathering (Luke 5:29–32). The dogs, the cat, the servants, the Germans, the man picking his teeth, the man with a nosebleed, and the dozens of extra guests remained untouched. Mary Magdalene was not painted in. As he well knew, she did not attend the Last Supper, and he was sure enough of his expertise to remind the inquisitors, implicitly, of that fact.

From 1575 to 1577, a recurrence of the bubonic plague struck Venice, carrying off a third of the population. Titian was among its victims. Veronese emerged from the experience a changed man. After forty years of remarkably consistent output, he abruptly changed his style. His bright, glittering palette veered toward greater contrasts between light and shadow. The images became more overtly religious and more overtly Catholic, focused on the importance of priests as mediators between divinity and humanity. He experimented more boldly than ever with challenging poses and odd angles. His brushwork became looser. It is tempting to see his Vision of Saint Helena (circa 1580), like a predecessor from around 1570, as a portrait of his wife, Elena, veiled, older, and executed in his new style.

When he died in 1588, probably of pneumonia, Veronese was still at the height of his formidable powers. The final section of the exhibition shows how his true heirs were not his sons and the remnants of his old workshop, who continued in his footsteps but without his prodigious talent. His legacy extended more broadly through space and time, to artists like El Greco, Diego Velázquez, Peter Paul Rubens, and Giambattista Tiepolo, for whom he provided an indispensable point of reference. As for the solace he brought his Venetian patrons through his opulent art, it is still there for the taking, a sovereign balsam for our own hard times.