Paolo Veronese (1528-1588)

Following on from Bassano (2001), Titian (2003), Tintoretto (2007) and Lotto (2018), the Museo del Prado is now bringing to close a series of exhibitions of Venetian Renaissance painting, a cornerstone of its collection, with Paolo Veronese.

Paolo Veronese achieved great success during his lifetime and continued to appeal to princes, collectors and colleagues after his death. It was not until the 20th century that his fame waned slightly. A life like his, devoid of scandal, is not attractive to modern sensibilities and it did not help that his painting tends to be associated with luxury and pomp. This exhibition is part of the current effort to banish these ideas and show the reality of a painter who, more than any other Italian Renaissance artist, gave concrete form to a comprehensive and all-embracing idea of art capable of encompassing an enormous number of aesthetic and cultural references. And he did so with an unparalleled formal freedom and conceptual ease at a critical time for Venice, where religious tensions were surfacing (resulting in him being hauled before the Holy Office of the Inquisition in 1573) along with the first symptoms of decline, which his brushes masterfully camouflaged.

Veronese is hailed for his ‘pictorial intelligence’. For beneath the glittering surfaces of his pictures lies an extraordinary ability to conceive a universe of his own and transform it through a variety of sophisticated devices into compositions that fascinate and move us. Gestures, clothing, colours and exotic figures, fictive spaces and arresting architecture… everything prompts spectators to imagine themselves inside them. As Boschini remarked in 1660, Veronese’s art ‘is not painting, it is magic that casts a spell on people who see it’.

Paolo Veronese trained in a Verona immersed in deep religious reforms and building projects promoted respectively by bishop Gian Matteo Giberti and the architect Michele Sanmicheli. More than his apprenticeship with his masters (Antonio Badile and the Caroto brothers), the most decisive influence during these formative years was his experience a frescoist working on Sanmicheli’s orders and the knowledge he gained of Venetian painting (chiefly Titian) and of Raphael and Parmigianino through these painters’ own works or those of their collaborators, including Valerio Belli in Vicenza and Giulio Romano in the neighbouring Mantua. This variety of stimuli explains aspects of his painting that are far removed from the practice of the Venetians, such as cangiante (iridescent) colours as opposed to tonal unity, and an emphasis on drawing in all stages of the creative process.

Paolo further added to this mix an enquiring mind and a sociable character that earned him the favour of the patrician families of Verona and Vicenza for whom Sanmicheli and Andrea Palladio worked, as well as access to antiquarian circles that were particularly enthusiastic in Verona, a city proud of its Roman past. It is highly plausible to think that he would have visited Rome then, encouraged by this environment.

With this background he made his appearance in Venice in 1551 with the Giustiniani Altarpiece for San Francesco della Vigna, in which he demonstrated a combination of personality and intelligence by reworking models by Titian, the dominant figure on the city’s art scene.

In the Renaissance invention was conceived as the finding of a – formally and technically – original solution to a problem of representation. In practice, it amounted to relating elements taken from different sources and combining them with personal expressions to create new scenes, employing new materials, or using traditional ones in new ways. Even so, clients commonly asked artists to emulate an earlier work or to repeat their designs.

Veronese drew inspiration both from classical Antiquity and from earlier and contemporary artists and constantly reused his own inventions, interpreting iconographies rarely addressed in 16th-century Venetian painting. His prototypes, even when inspired by other artists’ works, were innovative for how they presented the narrative and in terms of format, brushwork, colour and texture.

The works on view in this room alongside the results of the scientific analyses conducted on some illustrate how he produced his pictures, the wide-ranging practices he employed and how his painting procedures evolved from 1546 to 1588. They also show his ability to assimilate techniques observed in other artists and his skill at adapting them and combining them with his own working methods.

Veronese painted mythological subjects and profane allegories from the start of his career. He was particularly productive in this genre in three areas: fresco decoration for private country and city residences; as a court artist in the service of Venice; and easel paintings for collectors, both in the Veneto region and for Italian and European courts.

Although not a learned painter or pictor doctus, he mixed with humanists who devised the complex iconographies he translated into images, displaying a remarkable grasp and assimilation of diverse sources and a keen sense of decorum: each composition is adapted to its function and location, whether in a public or private setting.

Paolo was instrumental in capturing in images the myth of Venice’s prosperity at a time when the first signs of decline were appearing. He did so in the Doge’s Palace with an imaginative and solemn language attuned to classical models but without antiquarian rigidity. The sensuality of his forms and colours made him Titian’s successor as a mythological painter, although his pictures often provided alternative interpretations, as Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Europa show.

With Veronese, as with other great masters, it is important to distinguish between his legal heirs – the relatives who continued the business and squandered his aesthetic heritage within a few generations – and his artistic successors, who creatively embraced his legacy even if they never met him.

When Paolo died, his brother Benedetto (1538–1598) and his sons Gabriele (1568–1630) and Carletto (1570–1596) kept the workshop running under the name ‘Haeredes Pauli’, producing repetitive works of mediocre quality. The only one with any personality was Carletto, and his premature death marked the end of the bottega. Also hovering around the studio were independent masters who imitated Paolo with varying success, often reusing his models, such as Parrasio Micheli (1516–1578).

His true heirs are to be found far from his family, many of them in other parts of the world. Veronese has been a ‘painters’ painter’, idolised by artists as diverse as Guido Reni, Velázquez, Delacroix and Paul Cézanne. This section focuses on the generation after his death – El Greco, Annibale, Agostino and Ludovico Carracci, and Peter Paul Rubens – and ends with a look at his extraordinary reception by the European courts of the Baroque period.