What better respite from the cold, bleak, spiritual gloom of midwinter than to look on one of the glorious, color-rich paintings of Paolo Veronese?
The Italian Renaissance is most strongly identified with such immortals as Michelangelo and Titian, but perhaps room should be made alongside them for this grand gentleman of Verona and master of Venice. The pre-eminent colorist of the 16th Century-indeed, the gilder of the Golden Age of Venice-he could produce bedazzling splendor and pageantry out of the humblest Biblical lore.
Virtually every one of his canvases was a piece of great theater. He so strained at the conventions of Italian religious painting and so glorified the temporal wealth and power of Venice that he made ecclesiastical authorities decidedly nervous.
Terms like ”exquisite,” ”splendid” and ”opulent” are applied to his work, not as hyperbole, but as calm statements of fact. So, too, are terms like ”erotic,” ”seductive,” ”ironic” and ”humorous.”
There were so many ”buffoons, drunkards, Germans, dwarfs and other such scurrilities” in a painting he did of the Last Supper that he was summoned before the Inquisition in 1573 on charges of heresy. He defended himself with a claim to the right of poetic license, but was sternly ordered to ”correct” his painting. Instead, he simply changed the name to ”Feast in the House of Levi.”
As a national treat to last through the worst of winter, the National Gallery of Art in Washington is exhibiting 50 of Veronese`s paintings and 55 of his drawings. This marvelous show, which concludes Feb. 20, draws from more than 50 public and private collections, including those of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Galleria dell`Accademia of Venice, the Galleria Borghese of Rome, the Galleria degli Uffizi of Florence, the Fogg Art Museum, the State Hermitage Museum of Leningrad, the Kunsthistorisches Museum of Vienna, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, New York`s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Musee` du Louvre, the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen of Rotterdam, the National Gallery of London, the Pierpont Morgan Library and the Staatliche Museen Preussicher Kulturbesitz of Berlin.
”Veronese is a very major figure,” said National Gallery Director J. Carter Brown. ”He`s had a bum rap, having existed in one of the richest centuries and cities in the history of art.”
Born in 1528 in Verona, he was the son of a stonecutter named Piero. He was apprenticed in his early adolescence to a local traditionalist painter of modest ability named Antonio Badile, who was a follower of the great draftsman and painter Mantegna, among others.
Badile was a good teacher but Veronese a quicker pupil. By age 20, he had surpassed his master in ability and attainment-and not long after in reputation. By 1551, he was winning commissions in Venice, then an island of high culture, prosperity and political stability in a Europe much torn by religious discord and war.
With his dazzling style, he became a favorite of patrons holding high church and government office, as well as with many wealthy Venetians with private collections.
He took the name Caliari, but came to be called Veronese after the city of his birth.
Veronese painted hugely-magnificent frescoes and ceilings as well as monumental canvases, many of which are too large to have been included in this show. His mastery of color was so overwhelming it distracted from his skills as a draftsman, which were the equal of Mantegna, if not Michelangelo himself. His chief failing, if it can be called that, lay in his inability or unwillingness to produce a truly feminine female form. Like Michelangelo, he rendered the musculature of male figures with full, heroic detail, but his ladies tended to the overblown. Hence his being known to some art scholars as ”the painter of big blondes.”
This is notably obvious in two companion works that hang side by side in the National Gallery show. In ”Unfaithfulness” (1576), a hefty, nude blonde seen from below and the rear has one hand gripped by a bearded man with imploring eyes while her knee is held by a richly dressed fellow into whose eyes she gazes. There seems enough of her for both.
In ”Disillusionment” (1576), a bronze, bearded man lies on his back on a great stone slab with outstretched arms and upturned hands while a bemused, bare-breasted big blonde looks on with detached curiosity.
His 1555 ”Portrait of a Lady” presents yet another blonde. Her genteel, sensitive face is quite lovely, but her body is built along the lines of Dick Butkus`.
But Veronese`s unqualified masterpieces are many. His ”Venus and Mars”
(1578) is wondrous in its play of light on both the brawn and battledress of the God of War and on the delicate bare flesh of the Goddess of Love. It is a depiction at once of sensual, divine and maternal love.
His ”Holy Family with Saints Catherine and Anthony Abbot” (1551), predating his first state commission in Venice by two years, is a noble and ingenious grouping of standing and seated figures posed pensively on marble steps among erect and fallen pillars. Rich crimson and amber predominate among colors suffused with a warm and holy light.
Two oils completed in 1560 are strikingly related yet opposite in mood:
”Saint John the Baptist” is as pious and melancholy a figure as religion can muster, yet the companion ”Saint Menna” seems the essence of male boldness, vanity and pride. Until, that is, one looks into the sadly farseeing eyes.
One seems always to be looking up into Veronese`s paintings, noticing uncommon things for the genre, like the bottoms of bare feet.
Veronese was a masterful portraitist, popular with many royal families of Europe, and probably the most famous decorative artist of his time.
In 1579, his third son, Camillo, died after living just 28 days. Thereafter, his paintings began to reflect his own sense of mortality and the tragedy attendant upon so much of life and religious experience. His beautiful ”The Dream of Saint Helen” (1580-1581) is full of the majesty of his earlier works but also imparts a certain somber sadness. ”The Martyrdom and Last Communion of Saint Lucy” (1585-1587) is as violent a painting as it is theological, with its subject succumbing to the knife.
Still, he will be remembered most for the brilliance of his inimitable colors. As the art critic Marco Boschini wrote a century later: ”One can say that the Painter, to achieve such effects, had melted together gold, pearls, and rubies, emeralds and sapphires finer than fine, and the purest and most perfect diamonds.”
Veronese died in 1588.
The exhibition, underwritten by the Ford Motor Company, is the grandest of four presentations commemorating the 400th anniversary of his death. Three earlier and much smaller shows were put on in Verona and Venice. Nothing of this magnitude has been organized since a Veronese exhibition in Venice in 1939.
Most of the canvases on display underwent extensive and exhaustive cleaning and color restoration. The Russian ones did not, and the difference is remarkable.
This show will not travel, and is a must for anyone visiting Washington this winter.
