Renaissance
Paolo Veronese (1528–1588)
Italian Venetian Renaissance painter.
Paolo Veronese (Paolo Caliari, 1528 – 19 April 1588) was one of the great colourists of the Venetian Renaissance and, with the older Titian and his near-contemporary Tintoretto, one of the 'great trio' who dominated Venetian painting of the cinquecento. He was born in Verona — from which he took his name — the son of a stonecutter, and trained there under Antonio Badile (later his father-in-law) and Giovanni Francesco Caroto. Steeped early in the Mannerist culture of the terraferma, he soon abandoned its strain for a more radiant, naturalistic palette that would become his signature.
Having settled permanently in Venice around 1553, Veronese made his name as a decorator of ceilings and walls: the Sala del Consiglio dei Dieci in the Doge's Palace, the church of San Sebastiano (which became a virtual monument to him), and — in a prize judged in part by Titian himself — the ceiling of the Marciana Library. In the villa the architect Andrea Palladio built for the Barbaro family at Maser he covered the interior in luminous frescoes of illusionistic architecture, blue skies, and trompe-l'oeil figures. His fame rests above all on his enormous banquet pictures, painted for monastic refectories: The Wedding at Cana (1562–63) and The Feast in the House of Levi (1573), vast, sun-filled feasts crowded with silks, columns, musicians, servants, and dogs.
That worldly splendour brought him before the Venetian Holy Inquisition on 18 July 1573, summoned to explain the 'buffoons, drunkards, Germans, dwarfs and similar scurrilities' he had painted around a Last Supper. Rather than repaint the scene he simply re-titled it The Feast in the House of Levi, defending the licence of painters 'as poets and madmen take it.' Veronese ran a large family workshop and was admired across the centuries — by Rubens, Watteau, Tiepolo, Delacroix, and Renoir — for a chromatic brilliance, aristocratic elegance, and festive magnificence that the nineteenth century would treat as a foundation of modern painting.
The words the record keeps using: splendid, luminous, festive, elegant, magnificent, harmonious, worldly.
At a glance
- Lived 1528–1588
- Origin Italian (Venetian)
- Worked in Venice
- Era Renaissance
- Movements Venetian Renaissance, Mannerism
- Mediums Fresco, Oil on panel, Oil on canvas
- Techniques Buon fresco, Oil glazing, Linear perspective
Works in the archive
- Portrait of a Young Boy, 1560 (USC Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles)
A small, intimate portrait bust of a young boy on panel, a rare surviving example of Veronese working at cabinet scale on the individual sitter rather than the vast public feast. Where his refectory canvases crowd… - The Wedding at Cana, 1562 (Musée du Louvre, Paris)
Veronese's largest canvas, painted for the refectory of the Benedictine monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore in a collaboration with the architect Andrea Palladio. It stages Christ's first miracle — turning water into wine… - The Family of Darius before Alexander, 1565 (National Gallery, London)
Veronese's grandest treatment of secular history, showing the defeated family of the Persian king Darius kneeling before Alexander the Great after the Battle of Issus, mistaking his companion Hephaestion for the… - Mars and Venus United by Love, 1570 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
A mythological allegory of the 1570s in which the war-god Mars and the goddess Venus are bound together by Love, an image of concord born of the union of love and war. Cupid ties the couple with a cord, a horse is… - The Feast in the House of Levi, 1573 (Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice)
One of the largest canvases of the sixteenth century, painted for the refectory of the Dominican convent of Santi Giovanni e Paolo to replace a Titian lost to fire. Conceived as a Last Supper, it teems with servants,…
What was said
Summoned before the Venetian tribunal of the Inquisition to explain the servants, soldiers, dwarfs, dogs and other worldly figures he had placed around a Last Supper, Veronese testified that painters claim the same licence that poets and madmen take, and that he had added such figures as ornaments, to fill out the scene where the composition left room, following his own judgement of what a great house and feast would contain.
In his lives of the Venetian painters, Carlo Ridolfi treated the Feast in the House of Levi as the fullest witness to Veronese's art, praising a painter who gave rein to joy, made beauty majestic, and made laughter itself more festive.
Delacroix admired Veronese above all as a colourist, observing that he made light without violent contrasts — an effect commonly held to be impossible — and maintained the full strength of his hues even within the shadows.
Lineage
Passed on to Eugène Delacroix, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Peter Paul Rubens
What would Paolo make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Paolo Veronese", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Paolo · Keep a life moment the way Paolo would · Pictures made after Paolo