A Master and His Workshop in Renaissance Venice

paolo 

veronese 

•

paolo 

veronese 

• 

A Master and His Workshop in Renaissance Venice 

edited by virginia Brilliant 

with Frederick ilchman 

The John and Mable Ringling MuseuM of aRT, 

The sTaTe aRT MuseuM of floRida, floRida sTaTe univeRsiTy 

in associaTion wiTh scala PublisheRs

This book was published in conjunction with the exhibition Paolo Veronese: A Master and 

His Workshop in Renaissance Venice, on view at The John and Mable Ringling Museum of 

Art, Sarasota, Florida, December 7, 2012–April 14, 2013. 

This edition copyright © 2012 Scala Publishers Ltd 

Text copyright © 2012 The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, The State Art 

Museum of Florida, Florida State University 

First published in 2012 by 

Scala Publishers Ltd 

Northburgh House 

10 Northburgh Street 

London EC1V 0AT, UK 

www.scalapublishers.com 

In association with The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art 

www.ringling.org 

isbn 978-1-85759-766-0 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system 

or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, 

recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the Ringling and Scala 

Publishers Ltd. 

Every effort has been made to acknowledge correct copyright of images where 

applicable. Any errors or omissions are unintentional and should be notified to the 

Publisher, who will arrange for corrections to appear in any reprints. 

Edited by Kate Norment 

Designed by Benjamin Shaykin 

Type composition by Matt Mayerchak 

Typeset in mvB Verdigris 

Proofread by Julie Pickard 

Produced by Scala Publishers Ltd 

Printed and bound in China 

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 

Frontispiece: Allegory of Painting, 1560s, oil on canvas, The Detroit Institute of Arts. 

Front cover: Detail of the Rest on the Flight into Egypt, ca. 1572, oil on canvas, The John 

and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Fla. 

Back cover: Baptism of Christ, ca. 1580–85, oil on canvas, The J. Paul Getty Museum, 

Los Angeles. 

Contents 

6 Director’s Foreword 

8 Curator’s Introduction and Acknowledgments 

13 Lenders to the Exhibition 

essays 

14 Paolo Caliari: A Veronese Painter Triumphant 

in Venice 

David Rosand 

30 Veronese’s Training, Methods, and Shop Practice 

Diana Gisolfi 

44 Veronese and His Patrons 

Blake de Maria 

58 “Abiti gravi, abiti stravaganti”: Veronese’s Creative 

Approach to Drapery 

Rembrandt Duits 

70 Veronese’s Story of the Eye 

Maria H. Loh 

86 Veronese in America: Collecting and Taste 

Virginia Brilliant 

catalogue 

104 The Classical Tradition: Mythology and Allegory 

Inge Reist 

120 The Portraiture of Veronese 

John Garton 

134 The Bible and the Lives of the Saints 


150 Altarpieces and Heavenly Visions 


166 The Rest on the Flight into Egypt 


174 The Baptism of Christ 

Frederick Ilchman 

184 The Death of Christ 

Frederick Ilchman 

194 The Drawings of Veronese 

John Marciari 

208 Veronese and the Reproductive Print 

Jonathan Bober 

technical studies 

222 “Like a mirror that shows his idea…”: 

Interaction in the Veronese Workshop 

Stephen Gritt 

234 Materials, Technique, and the Master’s Hand: 

The Seattle Venus and Adonis 

Nicholas Dorman and Katie Patton 

244 Notes 

262 Checklist of the Exhibition 

271 Chronology 

273 Works Cited 

283 Index 

288 Photograph Credits

Director’s Foreword 

In 1925, John Ringling acquired, sight unseen, the first painting 

for his future museum: Paolo Veronese’s impressive Rest on 

the Flight into Egypt. Although the painting had long been in 

the possession of the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, the German 

museum had recently deemed the work to be by Veronese’s 

son Carletto, rather than the master himself, and had sold it. 

Since Ringling’s acquisition, the painting’s attribution to Paolo 

Veronese himself has been confirmed by many authorities. It 

remains one of the Ringling’s greatest treasures and a perennial 

favorite of our visitors. The Ringling Museum is proud to 

introduce John Ringling’s bold purchase to new audiences. 

Thinking boldly herself, Virginia Brilliant, curator at the 

Ringling Museum, began working in 2009 on an exhibition to 

situate the Rest on the Flight into Egypt in a new context. She 

envisioned using the Rest on the Flight, as well as two imposing 

full-length portraits in the Museum’s collection, as points of 

departure for a broad survey of the art of Renaissance Venice’s 

most elegant master. Paolo Veronese: A Master and His Workshop in 

Renaissance Venice is the culmination of those efforts. 

This project is also the culmination of the Ringling’s 

sustained hard work in recent years to develop exhibitions based 

on major pieces in its outstanding Old Master collection. The 

first Ringling-generated loan exhibitions in two decades, these 

projects have included The Triumph of Marriage: Painted Cassoni 

of the Renaissance (2008), Venice in the Age of Canaletto (2009–10), 

and Gothic Art in the Gilded Age: Medieval and Renaissance Treasures 

6 Paolo veRonese 

in the Gavet-Vanderbilt-Ringling Collection (2009–10). As with these 

past projects, the loans for the present exhibition come exclusively 

from North American museums and private collectors. Although 

this restriction acknowledges current economic conditions, 

as well as our wish in this case to minimize overlap with future 

exhibitions on the artist planned in Europe, the choice is not 

merely logistical. Happily, Veronese and his workshop are 

broadly represented in North American collections, and many 

of these works have often been overlooked. Moreover, a focus on 

collections in the United States and Canada has also permitted the 

exhibition to survey the taste for Veronese in North America. 

Virginia has been assisted in this endeavor by a specialist in 

Venetian art of the sixteenth century, Frederick Ilchman, Mrs. 

Russell W. Baker Curator of Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, 

Boston. I am grateful to Frederick for giving his time and energy to 

this project. Thanks to the generosity of the many lenders, Virginia 

and Frederick have brought to Sarasota the largest group of 

paintings and drawings by Veronese and his workshop assembled 

anywhere in North America since 1988, the year of the memorable 

exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, where the 

Rest on the Flight into Egypt played an important role. To investigate 

Veronese’s critical fortune more deeply, a group of fascinating 

prints after works by the painter, from the engraver Agostino 

Carracci in 1582 to the photographer Thomas Struth in 1992, have 

also been assembled for the show. 

In this volume, Virginia and Frederick are joined by prominent 

scholars from a variety of specialties to explore Veronese’s 

world, creative achievement, and artistic legacy in innovative 

and compelling ways: Jonathan Bober, Blake de Maria, Nicholas 

Dorman and Katie Patton, Rembrandt Duits, John Garton, Diana 

Gisolfi, Stephen Gritt, Maria H. Loh, John Marciari, Inge Reist, 

and David Rosand. The Ringling is delighted to present their 

writings here. 

An exhibition of this scale depends upon the goodwill of 

museums and private individuals throughout North America. 

Crucial loan commitments for groups of paintings or drawings 

were secured in particular from the National Gallery of Art, 

Washington; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Harvard 

Art Museums; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the J. Paul Getty 

Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Morgan Library 

and Museum; and the Blanton Museum of Art. I am deeply 

grateful to these lenders, and to all of the other public institutions 

and private collectors who have generously allowed the Ringling 

to bring before the public their precious paintings, drawings, and 

prints. 

Significant financial support is necessary for an exhibition 

of this complexity, and at the Ringling we are fortunate to have 

endowments established by Peter and Mary Lou Vogt, Steve 

and Stevie Wilberding, and John Ringling that are dedicated to 

funding exhibition development. We are also indebted to the 

Samuel H. Kress Foundation for their generous contribution to 

this fine publication. Additional assistance was provided through 

Florida State University, and for their unwavering commitment 

to the mission of the Ringling Museum I want to especially thank 

FSU President Eric Barron, Provost Garnett Stokes, and Sally 

McRorie, Dean of the College of Visual Arts, Theater, and Dance. 

Over the years the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities 

has supported some of our most significant exhibitions by 

providing indemnity, and I want to use this opportunity to 

acknowledge this very important federal program. 

As one of our distinguished authors, David Rosand, wrote in 

1973 at the start of an essay now deemed a classic, “We have always 

loved Paolo Veronese — for the chromatic brilliance of his palette, 

the splendor and sensibility of his brushwork, the aristocratic 

elegance of his figures, and the magnificence of his spectacle.” I 

hope that visitors to this exhibition and readers of this book will be 

inspired anew to love the creativity and variety of Paolo Veronese. 

Steven High 

executive director 

the john and mable ringling museum of art 

diRecToR’s foRewoRd 7

Curator’s Introduction and Acknowledgments 

The great Veronese is the most magnificent of all. He swims before you in 

a silver cloud; he thrones in an eternal morning. The deep blue sky burns 

behind him, streaked across with milky bars; the white colonnades sustain 

the richest canopies, under which the first gentlemen and ladies in the 

world both render homage and receive it. Their glorious garments rustle 

in the air of the sea and their sun-lighted faces are the very complexion of 

Venice. The mixture of pride and piety, of politics and religion, of art and 

patriotism, gives a splendid dignity to every scene. Never was a painter 

more nobly joyous, never did an artist take a greater delight in life, 

seeing it all as a kind of breezy festival and feeling it through the medium 

of perpetual success. He revels in the gold-framed ovals of the ceilings, 

multiplies himself there with the fluttering movement of an embroidered 

banner that tosses itself into the blue. He was the happiest of painters . . . 

— Henry James, Italian Hours: Venice, 1909 

Celebrated for his ambitious and extravagant decorative cycles, 

both religious and allegorical, sacred and profane, Paolo 

Veronese (1528–1588) is acknowledged as one of the giants of 

Venetian painting, the most elegant of the triumvirate that also 

included Titian and Tintoretto. Veronese is perhaps best known 

for his grand ceiling paintings and large scenes of Biblical feasts. 

Yet throughout his prodigious and enormously successful career, 

he and his large and busy workshop also created imposing 

altarpieces and smaller religious paintings made for private 

devotion or for collectors, striking portraits, and depictions of 

sensual episodes drawn from the classical tradition. He was an 

outstanding draughtsman, and his surviving graphic corpus 

ranges from preliminary sketches that pulsate with energy 


and invention to highly finished chiaroscuro sheets, magisterial 

works of art in their own right. One of Veronese’s main 

biographers, the art historian Carlo Ridolfi, wrote in 1648 of his 

“outlandish and majestic gods, grave characters, matrons full of 

graces and charm, kings richly adorned, the diversity of draperies, 

various military spoils, ornate architecture, joyous plants, 

beautiful animals and many of these curiosities.” But despite the 

sheer sumptuousness, secular cast, and operatic theatricality of 

many works, Veronese was also an attentive illustrator of the 

Bible and saints’ lives. Steeped in the secular humanist culture 

of the Renaissance Veneto, he was carefully attuned to the spirit 

of reform sweeping the Catholic Church over the course of the 

sixteenth century. Hailing from the city of Verona in the Venetian 

terraferma territories, the source of his nickname, he was a 

foreigner in Venice. He created paintings for Venetian clients and 

settings, as well for the mainland and export abroad. Veronese’s 

art has been admired for centuries, not least by Americans, from 

Henry James and the museum builders of his Gilded Age, to the 

collectors, scholars, and museum curators of today. 

When I began working at the Ringling Museum in 2008, I was 

charged with developing exhibitions based around major works 

of art in our Old Master collection. The museum owns many great 

paintings, but Veronese’s beautiful and brilliantly colored Rest on 

the Flight into Egypt is truly a jewel in the Ringling’s crown. A public 

favorite, the work was also, I soon discovered, the first Old Master 

painting that our founder, John Ringling, ever acquired. Ringling, 

who loved Italy and Venice especially, also later purchased two 

portraits related to the artist, Francesco Franceschini, whose authorship 

is discussed in this volume, and a Family Group then attributed to 

Veronese but now ascribed to his pupil Giovanni Antonio Fasolo. 

I soon decided that I wanted to build an exhibition around these 

three works. In need of a partner in this endeavor, I was fortunate 

to be able to call upon my colleague and friend Frederick Ilchman, 

a specialist in Venetian Renaissance art and Curator of Paintings 

at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, who had recently organized 

the exhibition Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese at his own museum. 

The exhibition we devised and that this volume accompanies 

surrounds the Ringling’s Rest on the Flight and portraits with 

many of the finest paintings and drawings by Veronese in North 

American collections, as well as a selection of prints after the 

artist, offering a rich and detailed presentation of this important 

painter. Many of Veronese’s best works, like his great ceilings and 

feast pictures, cannot be moved from their present locations in 

Venice and elsewhere in Europe; they are simply far too large to 

be transported to museum exhibitions. Nonetheless, Veronese’s 

range is very broadly represented in North America. Examples of 

all periods of his activity, works in a variety of formats, depictions 

of diverse subjects and themes, and both his paintings and 

drawings can be found in North American museums and private 

collections. Such abundance can be usefully contrasted with his 

rival Tintoretto; only a handful of first-rate works by the artist are 

found in this country. As for Veronese’s other great contemporary 

and mentor, Titian, while American collections are home to 

several of his portraits and mythological paintings, not one of his 

altarpieces has found its way across the Atlantic. 

Of course, no exhibition succeeds in securing every loan 

its curators have in their sights. Two of the finest paintings by 

Veronese in America, the Choice between Virtue and Vice and Wisdom 

and Strength in the Frick Collection, simply cannot be lent by the 

terms of Henry Clay Frick’s bequest; some works had already been 

promised to other exhibitions or were essential to permanent 

collection displays at their home institutions; a few drawings 

had been exposed to light too much too recently to be lent again 

so soon. Yet, thanks to the many museums and collectors that 

met this project and our requests for loans with great warmth 

and enthusiasm, it has been possible to assemble a substantial 

exhibition employing loans of paintings and drawings exclusively 

from North American institutions and private individuals. 

An American exhibition devoted to Veronese is timely. The 

broad spectrum of this artist as a painter and draughtsman has 

not been available to American audiences in over two decades. The 

last comprehensive exhibition on Veronese in America took place 

inTRoducTion and acknowledgMenTs 9

at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in 1988. A previous 

American display of Veronese, also the only significant display 

of his art in the South, was the 1972 exhibition in Birmingham 

and Montgomery, which included many works of questionable 

attribution. More recently, valuable dossier exhibitions at the 

Frick Collection (2006) and in Ottawa and Austin (2009–10) 

have shed light on key commissions. Meanwhile, in Europe, 

major exhibitions of Veronese were presented in Venice in 1988 

and in Paris and Venice in 2004 and 2005. A group of important 

Veronese canvases was included in both the Boston and Paris 

venues of Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese in 2009. Major European 

exhibitions are planned in London and Verona in 2014. Thus 

it seemed as though the time was ripe for a presentation of 

Veronese to American audiences. We are especially delighted 

that David Rosand, who wrote the essay for the Birmingham and 

Montgomery exhibition of 1972, has had in this volume a second 

chance at a similar assignment exactly forty years later, but now his 

excellent overview of the artist’s life and works is accompanied by 

many higher-quality works. 

Indeed, as Frederick and I devised the checklist we were ever 

mindful of quality. However, we also recognized that Veronese’s 

workshop was one of the greatest and most productive of the 

Renaissance, and a not inconsequential portion of its prolific 

output has found its way to America, as evidenced by the 

Ringling’s own contested portraits, mentioned above. Thus, the 

exhibition proceeds from the premise that the full measure of 

Paolo’s creativity and organizational talents can be understood 

only if paintings and drawings by members of his studio are 

included. The collaborative nature of Renaissance workshop 

practice has been recognized for some time, but the specifics of 

how Veronese worked alongside his assistants, or delegated the 

execution of sections or indeed entire paintings to his helpers, 

have generally been overlooked in exhibitions. This exhibition, 

with numerous examples of works produced by Veronese as well as 

those partially or totally by studio assistants, and including special 

attention to his working methods, seeks to remedy this oversight. 


It also contends that works partially or wholly by Veronese’s 

assistants can provide precious insight as to how Paolo presided 

over a busy and productive studio. The best and most interesting 

cases were selected for presentation in the exhibition, and we 

supplied attributions and dates to the best of our ability. 

Many essays in this volume touch on these issues and the 

questions of workshop participation in specific works, but 

contributions by Diana Gisolfi, Stephen Gritt, and Nicholas 

Dorman and Katie Patton in particular focus on the collaborative 

nature of Veronese’s artistic practice. Using technical and material 

analysis of individual paintings facilitated by cutting-edge 

technology, archival and anecdotal evidence, and connoisseurship 

and close looking, these authors significantly further our 

understanding of what makes a “Veronese,” helping us to better 

understand when we look at such a work where Paolo stops and his 

workshop begins. 

Throughout this volume readers will also find fresh 

perspectives on many other aspects of Veronese, the works 

included in the exhibition, and his oeuvre more broadly. Blake 

de Maria’s essay seeks to define the relationship between 

pictorial innovation and patronage, while Rembrandt Duits 

draws us into the voluminous folds of Veronese’s gorgeous 

textiles and draperies, presenting new insights and information 

regarding their making and meanings. Maria H. Loh’s lyrical 

approach to several works included in the exhibition deepens our 

understanding of Veronese as a storyteller and observer of human 

emotion, while also allowing us to glimpse the highly poetic yet 

also deeply religious culture for which he made his art. My own 

essay addresses the largely unexplored topic of the taste for and 

collecting of Veronese in America. 

Drawings by Veronese are perhaps some of the greatest works 

by this artist in American collections, and the Ringling is proud 

to present so many beautiful examples in the exhibition. John 

Marciari’s outstanding essay surveys these works and tackles 

the thorny problems posed by the often contentious scholarship 

surrounding the master’s graphic opus. The exhibition also 

includes a selection of engravings, etchings, and woodcuts 

after Veronese; a giant photograph featuring Veronese’s Feast 

in the House of Levi, Thomas Struth’s Galleria dell’Accademia 1, 

Venice 1992 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), brings this survey of 

reproductions to the present day. Together these works chart the 

reception of this great artist and the transmission of his ideas and 

compositions far beyond the Venetian lagoon; they also serve as 

surrogates for works that are not part of the exhibition. Nothing 

is published on the subject of prints after Veronese in English, 

and thus it is a particular pleasure to present Jonathan Bober’s 

excellent essay here. 

Marco Boschini in his great panegyric of Venetian painting of 

1660 characterized Veronese as “the painter of beautiful things.” 

Of course, Veronese was truly skilled at portraying beautiful 

things, creating a world of magnificence and luxuriousness 

without equal in the art of his era. However, we also felt that such 

remarks had earned the painter an unfair reputation of being 

merely “decorative.” It was important to us that this exhibition 

challenge this perception, shedding light on Veronese as a 

masterful and empathetic narrative painter, highly intelligent and 

energetic in matters both pictorial and intellectual, and exploring 

the iconographic complexity and rich layers of meaning with 

which he invested his paintings. 

Consequently the central portion of this volume — that 

which concentrates most closely on the works included in the 

exhibition — has been organized thematically rather than 

chronologically. Instead of offering traditional catalogue entries 

for each work in the show, the volume presents essays treating 

groups of works that bring Veronese’s approach to different genres 

and subject matters into focus. Two essays address Veronese as a 

painter of secular subjects. Inge Reist’s essay on Veronese and the 

classical tradition illustrates our artist as a painter of domestic 

interiors, designer of theatrical sets and costumes, and astute 

observer of architecture (particularly Palladio’s), who was shaped 

by and constantly in touch with the humanist culture of his native 

Verona. John Garton’s essay considers Veronese’s portraits, from 

the visual sources and cultural norms that informed his approach, 

to the wide range of sitters he painted, to the impact of portraiture 

style on pupils, including Giovanni Antonio Fasolo, creator of the 

Ringling Family Group. 

A series of further essays by me and Frederick Ilchman treat 

sacred subjects: contributions considering Veronese’s altarpieces 

and heavenly visions, as well as his other paintings depicting 

religious subjects, are complemented by a further three essays 

devoted to sacred narratives that Veronese treated repeatedly 

throughout his career, namely the Rest on the Flight into Egypt, 

the Baptism of Christ, and the Death of Christ. 

In 1660, Marco Boschini described Veronese’s work: “certainly 

never has been seen among painters such regal pomp and 

circumstance, such majestic actions, such weighty and decorous 

manner! He is the treasurer of the art and of the colors. This is 

not painting, it is magic that casts a spell on people who see it.” In 

sum, I hope that this exhibition and accompanying volume offer 

visitors and readers glimpses of Veronese’s magic. 

• 

Many people participated in the realization of this book and the 

exhibition it accompanies. Acknowledging their contributions is a 

great pleasure. 

From the first this volume was conceived as a multiple-author 

work that aimed to draw upon the interests and expertise of a wide 

range of scholars from a variety of backgrounds who were willing 

to take new approaches to this artist and the works assembled for 

the exhibition. I am proud to thank my fellow writers, colleagues, 

and friends for bringing their knowledge and talents to this 

venture: Jonathan Bober, Blake de Maria, Nicholas Dorman, 

Rembrandt Duits, John Garton, Diana Gisolfi, Stephen Gritt, 

Frederick Ilchman, Maria H. Loh, John Marciari, Katie Patton, 

Inge Reist, and David Rosand. 

I am grateful to T. Marshall Rousseau, the Ringling Museum’s 

former Interim Director, who supported this project at its 

inTRoducTion and acknowledgMenTs 11

inception, and for the continued goodwill of current Executive 

Director Steven High, who has with great commitment and 

encouragement seen the exhibition and this publication through 

to completion. Many colleagues past and present at the Ringling 

assisted with the preparation of this exhibition and publication 

in one way or another: Dwight Currie (Associate Director for 

Exhibitions and Programs); David Berry (Assistant Director 

for Research, Publications, and Education); Françoise Hack, 

Heidi Taylor, Gabriela Gil, and Jessie Christian (Registration); 

Donn Roll, Matthew Lynn, Aaron Board, and Norm Cornwell 

(Preparation); Linda McKee, Artis Wick, Liz Gray, and Arwen 

Spinosa (Library); Maureen Zaremba, Barbara Hyde, Erin 

Griswold, and Sonja Kida (Education); Peg Thornton (Project 

Coordinator); Matthew McLendon (Associate Curator of Modern 

and Contemporary Art); Grady Enlow, Jennifer Price, and Carol 

Tayman (Finance, Administration, and Accounting); Amy Sankes, 

Stacey Corley, Erin Barker, and Sharon Freddes (Development); 

Arthur K. Wiedinger (Office of the General Counsel, Florida 

State University); and Lauren Branzei, Katherine Evarts, Marissa 

Herman, and Catherine Olien (Curatorial Interns). Many thanks 

go to Richard Molinaroli, Linda Heinrich, and their team at 

MFM Design for bringing great skill and professionalism to the 

design of the exhibition’s splendid installation at the Ringling. The 

fabulous Lucy Zimmerman coordinated all of the comparative 

images for the volume, and for that I am truly grateful. 

I was overwhelmed by the collegiality, generosity, and support 

I encountered as I sought loans and conducted research for this 

exhibition. Among the countless individuals who assisted and 

facilitated in myriad ways, I would particularly like to thank the 

following colleagues and lending institutions: James Clifton 

(Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, Houston); Simone J. Wicha 

(Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas); Lisa Schubert and 

Marion Kahan (Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, New York); 

David Franklin, Jon Seydl, and Heather Lemonedes (Cleveland 

Museum of Art); William Hennessey and Jefferson C. Harrison 

(Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia); Hope McMath 


and Holly Kerris (Cummer Museum and Gardens, Jacksonville, 

Florida); Lewis I. Sharp, Timothy Standring, and Angelica Daneo 

(Denver Art Museum); Graham Beale, Alan Darr, and Salvador 

Salort-Pons (Detroit Institute of Arts); Thomas W. Lentz, William 

Robinson, Stephan Wolohojian, and Miriam Stewart (Harvard 

Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts); 

Anne Hawley, Oliver Tostmann, Anne-Marie Eze, and Joseph 

Saravo (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston); Jack Becker 

and Toby Jurovics (Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska); 

David Bomford, Scott Schaefer, Lee Hendrix, Julian Brooks, 

and Scott Allan (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles); Thomas 

Gaehtgens, David Brafman, and Louis Marchesano (Getty 

Research Institute, Los Angeles); William M. Griswold, Rhoda 

Etiel-Porter, Linda Wolk-Simon, and Jennifer Tonkovich (Morgan 

Library and Museum, New York); Malcolm Rogers, Ronni Baer, 

Victoria S. Reed, Cliff Ackley, Stephanie Loeb Stepanek, Lauren 

Whitley, Edward Saywell, Jen Mergel, Kenneth Brummel, Emily 

Cannarella, Vincent Martins, and Andrea Pitt (Museum of Fine 

Arts, Boston); the late Peter Marzio and Edgar Peters Bowron 

(Museum of Fine Arts, Houston); Earl A. Powell III, David 

Alan Brown, Gretchen Hirschauer, Jonathan Bober, Joanna 

Dunn, David Essex, and Neal Turtell (National Gallery of Art, 

Washington); Marc Mayer and Stephen Gritt (National Gallery of 

Canada, Ottawa); Julián Zugazagoitia and Ian Kennedy (Nelson- 

Atkins Art Museum, Kansas City); Lawrence J. Wheeler and David 

Steel (North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh); Timothy Rub, 

Joseph Rishel, Carl Strehlke, Jennifer Thompson, and Jennifer 

Vanim (Philadelphia Museum of Art); James Steward and Laura 

Giles (Princeton University Art Museum); Roxana Velásquez and 

John Marciari (San Diego Museum of Art); Chiyo Ishikawa and 

Nicholas Dorman (Seattle Art Museum); John Wilson (Timken 

Museum of Art, San Diego); and Sally Dickinson (Watkinson 

Library, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut). I also thank 

those lenders who wish to remain anonymous. 

Together with Frederick, I would also like to thank the 

following scholars who have assisted in our research and planning 

efforts, opened doors, helped facilitate loans and grants, provided 

advice and moral support, and helped in various other ways: 

Bernard Aikema, Christopher Apostle, William Barcham, Carrie 

Beneš, Linda Borean, Jack Brown, Caroline Campbell, Alan 

Chong, Melissa Conn, C. D. Dickerson III, Robert Echols, Giulio 

Manieri Elia, Miguel Falomir, Larry Feinberg, Mary Frank, 

Peter Humfrey, Peter Björn Kerber, Julia Marciari-Alexander, 

Max Marmor, Stephania Mason, Jacki Musacchio, Brooks Rich, 

Francis Russell, Susannah Rutherglen, Eliot Rowlands, Philip 

Rylands, Xavier Salomon, Nat Silver, and Eve Straussman- 

Pflanzer. 

I am delighted to thank the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and 

the National Endowment for the Arts for their sustained goodwill 

toward the Ringling Museum and their generous support of this 

project. 

It is always a pleasure to work with Scala Publishers Ltd. 

Special thanks go to the formidable Kate Norment, who 

undertook the coordinating and copyediting of this large volume 

and its many texts and voices with admirable authority and 

good humor. The talents and sensitive eye of Benjamin Shaykin 

are responsible for the book’s beautiful design. I would also 

like to thank Jennifer Wright Norman and Oliver Craske for 

their enthusiasm for this publication from the outset, and their 

forbearance throughout. Claudia Varosio brought her customary 

professionalism and expertise to so many essential production 

tasks. So very many thanks to all. 


curator of european art 

the john and mable ringling museum of art 

Lenders to 

the Exhibition 

Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, 

Houston 

Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas 

Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, 

New York 

The Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, 

Virginia 

The Cleveland Museum of Art 

The Cummer Museum and Gardens, 

Jacksonville, Florida 

Denver Art Museum 

The Detroit Institute of Arts 

Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, 

Cambridge, Massachusetts 

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston 

The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles 

Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles 

Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska 

The Morgan Library and Museum, 

New York 

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston 

National Gallery of Art, Washington 

National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa 

The Nelson-Atkins Art Museum, Kansas 

City, Missouri 

North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh 

Philadelphia Museum of Art 

Princeton University Art Museum 

San Diego Museum of Art 

Seattle Art Museum 

Timken Museum of Art, San Diego 

Watkinson Library, Trinity College, 

Hartford, Connecticut 

Anonymous lenders 

lendeRs To The exhibiTion 13

Paolo Caliari: A Veronese 

Painter Triumphant in Venice 

DaviD RosanD 

Born in Verona in 1528, Paolo Caliari was first trained by his 

father, a stonecutter (spezapreda),1 and then as a painter by 

local masters, including Giovanni Caroto (1488–1566) and 

Antonio Badile (1518–1560), whose daughter he eventually 

married. Perhaps his most important mentor, however, was 

the architect Michele Sanmicheli (1484–1559), who, according to 

the biographer Giorgio Vasari, loved “Paulino pittore” as a son.2 

It was likely through Sanmicheli that young Paolo received what 

was probably his earliest commission, around 1545, painting 

in fresco the vaulted ceilings of two rooms of the palace the 

architect designed for Count Lodovico di Canossa in Verona. 

Although sharing the work with other painters, Paolo already 

demonstrated a mastery of the fluid brushstroke, the rapid yet 

inflected touch required of painting on fresh plaster that was 

to be a most significant hallmark of his subsequent development 

as a painter.3 

It was through his painting master Badile that Paolo received 

his first commission for a major canvas, in the Avanzo chapel 

of the church of San Bernardino in Verona. His Revival of the 

Daughter of Jairus was originally on a wall opposite Badile’s own 

painting of the Raising of Lazarus, which, still in situ, is signed 

and dated 1546. Although the younger painter’s work is no longer 

extant, its composition is known through his preliminary modello, 

an oil sketch on paper (fig. 10).4 Here, too, an essential aspect 

of Paolo’s subsequent art is already manifest at the beginning of 

14 Paolo Veronese 15

his career, namely a predilection for asymmetrical design, one part of the field closed by 

architecture (or, in landscape settings, trees), the other open to a more distant view. 

Shortly thereafter, in 1548, Paolo completed his first altarpiece, for a chapel of the 

Bevilacqua-Lazise family in the church of San Fermo in Verona (Museo del Castelvecchio, 

Verona).5 The asymmetrical structure of this sacra conversazione — a compositional type in which 

the enthroned Virgin and Child are flanked by saints, here accompanied by two donors — 

attests to the painter’s knowledge, probably through Badile, of Titian’s celebrated Madonna 

of Ca’ Pesaro (1519–26) in the church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice (fig. 55). 

By about 1550 Paolo had attracted the attention of important patrons in Venice, the 

patrician brothers Lorenzo and Antonio Giustiniani, who commissioned him to paint 

the altarpiece of their new chapel in the church of San Francesco della Vigna, which can 

be dated by an inscription in the chapel to 1551 (fig. 56).6 A further pictorial meditation 

on Titian’s Madonna of Ca’ Pesaro, this altarpiece, which remains in situ, announced the 

young Veronese painter as a major player in the artistic scene of the capital. Indeed, Paolo 

was soon to be counted as the youngest member of the triumvirate that was to dominate 

Venetian painting in the latter part of the sixteenth century, a trio that included, as its 

undisputed leader, the aging Titian (ca. 1488–1576) and the young, fiercely competitive 

Jacopo Tintoretto (ca. 1518–1594). 

Back on the terraferma — the Venetian mainland — Paolo worked with other Veronese 

painters on the decorations of the Palazzo da Porto in Vicenza, designed by Andrea 

Palladio (1508–1580), a project finished by 1552. Unfortunately no longer extant, these 

frescoes were praised by the architect in his Quattro libri dell’architettura as the work of 

“Messer Paolo Veronese Pittore eccellentissimo.” 7 Paolo also painted a pair of full-length 

canvases depicting highly sympathetic and moving portraits of the patrons: one of Iseppo 

da Porto and their first-born son, Leonida (fig. 47), the other of his wife, Livia Thiene, and 

their first-born daughter, Deidamia (fig. 41).8 Clearly, Paolo was enjoying patronage of the 

highest level among the aristocracy of Vicenza.9 

Paolo’s first securely documented work is an altarpiece he painted for the cathedral 

of Mantua, representing the Temptation of Saint Anthony (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Caen).10 

This was one of four altarpieces commissioned by Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga from a group 

of young painters from Verona — the others being Paolo Farinati (1524–1606), Battista 

Angolo del Moro (ca. 1515–after 1573), and Domenico Brusasorci (1516–1567). Their work 

was finished by 11 March 1553, when the four wrote collectively to the cardinal indicating 

that it had been a year since the completion of the paintings and asking that arrangements 

be made for their delivery; the painters were concerned about the possible damage were 

the canvases to remain in their workshops. (Not incidentally, they also respectfully 

reminded the cardinal that full payment had not yet been made.) It is interesting to note 

that Paolo, by now well established as a painter, was still identifying himself with his 

father’s craft, for he signed the letter Paullo sprezap[re]da.11 Paolo’s painting, a particularly 

dynamic composition of radically foreshortened figures, depicts the saint being tormented 

by a seductive temptress and an aggressive satyr; such a juxtaposition of feminine and 

masculine modes would become another favorite motif in Paolo’s art. 

By January 1555 Paulo Veronese pictor had established his residence in Venice, in a house 

near Santi Apostoli, paying a rent of 32 ducats.12 On 3 June 1555, in the contract for the 

16 Paolo Veronese 

Transfiguration for the high altar of Santa Maria in Montagnana, he appears for the first 

time with his adopted aristocratic surname: “Mis. Paulo Caliaro Veronese,” already 

“habitante in Venetia.” 13 As a painter residing and working in Venice, the young Veronese 

must have been inscribed in the painters’ guild. The Arte dei Depentori represented 

depentori of the most varied kind, from sign painters to makers of playing cards, gilders to 

textile designers. Paolo would have belonged in the first, and highest, category, under the 

heading of figure painter (figurer). This is how he was to define himself when called before 

the Inquisition in 1573: “Io depingo et fazzo delle figure” — in other words, I am a painter 

inscribed in the first column of the guild. 

And he certainly would have to have been a member of the guild to receive his first great 

public commission in the Palazzo Ducale, the decorations for the ceilings of the rooms of 

the Consiglio dei Dieci (Council of Ten).14 This was the most powerful, and feared, council 

of the Venetian government, charged with overseeing the security of the state, internal and 

external, and the constitutionality and application of its laws. The framework of the ceiling 

of the Sala delle Udienze, the largest of the three rooms, was completed by early 1553, ready 

for its open fields to receive their painted canvases. These were installed the following 

year. According to Vasari, the commission was originally awarded to Giovanni Battista 

Ponchino (ca. 1500–ca. 1570), a painter from Castelfranco who had spent years in Rome.15 

Evidently daunted by the task, Ponchino invited two young painters of Verona, Paolo and 

Giovanni Battista Zelotti (1526–1578), to join him on the project. Of the nine large canvases 

that constitute the decorative scheme of the ceiling, four were assigned to Paolo, including 

the central oval of Jupiter Expelling Crimes and Vices from Heaven (part of Napoleon’s loot, the 

canvas is now in the Louvre) (fig. 1). Indeed, the first published notice of the ceiling, in 1556, 

explicitly recognizes the leading role of Veronese in the enterprise, referring to the ceiling 

as the work of “Paulo et compagni.” 16 

The challenge in ceiling painting is to open a window to the heavens, through which 

to view from below (di sotto in sù), and to populate that celestial space with figures such that 

they remain convincingly on high, at once overcoming the natural pull of gravity and yet 

remaining susceptible to it. Paolo’s art on the ceilings of the rooms of the Council of Ten 

distinguishes itself from that of his compagni by the grace of his figures and, even more, 

by the fluidity of his brush. He is able to elevate his figures to the heavens and, working 

with gravity and foreshortening, to have them simultaneously fall to earth. Ponchino’s 

heaviness of form, a somewhat clumsy Roman accent in this Venetian setting, frustrates 

the ambition of his airborne bodies; his lessons in central Italian drawing (disegno) seem 

misapplied here. Zelotti, however, is closer to Paolo in manner, and the older sources 

have not always agreed on the attribution of these unsigned paintings. And yet, compared 

to the graphic eloquence of Paolo’s varied and inflected stroke, Zelotti’s brush appears 

restrained and timid, committed to the surface of rendered form. 

It is the flight of Paolo’s brush that is so distinctive, its impulse to assert an 

independence beyond merely mimetic responsibility. That energy creates an aesthetic 

tension between surfaces, between the reality of the painted canvas and the fiction 

of represented form, enabling color itself to claim a certain life of its own. As formal 

definition depends more upon the individual touches of the brush, each necessarily 

representing a distinctive color choice, areas of drapery become fields of studied chromatic 

a Veronese Painter triumPhant in Venice 17


Fig. 1 Jupiter Expelling Crimes and Vices from 

Heaven, ca. 1553–55, oil on canvas, Musée du 

Louvre, Paris. 

juxtaposition; the very quality of the fabric is defined by the nature of the stroke. Hair, 

too — like drapery, always requiring shaping and styling — is defined by a gendered 

application of the brush, whether a feminine delicacy of touch or a more masculine, 

vigorous application. Expressive on the most fundamental level, the painter’s stroke 

creates the character of form. Picking out bits of light in shadow, highlighting a link of 

gold or pearl, edging the borders of cloth, Veronese’s brush enlivens surface. Contour itself 

becomes less a containing outline than an inflected linear alternation of color, a spatial 

exchange of boundary and field. These qualities will continue to serve as the fundamental 

elements of his art. 

In his triumphant paintings on the ceilings of the Council of Ten, Paolo gave 

convincing pictorial form to an iconographic program devised by Daniele Barbaro 

(1514–1570), a patrician who would continue to be one of the painter’s most supportive 

patrons (fig. 16). Realizing a program invoking Olympian deities to celebrate the virtues 

of the Venetian state, the painter extended the pictorial possibilities of the self-imaging of 

the Most Serene Republic. Indeed, more than any other painter, it was Paolo who gave the 

fullest pictorial definition to the figure of the Queen of the Adriatic. 

Paolo’s next great public commission in Venice, immediately following the project 

in the Palazzo Ducale, was the decoration of the church of San Sebastiano. Covering 

its ceilings and walls with his brushwork, he transformed the church into a temple 

dedicated to his art — appropriately, it became the site for his eventual burial and funerary 

monument. His patron at San Sebastiano was the prior of the Hieronymite monastery, 

Bernardo Torlioni of Verona, who was presumably already familiar with the painter’s 

work for the order in their native town. Paolo began with the low ceiling of the sacristy; 

its nearly square framework offered a central opening flanked by longer fields on each 

side and punctuated at its corners by tondi (circular paintings). The central canvas featured 

a representation of the Coronation of the Virgin, supported in the flanking oblongs by the 

Four Evangelists.17 

Kneeling in pious humility, Mary is crowned by her son, joined by God the Father, 

who reaches out to confer upon Christ the shared authority of the triune divinity; the third 

member of the Trinity, the dove of the Holy Spirit, hovers above. Father and son in turn 

enclose Mary within their divinity, welcoming her to the glory of heaven being revealed 

by angels pushing back darker clouds. It is the cumulus cloud that here serves as a visually 

solid support and a bridge between realms; an extension of our lower natural world, its 

solid form dissipates in the golden light of a higher realm — a formation that had been 

explored and exploited by earlier High Renaissance masters such as Raphael, Titian, and 

Correggio in the pictorial rendering of heaven. Even as she receives the crown of divine 

royalty, Mary looks down to our world below, recalling her humanity and confirming 

her intercessory role on behalf of humankind. Veronese painted this celebration of the 

divinity of Mary during the years in which the Catholic Church, in response to Protestant 

challenge, was reaffirming her role in salvation.18 But the theme of the Coronation of 

the Virgin held a particularly special place in the Venetian imagination, at least since 

Guariento’s monumental fresco of that subject initiated the decoration of the Sala del 

Maggior Consiglio in the mid-fourteenth century. Venetian myth held that the city had 

been divinely founded on 25 March, that is, on the date of the Annunciation. That legend at 

once established and confirmed the particular association of Venice with the Virgin Mary: 

Venice the “virgin city,” never conquered, inviolate. For a Venetian, a representation of the 

glorification of the Virgin Mary inevitably invited a reading at once religious and civic.19 

The sacristy ceiling was completed by 23 November 1555, the date recorded in one of the 

corner roundels. Veronese then moved on to the ceiling of the church itself. The contract of 

1 December 1555 stipulated that he was to paint the three central pictures with their figured 

subjects as well as the surrounding framing fields and decorative scrollwork for a fee of 150 

ducats.20 Subsequent documents of payment confirm the active participation of workshop 

assistants, especially the painter’s brother Benedetto Caliari (1538–1598) and Giovanni 

Antonio Fasolo (1530–1572). 


Unlike the ceiling of the sacristy, which was organized around a single central field, 

the longitudinal extension of the nave presented a sequence of three major pictorial fields 

(fig. 2) — as well as more mobile options for viewing. Their subject was drawn from the 

Old Testament story of Esther, the savior of her people and thus an Old Testament model 

for the Virgin Mary.21 The central field represents the Coronation of Esther: here the Jewish 

heroine kneels before Ahasuerus in a pose clearly reflecting that of Mary on the sacristy 

ceiling, a formal analogy that proclaims the theological typology. The narrative on the nave 

ceiling begins in the oval canvas above the entrance with the Repudiation of Vashti, Esther’s 

predecessor who was banished for having refused obedience to the king. In the oval nearest 

the high altar is the Triumph of Mordecai, whom Ahasuerus elevates above the evil Haman, 

who had threatened the extermination of the Jewish people. 

In designing this sequence of paintings, each set deep within its own frame, Veronese 

had to create an overall visual continuity down the nave. Working with the alternating 

sequence of oval-rectangle-oval, he established a basic continuity along the central vertical 

axis of the compositions, thereby reinforcing the longitudinal orientation of the nave as 

well as a linear progress toward the altar. That axis, especially in the two oval paintings, 

is theoretically a receding orthogonal, but its pure verticality in the field, effectively 

adhering to the surface, denies any spatial thrust. Such radical foreshortening, whereby the 

orthogonal aligns perfectly with the picture plane, counters any illusion of recession. The 

graphic preparation for such a pictorial construction was surely elaborated in the studio, 

where the canvases were presumably executed before being installed in the ceiling. 

Paolo received final payment for the ceiling on 30 October 1556.22 The twenty-eightyear-old 

painter had completed this monumental project in only eleven months. Beyond 

the sheer inventiveness of their compositions, the accommodation of single pictures to 

a larger whole, and the creative response to the challenge of viewing from below, these 

paintings offered further demonstrations of the young Paolo’s absolute mastery of the 

brush, his ability to give it an articulateness of its own — as was so brilliantly revealed by 

the recent restoration of the canvases.23 

The pictorial decoration of San Sebastiano continued in fresco on the walls, with scenes 

from the life of Saint Sebastian.24 These included his first, failed martyrdom, when he was 

shot with arrows. On one side of the upper zone of the nave Veronese painted the archers 

and, opposite, their targeted martyr: the arrows were imagined to be flying across the 

nave, turning that space into a dramatic arena, an aesthetic appropriation of reality that 

we might term proto-Baroque. Veronese also designed and decorated the organ loft, and 

his early training as a spezapreda surely served him when he was commissioned to redesign 

the architecture of the presbytery. By the time he had finished the decoration of San 

Sebastiano, about 1565–70, with the high altarpiece (fig. 57) and two narrative canvases on 

the side walls of the presbytery, the church had become a monument to the art of Paolo.25 

That Veronese was able to work so efficiently on such a demanding project as the 

decoration of the many surfaces of San Sebastiano is owing to the operation of a wellorganized 

workshop, in which the second in command was his brother Benedetto. Such 

family botteghe were the norm in Venice; from at least the fourteenth century to the very 

end of the republic in the eighteenth, masters passed on their art and their studios to their 

sons, a system essentially guaranteed by the guild system. Thus, following the death of 


Fig. 2 Nave of the church of San 

Sebastiano, Venice, with the Story of 

Esther, 1556, on the ceiling. 

Paolo in 1588, his brother and sons continued to produce “Veroneses,” signing them as by 

the heirs of Paolo Caliari, Haeredes Pauli (see, for example, cat. 40). The master established 

the basic style of the shop; assistants learned their trade and their style by working under 

his direction. On large projects in particular, the master might create the basic design, 

blocking in the composition, while assistants, having learned to mimic the signature 

style, could be left to fill in the rest — with the master perhaps returning to add finishing 

touches. Or, in the case of Saint Herculanus Visited by an Angel (fig. 71), which is based on 

Paolo’s own brilliant compositional sketch (cat. 53), the provincial altarpiece was executed 

by Benedetto, probably with the assistance of Paolo’s son Carletto (1570–1596), who signed 

it Paullo Calliari Veronese F.26 It was, in other words, a Veronese. Although it is sometimes 

possible to distinguish the various hands at work in a painting, the very success of the 


procedure has created a continuing challenge to connoisseurs seeking to differentiate the 

master’s brush from that of the assistants.27 

A sign of Veronese’s artistic skill and organizational competence is that even in a 

particularly busy period, that of the early 1560s, the artist and his workshop could produce 

numerous works of superb quality in the same span of years. For example, he produced 

three impressive altarpieces in 1562 for the abbey of San Benedetto Po, southeast of 

Mantua, including the dramatic Virgin and Child with Angels Appearing to Saint Anthony 

Abbot and Saint Paul the Hermit (cat. 28). This is clearly an autograph work and sensitively 

rendered, despite the enormous pressures that the artist must have felt with successive 

and even simultaneous commissions.28 Such creative workshop efficiency allowed Paolo 

to undertake yet another major project even before work at San Sebastiano was complete: 

the decoration of the ceiling of the church of Santa Maria dell’Umiltà. That ceiling was 

finished by May of 1564 and to great public acclaim: “the entire city flocked to see it and all 

marveled at its beauty.” 29 

Less demanding perhaps, but equally rewarding, was Paolo’s contribution to the 

decoration of the vaulted ceiling of the reading room of the Libreria Marciana (fig. 15), 

designed by Jacopo Sansovino (1486–1570).30 To fill the sequence of round pictorial 

fields that articulated the ceiling, in August of 1556 the Procuratori di San Marco, the 

official patrons of the project, commissioned seven of “the best painters who were then 

in Venice.” 31 The work was to be completed by January 1557, and final payments in the 

following month indicate that the artists met the deadline. The procurators had stipulated 

that a prize was to be awarded for the painting judged to be best; the judges were Titian and 

Sansovino, who awarded the prize of a gold chain to Paolo for his Allegory of Music.32 

Probably in the summer of 1560 Veronese began another major project, the pictorial 

decoration of the villa that Palladio designed for the brothers Daniele and Marcantonio 

Barbaro (1518–1595) at Maser, on the mainland northwest of Treviso (fig. 20).33 These 

Venetian patricians were active humanists, engaged in the arts as well as in service to the 

republic. Daniele’s most significant artistic project was his translation of and commentary 

on Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture. First published in 1556, I dieci libri dell’architettura di 

M. Vitruvio tradutti e commentati da Monsignor Barbaro eletto patriarca d’Aquileggia was a work 

of collaboration between the humanist and the architect Palladio. Veronese’s familiarity 

with that publishing project is attested to by his portrait of Daniele (fig. 16), in which the 

author is depicted with both the title page of the book and its manuscript preparation.34 In 

the plan of the Villa Barbaro that Palladio published in his own Quattro libri dell’architettura, 

the architect inscribed numbers within each room that declare their harmonic proportions 

and sequences.35 Such harmonic proportions had been discussed by Barbaro in his Vitruvian 

commentary as the source of beauty in architecture as well as in music, and Palladio assured 

that the villa would embody such harmony. 

Paolo was certainly responsive to this guiding notion. In the crossing of the villa he 

painted female figures in niches, each holding a musical instrument (fig. 42); they sound 

that basic harmonic note so central to the ideal of beauty explicated by the patron and 

realized by his architect. The painter also introduced half-open fictive doors, in which 

young members of the family appear. Basically, however, the walls of the villa were reserved 

for architectural articulation, including illusionistic statues in niches and open landscape 


Fig. 3 Family of Darius before Alexander, 

ca. 1565–67, oil on canvas, National 

Gallery, London. 

views. Other than in the crossing, figural units are reserved for the ceilings and vaults 

above. At the core of the villa, in the so-called Sala dell’Olimpo, within a celestial field, is 

a radiant woman in white seated upon a dragon and surrounded by the seven planetary 

deities (fig. 22). She is the reigning figure of this cosmos, on whom the rest of the imagery 

depends. Triumphant over discord, she has been most convincingly identified as Divine 

Love.36 On the painted balconies just below, this Olympian realm is witnessed by members 

of the Barbaro family (fig. 21), who thereby participate in that higher, perfectly ordered 

universe. 

The Villa Barbaro, like most Renaissance villas, was inspired by the villas of ancient 

Rome, so enthusiastically celebrated by Cicero, Varro, and Pliny the Younger. Revived 

in the Renaissance, that vision of the country house saw it as a place dedicated to leisure 

(otium) but not entirely free of the responsibilities of work (negotium), combining the 

leisure of the study and the work of the fields. The horizons of Veronese’s painted 

landscapes align with the actual horizon of the cultivated fields belonging to the Barbaro 


family seen through the actual windows. And just as the idea of the villa was inspired by 

ancient models, Veronese’s brush seems to have found a model in the murals described by 

those same sources. Not only does the landscape iconography — of promenades, groves, 

harbors, streams, and shores — evoke ancient wall painting, but Veronese’s brush seems 

to have gained new inspiration, or confirmation, from ancient Roman painting. Although 

we cannot be sure just what ancient landscape painting he might have studied when he 

visited Rome, the very fluidity of his brush painting in fresco seems a conscious revival of 

an ancient mode of painting, a truly professional rinascità dell’antichità. Considering the 

complexity of the decoration at Maser — the fusion of painted architecture and sculpture 

below and the ambitious figural activity above — presumably many drawings were made 

preparatory to the actual painting, and yet only a few survive (cat. 10). 

Not long after completion of the decoration of the Villa Barbaro, Paolo painted the 

canvas that most fully epitomizes his art, the representation of the Family of Darius before 


Fig. 4 Feast in the House of Levi, 1573, oil on 

canvas, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice. 

Alexander (fig. 3).37 It was painted to decorate the villa of Francesco Pisani (1514–1567) 

just outside the walls of Montagnana, southwest of Padua; in that villa, in 1555, Paolo 

had signed the contract for the Transfiguration in the cathedral of that town. The geste of 

Alexander the Great were an appropriate theme for pictorial cycles in villas, as Renaissance 

aristocrats identified with the nobility of the ancient exemplum virtutis, although such 

images were more usually part of decorative cycles in fresco. That Veronese’s canvas 

enjoyed a place of honor in the Pisani villa is made clear in a document of 1568, in which it 

is referred to as the “most precious painting of the History of Alexander the Great.” 38 

The composition of the Historia di Alessandro Magno and its palette manifest the stylistic 

choices that guide Veronese’s art. On a major scale, the avoidance of deep orthogonals — 

an important feature of the competing art of Tintoretto — controls and limits spatial 

recession. Paolo had opted for such shallow stage space early in his career. This allowed 

him to place his figures in a tableau-like setting, moving across the picture plane and 

against an architectural backdrop similarly parallel to the plane — as in compositions such 

as Christ and the Centurion (cat. 23 and fig. 53), Christ among the Doctors (fig. 52), and the 

Cuccina Family Presented to the Virgin and Child (fig. 19). 

In the nobility of its action and the classical grandeur of its setting, the Family of Darius 

before Alexander epitomizes what has always been recognized as Veronese’s own natural 

patrician aesthetic. The subject represents the women of the defeated Persian ruler 

humbling themselves before the victorious Greek and his entourage of officers. The queen 

has mistaken the taller Hephaestion for his leader. Alexander, dressed in brilliant crimson, 

steps forward and in an act of imperial magnanimity allays her embarrassment by turning 

the mistake into a tribute both to his general, whom he calls another Alexander, and, of 

course, to himself. Gesturing to Hephaestion as an alter ego, Alexander reaches out with 

his right hand to calm the nervous woman kneeling before him, a gesture exhibiting both 

compassion and control. 

Figures here move rhythmically against a fixed monumental backdrop, an arcade that 

establishes a measured staff; light in color, it serves as a relatively neutral ground against 

which the chromatic splendor of the costumes stands out. (Paolo was also a designer for 

the theater, especially for the Oedipus Tyrannus that inaugurated Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico 

in Vicenza in 1585 [cat. 6].39) These gestures, grand and generous, are played out by many 

of the protagonists of Paolo’s art, and they were also ascribed to the painter himself. The 

generosity of mind that informs his work is the same that marks the man, as his biographer 

Ridolfi observed, “because every cause produces effects similar to itself.” 40 Honored not 

by aristocratic title but by natural virtue and moral rectitude, Paolo was honest and open 

in his relationships with others; never scheming to obtain commissions — and the implicit 

comparison is with Tintoretto — his every action was praiseworthy.41 Although not 

patrician by birth, he dressed nobly; the velvet stockings he wore were still preserved by his 

heirs in the seventeenth century.42 

We may recognize the artist himself as the violist elegantly dressed in white in the 

musical group at the base of the grand canvas of the Wedding Feast at Cana (fig. 23), painted 

in 1562–63 for the Benedictines of San Giorgio Maggiore.43 Opposite him, the older 

player on the bass has been convincingly identified as Titian.44 Long considered a pictorial 

indulgence in transgressing the sumptuary laws of Venice, it is only recently that this great 


composition has begun to be appreciated for its profound pictorial intelligence. Above 

the musicians, Christ’s figure affirms the central axis, staring directly at us, in maestà. 

Immediately above him, in the background, a butcher is preparing the meat for the feast: 

the upraised cleaver serves as a culminating accent to the vertical axis. Prominently set 

along the core of the composition, the musicians-Christ-butcher sequence by its very 

position clearly signals the meaning of the entire image. A key to this meaning is offered 

by the hourglass on the table in the midst of the musicians. Totally without function in 

musical practice, it stands as a symbol of music as measured time; set so prominently on 

axis, it can only allude to the response of Jesus to his mother: “mine hour is not yet come” 

(John 2:4). The preparation of the lamb above, a prophecy of the sacrifice of that hour to 

come, thus assumes a positive symbolic meaning consonant with its visual prominence. 

Further analysis of this vast composition reveals the cultural range and intelligence of the 

painter, from his careful reading of both scriptural sources and their literary elaboration in 

the writings of Pietro Aretino to his architectural knowledge and pictorial application of 

harmonic proportions.45 

That same intelligence is evident in Veronese’s appearance before the inquisitors of 

the Holy Tribunal. He was called to answer questions regarding another feast picture, the 

Last Supper he had painted for the Dominican refectory of Santi Giovanni e Paolo (fig. 4).46 

Replacing a Last Supper by Titian, which had been destroyed in a fire, Paolo’s vast canvas 

was completed on 20 April 1573, a date prominently inscribed at the base of the picture. 

Shortly thereafter, on 18 July, he was called before the Holy Tribunal to face charges of 

indecorum, including the depiction in a supper of our Lord of “buffoons, drunkards, 

Germans, dwarfs and other such scurrilities.” Ordered to make, at his own expense and 

within a period of three months, appropriate corrections to remove the offenses, Veronese 

chose only to add an inscription that retitled the painting as a Feast in the House of Levi — a 

subject that did indeed call for the presence of “publicans and sinners” (Luke 5:30) and that 

presumably could also accommodate “other such scurrilities.” 

In his response, as recorded in the preserved minutes, Paolo identified himself as a 

painter of figures. He went on to defend the inclusion of such details as dwarfs and jesters 

and German soldiers by invoking poetic license on behalf of the art of painting, the right to 

enrich a large pictorial field with such incident, insisting, however, that he did so according 

to the subject (secondo le inventioni) and that such additions were appropriate (conveniente). 

Despite his defensive explanations, this exchange has often been taken to confirm the 

traditional image of Veronese as a purely decorative painter. Other passages in the 

minutes, however, reveal more about the specific nature of his professional values and his 

pictorial intelligence. Twice, when asked by the inquisitors why he painted those buffoons, 

drunkards, Germans, and dwarfs, he referred explicitly to the spatial structure of his 

composition: namely, that these figures “were outside of the place of the supper,” “outside 

of the place where Our Lord is depicted.” The painter was thus explaining the very logic 

of his design. In the monumental arcade that is the setting of the supper, the central arch 

features Christ, set against a celestial backdrop. None of the scurrilous hangers-on come 

into that reserved field. Paolo’s response is as articulate a compositional analysis as any we 

have from a Renaissance painter.47 


Fig. 5 Agony in the Garden, ca. 1581–83, oil 

on canvas, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. 

In 1574 fire destroyed the Sala del Collegio of the Palazzo Ducale, and Paolo was 

commissioned to paint the reconstructed ceiling and the canvas over the tribunal.48 On the 

ceiling he extended the Olympian invocation on behalf of the glorification of the republic 

with one canvas depicting Mars and Neptune, representing respectively the Venetian 

domain on land and on sea. At the other end of the ceiling Venice personified received 

tribute from personifications of Justice and Peace, primary virtues claimed by the republic. 

The oval at the center represented the Triumph of Faith, a declaration of the role of Venice as 

the defender of the Christian religion, not only against the menace of the Ottoman Turks, 

but also in competition with papal Rome. 

Another, more disastrous fire consumed the Sala del Maggior Consiglio in 1577, and 

its reconstruction and redecoration became matters of urgency to the state. On the new 

ceiling, Veronese was awarded the pictorial field closest to the ducal throne — the other 

fields being awarded to Tintoretto and Palma il Giovane (1548–1628). In that oval he 

painted an Apotheosis of Venice, a celebration of the Pax Veneta in which the subjects of the 

empire celebrate their subjugation.49 The glorious Queen of the Adriatic is enthroned in 

the clouds, surrounded by Olympian deities and crowned by Victory figures. Invoking her 

origins on the date of the Annunciation, Venice thereby identified herself with the Virgin 

Mary. In other images the Queen of the Adriatic pays proper pious homage to the Queen 

of Heaven, especially as the republic asserted itself as the defender of the Faith (see cat. 32, 

the Allegory of Venice Adoring the Virgin and Child). 


Fig. 6 Crucifixion, ca. 1580–81, oil on 

canvas, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice. 


Below the new ceiling, over the ducal throne, Guariento’s fresco of the Coronation of the 

Virgin, although not totally destroyed, needed replacement. Paolo won the competition, 

along with Francesco Bassano (1549–1592), but all we have of this project are his 

preparatory modello (fig. 70) and related drawings (cats. 51 and 52). Paolo died in 1588, and 

the commission passed to Tintoretto and his studio.50 

Although he died at the age of sixty, Veronese did have what might legitimately be called 

a late style.51 In his final years his palette became more somber. Without ever surrendering 

the chromatic brilliance of his brushwork, he allowed color to emerge increasingly from 

a deeper ground, whether the nocturnal darkness of the Agony in the Garden, of about 

1580, from the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Venice (fig. 5),52 or the deep woods of 

the Baptism and Temptation of Christ from San Nicolò ai Frari, also in Venice (now in the 

Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan).53 In part this deepening mood may have been a response to 

the art of Jacopo Bassano (ca. 1510–1592), whose brushwork Paolo admired enough to set 

as a model for his son Carletto.54 

More than a response to Bassano or to the dramatic imagery of Tintoretto, the 

deepened sense of pathos that informs Veronese’s later works may well reflect the crisis of 

these years. The great trauma of the time was the plague that ravaged Venice from 1575 to 

1577; it had a major impact on all aspects of Venetian life. And it certainly played a role in 

Fig. 7 Lucretia, ca. 1580–85, oil on canvas, 

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. 

determining the character of Veronese’s Crucifixion for San Nicolò ai Frari (fig. 6), with its 

particular emphasis on the gloom of the sixth hour and the opening of the graves (Matthew 

27:45–53).55 

In the darkening vision of Veronese’s later style, tonal profundity transforms the 

painter’s brushwork. Marks that formerly added their own elegance and sprezzatura 

to the painted personae they formed no longer dance across the surface but are now rather 

submerged with the darker depth of tone, chromatic notes set in a more somber minor 

mode — eloquently represented in the pathos of a Lucretia of the 1580s (fig. 7).56 Whether 

or not we can speak of a “late style” for an artist in his fifties, we are moved by the 

emotional growth of Paolo in the final decade or so of his life.

A Master and His Workshop in Renaissance Venice

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