404. Veronese (Paolo Caliari) (1528-1588),

Italian, Gentleman in a Lynx Fur, c. 1565.

Oil on canvas, 140 x 107 cm.

Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence.

 

 

Veronese (Paolo Caliari)

(1528 Verona – 1588 Venice)

 

Paolo Veronese was one of the great masters of the late Renaissance in Venice with Titian and Tintoretto, the three of them seen as a triumvirate. Originally named Paolo Caliari, he was called Veronese from his native city of Verona. He is known for his use of vibrant colours and for his realistic perspective in both fresco and oil. His large paintings of biblical feasts executed for the refectories of monasteries in Venice and Verona are especially celebrated (like The Marriage of Cana). He also painted many portraits, altarpieces and historical and mythological paintings. He headed a family workshop that remained active after his death. Although highly successful, he had little immediate influence. To the Flemish baroque master Peter Paul Rubens and to the eighteenth-century Venetian painters, especially Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, however, Veronese's handling of colour and perspective supplied an indispensable point of departure.

The quality of his paintings is of sober restraint. Veronese is simply what he was – a painter. The purpose of his pictures is immediately self-evident. Some people will say that this self-evidence is the proper scope of painting; that “art for art's sake” should be the sole object of the painter; that the representation of anything else but what is apparent to the eye is going outside the province of the art; and that the preference which so many people have for a picture which makes an appeal not only to the eye, but to the intellect or the poetic and dramatic sense, is a proof of vulgar taste which confuses painting with illustration. The best answer to this is that not solely laymen, but artists also in all periods – artists of such personality that they cannot be ignored – have tried to reinforce the grandeur of mere appearances with something that shall appeal to the mind and soul of men.