Paolo Veronese

Paolo Veronese (1528–1588)

During his prolific and highly successful career, Paolo Veronese produced paintings ranging from complex fresco decorations for villas and palaces to large-scale altarpieces, smaller devotional paintings, portraits, and mythological, historical, and allegorical pictures (10.189) in different formats. One of Veronese’s main biographers, the art historian Carlo Ridolfi, writing in 1648, eulogized the painter’s “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.” Another writer, Marco Boschini, described Veronese’s work in 1660: “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.” Veronese produced beautiful and careful compositional drawings for most of his painted projects. His dazzling and effective use of color has been praised and celebrated over the centuries. Boschini also concluded that “to achieve such effects, he has mixed gold with pearls, rubies, emeralds, and sapphires of the best quality, and the purest and most perfect diamonds. And to flavor it he has scattered the flowers most gentle that come from the Levant with all of the most beautiful things that Nature can make with its colors.”