The Splendor Of Venice

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

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Working side by side first with Titian, afterwards with Tintoretto, was Paolo Cagliari, who, from Verona, the city of his birth, was known as Paul Veronese (1528-88). The whole splendor of Venice is revealed in his paintings, and his decorations in the Ducal Palace give immortality to the pageantry which characterized the Italy of his time.

When the Venetian Senate gave a festival in honor of King Henry III of France, the monarch was received (so history tell us) by two hundred of the fairest damsels in the city, dressed in white and covered with pearls and diamonds, ‘so that the King thought he had suddenly entered a realm of goddesses and fairies.’

This is the realm we enter through a canvas by Veronese, whether his subject be professedly historical, as in ‘The Family of Darius before Alexander’ in the National Gallery, or professedly religious as in ‘The Marriage of Cana’ at Dresden. We have only to look at this painting with all its wordily pomp and ostentatious luxury to see how far art has traveled from the simple piety of the earlier Primitive Masters.

The monasteries were the chief employers of Veronese as the eminent critic Mr Berenson has pointed out: ‘His cheerfulness, and his frank and joyous worldliness—the qualities, in short, which we find in his huge pictures of feasts—seem to have been particularly welcome to those who were expected to make their meat and drink of the very opposite qualities. This is no small comment on the times, and shows how thorough had been the permeation of the spirit of the Renaissance when even the religious orders gave up their pretence to asceticism and piety.’

A time came, however, when Veronese went too far even for the depraved ecclesiastics of his day. When he painted ‘The Last Supper’—now in the Louvre—in the style of ‘The Marriage at Cana,’ with the same glitter of crystal, silver, and jewels, the same sheen of silks and satins, the same multitude of serving men and attendants, the stricter clerics were scandalized. Information was laid against the painter, and on July 18, 1573, Paul Veronese was summoned before the tribunal of the Inquisition.

Exactly what happened then is not clearly known: while escaping banishment or severer punishment, the artist was sternly rebuked for his wordily treatment of religious subjects; and though the reprimand appears to have had little permanent effect on his paintings, it is significant to note that his ‘Adoration of the Magi’ in the National Gallery, which is dated 1573, is both in conception and in execution far more simple and respectful than are the majority of Veronese’s pictures of sacred subjects.

The most beautiful picture by Veronese in the National Gallery, and one of the most haunting of all his work, is ‘St. Helena’s Vision of the Cross,’ which is as reposeful as a piece of antique Greek sculpture and a superbly decorative example of the artist’s skill as a maker of patterns. The curious will note in this work how cunningly the painter has arranged the figure to secure decorative balance and rhythm, how the right leg continuing the line of the forearm repeats the diagonal of the cross, while the sharp horizontal of the cherub’s wing repeats the line of the window-sill. In these devices we recognize the hand of a master-craftsman.

The Splendor Of Venice (continued)