In the Musée du Louvre

III. The Holy Family 24     In the Musée du Louvre IV. The Wedding at Cana 34     In the Musée du Louvre V. The Family of Darius 40     In the National Gallery, London VI. Calvary 50     In the Musée du Louvre VII. The Marriage of St. Catherine 60     In the Accademia delle Belle Arti, Venice VIII. The Vision of St. Helena 70     In the National Gallery, London

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INTRODUCTION

It has been said of Veronese that he was the most absurd and the most adorable of the great painters. Paradoxical as it sounds, this judgment is perfectly true. Absurd, Veronese undoubtedly was, in his disdain of logic and common sense, in his complete indifference to historic truth and school traditions, and in his anachronistic habit of garbing antiquity in modern raiment. “I paint my pictures,” he said, “without taking these matters into consideration, and I allow myself the same license which is granted to poets and to fools.” And it is precisely his riotous fantasy, his naïve self-confidence, his own peculiar way of understanding mythology and religion that have made him the adorable artist whose glory has been consecrated by the centuries.

Thanks to the rare power of his genius, the most audacious improbabilities vanish beneath the magic adornments with which he covers them, and it hardly occurs to one to notice his glaring historical errors or the superficialities of his pictorial conceptions in the continual delight inspired by the sense of concentrated life in his characters, the splendour of his colouring, the caressing charm of his draperies, the brilliance of his skies, and the impression of youth and of joy that radiates from his work. Veronese was neither a thinker nor an historian, nor a moralist; he was quite simply a painter, but he was a very great one. If his preference is for the joyous scenes of life, that is because life treated him indulgently from his earliest years; if he delights in giving to his pictures a sumptuous setting, in which silk, brocades and precious vases abound, it is because he acquired a taste for these things in that matchless Venice of the sixteenth century, marvellous treasury of sun-bathed, gaily bedecked palaces, wherein all the opulence of the East had been brought together. What these paintings of Veronese reproduce for us are the thick, rich carpets of Smyrna, newly unladen from Musselman feluccas, monkeys imported from tropic islands, greyhounds brought from Asia, and negro pages purchased on the Riva dei Schiavoni, the Quay of the Slaves, to bear the trains of the patrician beauties of Venice. But, above all, one finds in them Venice herself, Venice the Glorious, queen of the sea, Venice sated with gold and lavish of it, sowing her lagunes broadcast with palaces, and the robes of her women with diamonds. More truly than Titian or Tintoretto, Veronese is the chosen painter of the Most Serene Republic. He not only decorated the ceilings of her palaces and the walls of her churches: but he took the city of his adoption as the setting for all his compositions; it is at Venice that the Feast at the House of Simon the Pharisee, the Feast at the House of Levi take place; it is in Venetian surroundings that Jesus presides over the Wedding Feast at Cana.

One can understand how the painters of the Venetian school, nurtured in the dazzling and joyous light of the sea-born city, transferred to their palette that vibrant colour with which their artist eyes were filled; nor is it surprising that Veronese, passionately enamoured of Venice, achieved, through his wish to glorify her, that magnificence of colour and of expression which remains his distinctive mark.

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THE FIRST YEARS

Nevertheless, Veronese was not a native of Venice but of Verona, as is indicated by the surname that was bestowed upon him during his life and that has adhered to him ever since. His rightful name was Paolo Caliari. He was born at Verona in 1528 and not in 1530, as is asserted by several of his biographers, notably by Carlo Ridolfi. The correct date is now verified by the discovery, in San Samuele of Venice, Veronese’s parish church, of the register of deaths wherein the decease of the great painter is entered as having occurred the 19th of April, 1588, the very day when he completed his sixtieth year.

Paolo Caliari belonged to a family of artists. His father, Gabriele Caliari, was a sculptor and enjoyed some little reputation in his own city. Veronese’s uncle, Antonio Badile, was a painter, and in such pictures as are known to be his we find evidence not only of a good deal of ability, but of a certain facile grace that justifies the high esteem in which his compatriots held him.

Veronese’s father, being of a logical turn of mind, wished, since he himself was a sculptor, to make a sculptor of his son. Veronese learned to model statuettes in clay, and, aided by his precocious intelligence, he acquired a real dexterity in this art, quite remarkable in one so young.

But this was not