_Paolo Veronese_ (Veronese: 1528-1588).
Paolo Caliari (called Veronese from his birthplace) stands,
says Ruskin, in the forefront of the great colourists. "Titian,
Veronese, and Tintoret were the only painters who ever sought
entirely to master, and who did entirely master, the truths of
light and shade as associated with colour, in the noblest of
all physical created things, the human form." With Veronese,
"the whole picture is like the rose--glowing with colour in
the shadows, and rising into paler and more delicate hues, or
masses of whiteness, in the lights." Contrasting the aims of
Veronese with those of the great chiaroscurists, Ruskin says:
"Veronese chooses to represent the great relations of visible
things to each other, to the heaven above, and to the earth
beneath them. He holds it more important to show how a figure
stands relieved from delicate air, or marble wall; how as a
red, or purple, or white figure, it separates itself, in clear
discernibility, from things not red, nor purple, nor white;
how infinite daylight shines round it; how innumerable veils
of faint shadow invest it; how its blackness and darkness
are, in the excess of their nature, just as limited and local
as its intensity of light; all this, I say, he feels to be
more important than showing merely the exact _measure_ of the
spark of sunshine that gleams on a dagger-hilt, or glows on a
jewel. All this, moreover, he feels to be harmonious,--capable
of being joined in one great system of spacious truth. And
with inevitable watchfulness, inestimable subtlety, he unites
all this in tenderest balance, noting in each hair's-breadth
of colour, not merely what its rightness or wrongness is
in itself, but what its relation is to every other on his
canvas." In the tone of his colouring Paolo retained, as Sir
F. Burton points out, much of the tradition of the Veronese
school. "The silvery tone which differentiates his best works
from the golden lustre of Titian was not gained in Venice, and
under the lightsome skies of the lagoons he was not tempted
to alter it." In the tone of his mind Veronese was thoroughly
Venetian. It is a certain "gay grasp of the outside aspects of
the world" that distinguishes him. "By habitual preference,
exquisitely graceful and playful; religious, without severity,
and winningly noble; delighting in slight, sweet everyday
incident, but hiding deep meanings underneath it; rarely
painting a gloomy subject, and never a base one" (_Modern
Painters_, vol. iii. pt. iv. ch. iii. § 16; vol. iv. pt. v.
ch. iii. § 18, ch. xx. § 16; vol. v. pt. ix. ch. iii. § 27;
_Cambridge Inaugural Lecture in O.O.R._, vol. i. § 314). Thus
Venetian in character, it is the Venice of his time--with all
its material magnificence and pride of life of a nation of
merchant princes--that Veronese everywhere paints. "Veronese,"
says Symonds, "elevated pageantry to the height of serious art.
His domain is noonday sunlight ablaze on sumptuous dresses and
Palladian architecture. Armour, shot silks and satins, brocaded
canopies, banners, plate, fruit, sceptres, crowns--all things,
in fact, that burn and glitter in the sun--form the habitual
furniture of his pictures." It is characteristic of the spirit
of his time that the pictures by Veronese of banquets and
other scenes of gaiety were mostly painted for monasteries.
The frank introduction of the costumes of the painter's own
time, clothing the fine race to which he belonged, gives to
his pictures of this kind an historical interest. Often he
introduces portraits into his groups. In expression his
figures are often deficient. "He will make the Magdalene wash
the feet of Christ with a countenance as absolutely unmoved as
that of any ordinary servant bringing an ewer to her master."
Animal force in men, superb voluptuousness in women, were
his favourite types. "His noblest creatures are men of about
twenty-five, manly, brawny, crisp-haired, full of nerve and
blood. In all this Veronese resembles Rubens. But he does not,
like Rubens, strike us as gross, sensual, fleshly; he remains
proud and powerful, and frigidly urbane. The same love of
display led him to delight in allegory--not allegory of the
deep and mystic kind, but of the pompous and processional, in
which Venice appears enthroned among the deities, or the genii
of the arts are personified as handsome women and blooming
boys." He painted with marvellous facility and revelled, as we
have seen, in exuberance. In this he resembled Rubens, but he
combined, as Rubens did not, moderation with profusion. Amid
so much that is distracting, Veronese never loses command over
his subject or his brush, "restraining, for truth's sake, his
exhaustless energy; reining back, for truth's sake, his fiery
strength; veiling, before truth, the vanity of brightness;
penetrating, for truth, the discouragement of gloom; ruling his
restless invention with a rod of iron; pardoning no error, no
thoughtlessness, no forgetfulness; and subduing all his powers,
impulses, and imaginations, to the arbitrament of a merciless
justice, and the obedience of an incorruptible verity."
Of the life of Paolo Veronese few incidents are related. He
was the son of a stone carver, and having shown a propensity
to painting was apprenticed to his uncle, a mediocre artist.
In his native city the works of Cavazzola and other Veronese
masters were before his eyes. After executing some commissions
in Mantua and Verona, he went in 1555 to Venice, which was
henceforward to be his home and the scene of his triumphs.
He soon began to rank with Tintoretto, who was nearly twenty
years his senior, and with Titian, then in his eightieth year.
He entered into a competition for painting the ceiling of the
library of St. Mark, and executed the commission with so much
power that his very rivals voted him the golden chain which had
been tendered as an honorary distinction. He visited Verona in
1565, where he then married the daughter of his old master;
and in 1560-61 he went to Rome in the suite of Grimani, the
Venetian ambassador. With these exceptions he remained in
Venice, full of work and honour. Upon his death his two sons
and his younger brother, Benedetto, continued the work of his
studio, signing the works which they produced in common as
"heirs of Paolo Caliari Veronese."
This picture, which was formerly in the church of San Niccolo de' Frari
at Venice, represents the consecration of Nicholas (for whom see 1171)
as Bishop of Myra, in Syria (hence the turbans of the attendants). Two
dignitaries of the Church are presenting him to the patriarch, who
holds aloft the symbolical cross of the Redeemer, and with his right
hand gives his blessing. The bishop-elect abases himself meanwhile
that he may be exalted, while the angel descending with the mitre and
crozier signifies that his "call" is from above. Clearly it is the
pageantry of a Church function that fascinates the painter. "His art
is seen at its best," says Sir Edward Poynter, "in the grouping and
light and shade in this picture. The boy kneeling on the right is a
masterpiece of silvery colour, and, with his red stockings, gives
vivacity to the whole composition." We may also observe in this picture
the employment of a "glaze." "The kneeling figure of the Saint is robed
in green, with sleeves of golden orange. This latter colour is carried
through as under-painting over the whole draped portions of the figure,
the green being then floated over and so manipulated that the golden
tint shows through in parts and gives the high lights on the folds"
(Baldwin Brown's _Fine Arts_, 1891, p. 310).