VENICE: He was a foreigner with an unconventional taste for excess, but Veronese captured the essence of Venice’s lavish 16th century and his oversized, overcrowded paintings came to symbolise the city’s Golden Age.
“This is the man who constructed the city’s image of itself,” says Giandomenico Romanelli, director of Venice’s city museums and curator of a city-wide show aimed at rediscovering the painter born Paolo Caliari.
“He is the pillar on which the image of Venice, the triumphant city, was built. Using themes from religious painting, he built the imagery of Venice’s glory years.”
Famous for his love of rich materials and opulent scenes, in 1582 Veronese famously provided the city’s elders with “Venice Triumphant”, a 9-metre (29 feet 6 inches) ceiling fresco for the meeting hall of the city’s Great Council.
True to form, he crowded the image with dozens of onlookers, soldiers, richly dressed noblemen, horses and dogs.
But he centred the viewer’s attention on Venice — a statuesque woman in silk and gold brocade, crowned by angels.
In reality, Venice, once “queen of the seas”, was fading.
By the late 16th century, it had lost Constantinople to the Turks and with it, the overland route east found by its famed son Marco Polo. Its power as a commercial centre waned further as new sea routes opened up to the west and east.
But Veronese’s rich paintings fed the city-state’s imagination and celebrated its fascination with its own power.
A new exhibition, centred around the small but sumptuous Correr Museum, aims to re-establish Veronese as one of Venice’s most emblematic artists, alongside Titian and Jacopo Tintoretto.
At the Correr, curators have gathered dozens of Veronese’s non-religious paintings — from stately portraits to titillating mythological trysts — most of which now live outside Venice.
