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There is also Paolo Veronese's "Holy Family with S. Catherine," superbly masterly and golden but suggesting the Rialto rather than Nazareth. One picture gives the next room, the Sala di Michelangelo, its name; but entering from the Venetian room we come first on the right to a very well-known Lippo Lippi, copied in every picture shop in Florence: No. 1307, a Madonna and two Children.
Here once hung Veronese's "Family of Darius," now No. 294 in our National Gallery, and, according to Ruskin, "the most precious" of the painter's works. The story goes that Veronese being driven to make use of the Pisani villa at Este as a temporary home, painted the picture while there and left it behind him with a message that he hoped it would pay for his board and lodging.
He had married and left sons who were painters, and worked with their father. He had a brother, Benedotto, who was also a painter, and who is thought to have painted many of the architectural backgrounds to Veronese's pictures. Veronese's portrait, which he has left us, gives the idea of a more earnest and impressionable man than Tintoret.
I dare say this is true; but the same claim, I recall, was once made for an original poster in the Strand. The "Paradiso" was one of Tintoretto's last works, the commission coming to him only by the accident of Veronese's death. Veronese was the artist first chosen, with a Bassano to assist, but when he died, Tintoretto, who had been passed over as too old, was permitted to try.
Veronese is reported to have been far more correct and careful in drawing than was Tintoret, while Veronese's prodigality of colour was a mellowed version of Tintoret's glare or deadness. One of Veronese's best pictures is the 'Marriage of Cana, painted originally for the refectory of the convent of San Giorgio, Venice, and now in the Louvre.
Accidentally he saw Paul Veronese's "Queen of Sheba" and other Venetian pictures; and so fell to comparing a period of fully ripened art with one of artlessness; discovering that the mature art, while it appeared at the same time with decay in morals, did not spring from that decay, but was rooted in the virtues of the earlier age.
There are few more suggestive contrasts than that between the absence of a total character at all commensurate with its scattered variety and brilliancy in Veronese's "Marriage of Cana," at the Louvre, and the poignant, almost startling, completeness of Tintoret's illustration of the theme at the Salute church.
He is, in short, a sedentary idler, who will not take the trouble to read the great book of nature, and would rather fire at a wooden eagle on a pole, than pursue the kingly bird amidst the wild scenery of the Apennines. He assumed the unwarrantable liberty of severely censuring Paul Veronese's grand picture of the 'Nuptials of Cana, in the presence of that noble artist.
To correct this thinness and dislocation, to restore life without losing significance, painting must proceed to accumulate symbol upon symbol, till the original impression is almost restored, but so restored that it contains all the articulation which a thorough analysis had given it. Such painting as Tintoretto's or Paolo Veronese's records impressions as a cultivated sense might receive them.
"The Flagellation of Christ," "The Supper at Emmaus," "The Death of Abel," "The Assumption," "The Entombment," "Faith," "The Madonna." What are Michael Angelo's great pictures? "The Annunciation," "The Spirits in Prison," "At the feet of Christ," "The Infant Christ," "The Crucifixion," "The Last Judgment." What are Paul Veronese's great pictures?
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