Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 17, 2025
"What other Venetian Masters ought we particularly to study?" asked Barbara. "Look out for Crivelli's Madonnas, and all of Paul Veronese's work. He was really the most utterly Venetian painter who ever lived. He painted Venice into everything: its motion, its color, its intoxicating fulness are all found in his mythological and banquet scenes.
The Veronese's wonderful Madonna del Sorriso leaped to instant life; a smile full of the pathos of human suffering, tender in comprehension, perfect in faith this, which this moment of inspiration had revealed to him, would he paint for the consolation of those who should kneel before the altar of the Servi!
This painting is most characteristic of Veronese's methods. He has no regard for the truth in presenting the picture story. At the marriage at Cana everybody must have been very simply dressed, and there could have been no beautiful architecture, such as we see in the picture. In the painting we find courtier-like men and women dressed in beautiful silks.
All the equipage of wealth and worldliness, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life such a vision as the fiend offered to Christ on the mountain of temptation; this is Veronese's realm. Again, he has no flashes of poetic imagination like Tintoretto; but his grip on the realities of the world, his faculty for idealising prosaic magnificence, is even greater.
Another of Veronese's pictures in the National Gallery is 'The Consecration of St Nicholas, Bishop of Myra.
It seems that an emblazonment fluctuates from their waters, and writhing above the crags which imprison them drifts athwart a sky sometimes a little chill Leonardo's pensive sky of shadowed amethyst again of a flushed blue, whereupon float great clouds, silken and ruddy, as in the backgrounds of Veronese's pictures.
This goblet, then, must surpass that one in magnificence, for it was the Veronese's opportunity; and in his soul, genial as it was, some sense of rivalry, born of Titian's assumption of the highest place in Venetian art, would last forever, in spite of the great master's manifest affection.
And the great splendour of the Venetian school arises from their having seen and held from the beginning this great fact that shadow is as much colour as light, often much more. In Titian's fullest red the lights are pale rose-colour, passing into white the shadows warm deep crimson. In Veronese's most splendid orange, the lights are pale, the shadows crocus colour; and so on.
Martha, not sufficiently resentful, lays the table. In Room VIII we again go north and again are among pictures that must be cleaned if we are to see them. And then we come to Room IX and some masterpieces. The largest picture here is Paul Veronese's famous work, "Jesus in the House of Levi," of which I give a reproduction opposite page 176.
The other great picture in this room is Paul Veronese's sumptuous "Rape of Europa." The Sala del Collegio itself, leading from this room, is full of Doges in all the magnificence of paint, above the tawdriest of wainscotting.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking