“Nature Hath Fram’d Strange Fellows in Her Time”

P take the same license as poets and madmen, Paolo Veronese told the Inquisition Tribunal in Venice during an interrogation. Buffoons, drunkards, exotic creatures, and anachronisms in his Last Supper were placed there “so they might be of service because it seemed to me fi tting ...” in creating the scene, not as irreverence (1). The dispute was resolved by changing the name of the painting to Supper in the House of Levi. Veronese was not interested in piety or historical accuracy. Large banquets were opportunities to create feasts for the eyes, monumental gatherings framed in architectural detail, bathed in sumptuous color. The son of a stone mason known only as Gabriele, the painter adopted the name Caliari and later became known as Veronese from his birthplace. A precocious child entirely uninterested in stone cutting, he was quickly recognized for facility with the brush and was trained by local masters Antonio Badile and Giovanni Caroto. Then, according to chronicler Giorgio Vasari, architect and engineer Michele Sanmicheli took him under his wing and “treated him like a son” (2). He painted his fi rst works in Verona and Mantua, but when called to Venice on a commission, he remained there for the rest of his life, becoming a preeminent master of the late Renaissance, along with Titian and Tintoretto. In the Doge’s palace, the Church of San Sebastiano, the Villa Barbaro at Maser with the great architect Andrea Palladio, and churches and palaces all over the city, he extolled youth, beauty, and prodigious harvests in frescoes and oil paintings of enduring charm. A kind and amiable man, Veronese was well liked and appreciated, one of the fi rst painters whose work was sought by collectors during his lifetime (3). Early training in the mannerist style, which emphasized the decorative, was transformed by the styles of Venice, an innate sense of composition, and his genius as draftsman. He reveled in rich textures and patterns and captured luminescence in fl esh and fabric, lace or wool. He was “the greatest colorist who ever lived,” wrote French critic Théophile Gautier, “greater than Titian, Rubens, or Rembrandt” because he created light without violent contrasts and maintained the strength of hue and shadow, which French master Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) said, “We are always told is impossible” (4). An expert illusionist, Veronese overcame the problems of applying linear perspective to the concave surfaces of church domes, overriding the architecture, simulating limitless space. With sotto in su techniques, he created foreshortened fi gures to be seen from below as fl oating above the viewer. He moved adventurously between secular and religious themes, incorporated classical and mythologic fi gures, crafted allegorical pageants, mingled the sacred with what some thought the profane.