Of the triumvirate of sixteenth-century Venetian painters,
Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto, Paolo [Caliari] Veronese
(1528-1588) best conveyed Venice’s civic
splendor. His masterpieces in the Doge’s Palace
conferred on the Republic a magnificence and authority that was
rapidly dwindling by the end of the Renaissance. But on a
private level, he also reshaped the fashions of the Serenissima
through a steady stream of portrait commissions. Many members
of Venice’s most elite families sat for Veronese, as did
notable artists and authors, including Titian and Sir Phillip
Sidney. Once regarded as Venice’s best portraitist, his
talents in this genre unfortunately remain largely unknown to
modern audiences.
This book offers the first comprehensive study of the
approximately forty portraits that survive. Shedding new
light on early works, such as the pendants of the Da Porto and the
frescos of the Barbaro in the Palladian villa at Maser, Professor
Garton also examines Paolo’s images of women within the
larger polemics surrounding the anonymous beauties of Giorgione,
Palma il Vecchio, and Titian. The author analyzes
Veronese’s innovations in martial portraiture, melancholic
portrayals of artists and nobility, and evocations of the
antique. Relevant issues of social history, class insecurity,
and poetic convention are all brought to bear in deciphering the
meanings of these images and what they reveal about the painter and
his clientele. This layered study of Venice’s golden
age of painting ends appropriately with a glance at the
“moderns” who profited most from the study of
Veronese’s portraits: Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Henri
Fantin-Latour, Mary Cassatt, and Henri Matisse. A complete
catalogue of Veronese’s portraits follows the
chapters.
John Garton, Ph.D., is assistant professor of
liberal arts at the Cleveland Institute of Art.