Part 1 (1/2)

Veronese.

by Fr. (Francois) Crastre.

INTRODUCTION

It has been said of Veronese that he was the most absurd and the most adorable of the great painters. Paradoxical as it sounds, this judgment is perfectly true. Absurd, Veronese undoubtedly was, in his disdain of logic and common sense, in his complete indifference to historic truth and school traditions, and in his anachronistic habit of garbing antiquity in modern raiment. ”I paint my pictures,” he said, ”without taking these matters into consideration, and I allow myself the same license which is granted to poets and to fools.” And it is precisely his riotous fantasy, his nave self-confidence, his own peculiar way of understanding mythology and religion that have made him the adorable artist whose glory has been consecrated by the centuries.

Thanks to the rare power of his genius, the most audacious improbabilities vanish beneath the magic adornments with which he covers them, and it hardly occurs to one to notice his glaring historical errors or the superficialities of his pictorial conceptions in the continual delight inspired by the sense of concentrated life in his characters, the splendour of his colouring, the caressing charm of his draperies, the brilliance of his skies, and the impression of youth and of joy that radiates from his work. Veronese was neither a thinker nor an historian, nor a moralist; he was quite simply a painter, but he was a very great one. If his preference is for the joyous scenes of life, that is because life treated him indulgently from his earliest years; if he delights in giving to his pictures a sumptuous setting, in which silk, brocades and precious vases abound, it is because he acquired a taste for these things in that matchless Venice of the sixteenth century, marvellous treasury of sun-bathed, gaily bedecked palaces, wherein all the opulence of the East had been brought together. What these paintings of Veronese reproduce for us are the thick, rich carpets of Smyrna, newly unladen from Musselman _feluccas_, monkeys imported from tropic islands, greyhounds brought from Asia, and negro pages purchased on the Riva dei Schiavoni, the Quay of the Slaves, to bear the trains of the patrician beauties of Venice. But, above all, one finds in them Venice herself, Venice the Glorious, queen of the sea, Venice sated with gold and lavish of it, sowing her lagunes broadcast with palaces, and the robes of her women with diamonds. More truly than t.i.tian or Tintoretto, Veronese is the chosen painter of the Most Serene Republic. He not only decorated the ceilings of her palaces and the walls of her churches: but he took the city of his adoption as the setting for all his compositions; it is at Venice that the _Feast at the House of Simon the Pharisee_, the _Feast at the House of Levi_ take place; it is in Venetian surroundings that Jesus presides over the _Wedding Feast at Cana_.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE II.--THE DISCIPLES AT EMMAUS

(In the Musee du Louvre)

This biblical scene, as treated by Veronese, in no wise resembles the same subject as treated by the Primitives or by Rembrandt. The Venetian Master does not trouble himself about tradition; for him, this Feast is simply an opportunity for a beautiful picture, brilliant in colour, and embellished with rich accessories and architectural drawing.]

One can understand how the painters of the Venetian school, nurtured in the dazzling and joyous light of the sea-born city, transferred to their palette that vibrant colour with which their artist eyes were filled; nor is it surprising that Veronese, pa.s.sionately enamoured of Venice, achieved, through his wish to glorify her, that magnificence of colour and of expression which remains his distinctive mark.

THE FIRST YEARS

Nevertheless, Veronese was not a native of Venice but of Verona, as is indicated by the surname that was bestowed upon him during his life and that has adhered to him ever since. His rightful name was Paolo Caliari. He was born at Verona in 1528 and not in 1530, as is a.s.serted by several of his biographers, notably by Carlo Ridolfi. The correct date is now verified by the discovery, in San Samuele of Venice, Veronese's parish church, of the register of deaths wherein the decease of the great painter is entered as having occurred the 19th of April, 1588, the very day when he completed his sixtieth year.

Paolo Caliari belonged to a family of artists. His father, Gabriele Caliari, was a sculptor and enjoyed some little reputation in his own city. Veronese's uncle, Antonio Badile, was a painter, and in such pictures as are known to be his we find evidence not only of a good deal of ability, but of a certain facile grace that justifies the high esteem in which his compatriots held him.

Veronese's father, being of a logical turn of mind, wished, since he himself was a sculptor, to make a sculptor of his son. Veronese learned to model statuettes in clay, and, aided by his precocious intelligence, he acquired a real dexterity in this art, quite remarkable in one so young.

But this was not his vocation. Frequent visits to the studio of his uncle Badile had awakened in him an enthusiasm for painting. He applied himself to learn to paint with so much zeal and imagination that his father made no attempt to check his inclination, but entrusted him to Badile. The latter was Veronese's real teacher, though not the only one, for young ”Paolino” also attended the studio of another Veronese painter, Giovanni Carotto.

From the outset, Veronese applied himself energetically to perfecting his skill in line drawing. The future genial painter of wondrous fantasy yielded himself without a murmur to the rude but salutary exigencies of technique. Strange caprice on the part of an artist who was destined to show so much dexterity in execution and lavishness in decoration, his tastes turned towards the most severe and least imaginative of masters, Albert Durer and Lucas Van Leyden. It was through copying the engravings of these ill.u.s.trious masters that he learned how to draw. Such lessons always bear their fruit. In this laborious apprentices.h.i.+p, Veronese acquired that steadiness of hand, that firmness of line that was later to be noted even in his most exuberant paintings, despite the enormous quant.i.ty of canvases that he produced in the course of his life.

Even his earliest attempts reveal his abundant and facile genius; and these first, and one might almost say immature, works already foreshadow the great artist. The affectionate patronage of his uncle Badile greatly facilitated his debut. At an age when young folk have not usually begun to form dreams of the future, young Caliari had already forced himself upon the attention of Verona, and the Chapter of the Church of San Bernardino commissioned him to paint a Madonna.

He acquitted himself well of this task. The work proved satisfactory, other orders followed, and the name of the young artist swiftly spread beyond the confines of his native city. A short time later, the cardinal Ercole di Gonzaga decided to decorate the cathedral at Mantua, recently rebuilt by Giulio Romano. He sent a summons to Caliari, as well as to three other Veronese painters who enjoyed a big reputation: Battista del Moro, Paolo Farinato degli Uberti, and Brusasorci, who was regarded as the t.i.tian of Verona. The cardinal inst.i.tuted a sort of rivalry between these four artists, and gave them orders for four pictures, destined to be compet.i.tive. The subject entrusted to Paolo Caliari was a representation of the _Temptations of St. Anthony_. The young painter applied himself resolutely to the task. Far from intimidating him, the redoubtable compet.i.tion of his three elders served only to excite his ardour and stimulate his imagination. He painted the saintly anchorite defending himself against the blows which the Devil is dealing him with a stick and repulsing the advances of a woman who has been raised up from h.e.l.l itself to tempt him. The cardinal, delighted with this picture, gave preference to Veronese over his three compet.i.tors.

Veronese lost no time in returning to Verona, but, however flattering the esteem with which his compatriots surrounded him might be, he was not long in finding that the limited scope afforded by his native city was too narrow for his activity. He had a boyhood friend, Battista Zelotti, a painter like himself, and also like himself tormented by dreams of glory. Together they quitted Verona and betook themselves to Tiene, in the duchy of Vicenza. Here they had the good luck to meet a man of discrimination, in the person of the paymaster-general Portesco, who entrusted them with the decoration of his palace. The two friends apportioned the work between them; while Zelotti, who had studied at Venice under t.i.tian, undertook the fresco painting, Veronese decorated the intervening panels in _grisaille_, or gray monochrome. The result of this friendly collaboration was a complete series of paintings, of great diversity: hunting scenes, banquets, dances and numerous subjects borrowed from mythology or from history, the _Loves of Venus and Vulcan_, the _Heroism of Mucius Scaevola_, the _Festival of Cleopatra_, and a remarkable _Sophonisba_. This work in common was not without profit to Veronese. Zelotti's manner closely resembled his own; they both show the same qualities of colouring and composition, and the same broad and facile touch.

They collaborated once again on fresco work in the home of a certain Eni, in the village of Fanzolo, in the neighbourhood of Trevise. After this they separated, Zelotti going to Vicenza, whither he had been summoned, while Caliari betook himself to Venice, the Promised Land towards which he was impelled by his ardent desire for glory.

When he arrived in the Most Serene Republic, Caliari was not yet twenty-five years old. We have no reliable doc.u.ment regarding these first years of his residence there, nor even of the impressions produced upon him by the opulent and magnificent city. But these impressions are easy to conceive. To anyone so sensitive as he to externals, Venice must have seemed enchanted ground. How could he have failed to be dazzled, in acquainting himself with that gorgeous city, enthroned upon the Adriatic, like a pearl in a casket of velvet? With what joyous eagerness his colour-enraptured eye must have rested upon those white marble palaces, moulded and filagreed in arabesque, those churches paved with precious mosaics, those quays swarming ceaselessly with a picturesque and motley crowd of Armenians, Greeks and Moors, spreading the sun-bathed pavements with a glittering display of spangled ornaments, turquoise-inlaid cutlery, and multicoloured fabrics.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE III.--THE HOLY FAMILY

(In the Musee du Louvre)

In this work, one of the most beautiful in the Salon Carre, Veronese has grouped his figures in a charming manner. Following his customary formula, he has clothed them in the Venetian style, but the faces of the Virgin and the Child are remarkable for their tenderness. It is a matter of regret that time has faded the colours of this magnificent painting.]

If the models that pa.s.sed in endless procession before his eyes impressed him as magnificent opportunities, the sight of what other painters had already wrought from this material aroused his artist soul to keen enthusiasm. The whole constellation of the great Venetians had converted the city of the Doges into an incomparable museum: Giorgione, with his melancholy compositions, full of vague dreams; Carpaccio, with his nave and picturesque reproductions of Venetian life. Among the living, Sansovino, simultaneously architect and artist, who built marvellous palaces and adorned them with graceful frescoes; Tintoretto, sombre genius whose creative power largely redeemed the somewhat obscure tints of his palette; and above them all, t.i.tian, the great t.i.tian, who at that time was already eighty years of age, yet still manipulated his brush with the firm hand of youth.