Venetian Splendours

 

This one is for my lovely friend Gia in honour of her recent holiday in Venice, which she kindly shared with us on Flickr!

I prised myself away from the World Cup to catch the Veronese exhibition at the National Gallery before it closed last weekend.  This had been billed in a lot of the media as one of the “must see” shows of the year in London but turned out to be a blockbuster which didn’t detonate- there was no shortage of tickets for any of the time slots and the galleries, though not exactly suffering from drifting tumbleweed syndrome, weren’t much busier than they would be on a normal summer Saturday afternoon (the exhibition was hung “round” the Gallery’s own resident Veroneses in the regular gallery space rather than the more standard approach of hosting it in the basement space in the Sainsbury wing).   I don’t quite know why it was something of a box office flop.  My guess is that Veronese isn’t quite as big a name for the ordinary punter as he is for the art critics, there aren’t many iconic images buried in the wider public consciousness that one can hang the marketing on and art dominated by references to Christian and Classical histories and mythologies which are increasingly a closed book to the average 21^st century British (and indeed “Western”) viewer is a bit of a specialised taste.  It doesn’t help that the allegories in some of the paintings on display are so obscure that even specialists can’t agree on what they’re supposed to mean and how they would originally have been displayed and I have to admit that I didn’t find the topics from Classical mythology entirely compelling myself.

Veronese’s life story was pretty uneventful- there’s very little “Agony and Ecstasy” there to spice the show.   He was born in 1528 in Verona, then one of the subject communities under the rule of the Venetian republic which dominated most of the north east of Italy from Bergamo right over to Trieste (what the Venetians called the Stato di Terraferma, as opposed to their Stato di Mare of colonial outposts in the Eastern Mediterranean).   There’s a small story over his name.  “Veronese” is a rather unimaginative nickname which he adopted once he’d moved to Venice.  The “official” name he used was Paolo Caliari, though that wasn’t strictly speaking his family name either.   This was Bazaro but Paolo and his brothers adopted the Caliari name from their mother, who was the illegitimate daughter of a minor noble family; presumably the hope was that this claim to higher status would help in business.   The Bazaros were a dynasty of stone cutters and carvers, so young Paolo grew up in an artistic environment; when it became clear his talents lay in the painting field he was apprenticed to local workshops in Verona (he eventually married the daughter of his first teacher).  His first big break came in his early twenties when a rather economy-minded Gonzaga cardinal, acting as regent of Mantua for his nephews, hired a clutch of young, and therefore cheap, artists to work on decorating the cathedral which had just been remodelled.   Young Paolo did well,  and began getting commissions across the Terraferma.   By 1555 he had moved to Venice, where he remained for the rest of his life picking up regular commissions from individual patrons, religious corporations and eventually the various Councils and Committees that ran the Venetian state.  Apart from a possible visit to Rome he never left the Venetian state; with one minor exception he appears to have led an untroubled and prosperous life, highly regarded by his artistic peers and a regular collaborator with the major architects of the day on prestige building projects.   He died rather suddenly in 1588.  

It was perhaps a good thing for his long term reputation that he died when he did and that the original plan for his younger brother to carry on the family business with Paolo’s sons foundered when the more talented of the offspring died a couple of years after his father.   The Veronese workshop was already having serious quality control issues in the 1580’s churning out uninspired copies of Paolo’s greatest hits, a situation not helped by his own apparent tendency to take on any commissions going at a time when he was already heavily committed to work on redecorating the Doge’s Palace after a major fire.   Veronese was a famously quick worker but one has a slight sense that he was overcommitting in the later years of his life. Admittedly he may have been in a bit of a bind.  Public commissions, however prestigious, were often problematic for a working artist as the Venetian state was not good at paying its bills on time; additional commissions and even hackwork studio copies were essential to keep the business cashflow going.  Nevertheless there is a sense that even the work he did in the Doge’s Palace was a notch or two below his best and he may have been on a downward path in terms of quality himself by then.   Obviously the inferior hackwork didn’t get into the National Gallery show (though it is discussed a bit in the exhibition book) but I have to admit I’m not generally so taken with his later works, mostly done in a very dark and gloomy palate which may have met Venetian taste of the time but didn’t fit Veronese’s talents anything like as well as the clearer, brighter colours of his prime.

As frequently happens with exhibitions focused on Renaissance art, there were obvious gaps in coverage.    None of his work in fresco was going to travel, which ruled out some of his large scale public commissions in Venice as well as the decorated ceilings he did in the rural villas of members of the Venetian elite.   Items which are integral parts of the decoration of major sites like the Doge’s Palace were not going to be on offer.   Italian parish churches fortunate enough not to have had their Veronese altarpieces looted by the French during the Napoleonic Wars are often understandably reluctant to loan them out now- it was remarkable that a couple of major pieces included had in  fact travelled from Italian churches.   A few notable pieces are simply so big that moving them is problematic- one factor presumably influencing the way the show was structured within the Gallery to avoid the need to move one of its centrepiece items even within the building.   Overall, though, it felt like a pretty fair overview of the man’s work.

He wasn’t a very prolific portraitist, for instance (at least not in terms of a straightforward depiction of a given sitter “as themselves”- he had other ways of catering to patrons’ desires to get into the picture) and, given the obvious prosperity and importance of his sitters, it’s surprising how many of the sitters in his Venetian years are either anonymous or have traditional identifications which are probably wrong.  The lady at the top of this piece is a good example; she’s customarily known as “La Bella Nani” on the mistaken assumption that she’s a member of the aristocratic Nani family.   In fact nobody really knows who she is.  It’s only a guess that she’s the respectable wife of a Venetian noble rather than one of Venice’s famed courtesans- the quality of her clothing and jewellery could point either way (and in both cases would probably have contravened the letter of Venetian sumptuary law which sought to regulate who could wear what and could be quite sniffy about even noblewomen wearing clothing this lavish).   The main argument against her being the latter seems to be the rather sexist one that she looks too modest and decorous in her bearing by comparison with portraits by other painters which are known to be of courtesans; this doesn’t seem particularly persuasive and the blonde hair could point the other way (it was pretty well a trade requirement for Venetian courtesans to be blonde, leading to a lively market in hair bleach).   Perhaps it doesn’t really matter- there was a lot more cross-influence in terms of style and fashion between the courtesan sub-culture and elite female looks than a male Venetian governing class with strong misogynistic tendencies was ever comfortable with.

 

 

One of Veronese’s brothers was in the textile trade (he’s listed as an “embroiderer” in a tax assessment, which probably means he ran a workshop rather than necessarily wielding the needle himself) and his son eventually went into the wool business after the painting workshop folded.   This professional link to the trade in fine cloth and embroideries perhaps gives a link to Veronese’s obvious love for depicting top quality textiles in all their glory, sheen and shimmer.   The double portrait of the nobleman Iseppo da Porto and his wife Lavinia Thiene from Vicenza and their children (painted fairly early in his career) beautifully bring out this aspect of his work.   Both are clad in the very height of fashion- the deep black of Iseppo’s clothing was extremely expensive to produce to the highest quality.   The fur stole over Lavinina’s arm was carried as a kind of fly whisk-cum- fly paper; it was believed that fur, especially the fur of the marten, drew vermin away from the body (an interesting commentary on the personal hygiene problems even of the elite in sixteenth century Europe).   The marten also had associations with childbirth (martens were believed to give birth without pain), so this may also indicate that Lavinia is pregnant. The adults look towards each other, an image of conjugal harmony.  The children, also dressed up to within an inch of their lives, seem to be treating the experience of having their portraits painted rather differently.  The little girl peers slightly warily from behind her mother’s skirts; her brother would clearly rather run off and play with her and has to be gently restrained by his father.   Veronese had an eye for children and it’s tempting to think that he was a loving father.

 

It’s also tempting to think that he may have been a dog person.   The picture above (again relatively early) has a couple of canines on display- the big docile fellow whom the little girls in the foreground are playing with and the spaniel puppy wriggling in the arms of their brother.   This is a rather extreme example of Veronese’s way of getting patrons into the frame.  Nominally this is a depiction of the meal at Emmaus, from Luke’s Gospel, where the resurrected Jesus reveals himself to a couple of disciples who had passed the time of day with him while walking to the town without realising who he was (the back story is squeezed into the left hand side of the picture).   In practice, however, this event from Scripture is played out before the reverential gaze (at least as far as the adults are concerned) of an unidentified noble family whose servants are doing the honours with the meal.  Inserting patrons into biblical events was not that uncommon and fitted into approaches to devotion which were positively encouraged by many churchmen but this wholesale annexation of a biblical event to the greater honour of the patrons is a bit extreme- I assume the paterfamilias must have insisted that he wanted his whole household to share in the spiritual benefits of his commission.  “Spot the patron” is however a popular game in many of Veronese paintings.

 

There is a distinct element of theatricality in this work, and that’s a common feature in many of Veronese’s paintings.   Time and again his works look like a moment out of a play, framed in a proscenium arch (or even a still from a film…..).   It’s perhaps not a coincidence that there was considerable intellectual interest in the staging of classical drama in Venice during Veronese’s life and what is arguably the first “modern” theatre to survive intact, the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, was completed during his lifetime.   It’s a bit more complex, however, as we are not the only audience in many of Veronese’s paintings- time and again the events they depict play out in front of an audience which is itself part of the painting, a busy and bustling world frozen in time.  One spectacular example of this is the National Gallery’s own “Family of Darius before Alexander”.   This was painted for the Pisani family and hung in one of their terraferma villas (and became part of a messy inheritance dispute when the man who commissioned it tried to cut his wife out of his will); in this case the bearded man centre stage presenting the supplicant women is favourite for “spot the patron”.  The scene is set in the Persian court after Alexander the Great’s victory at Issus and occupation of the royal palace.  The Persian queen and her daughters (as well as most of the court staff and servants, to judge from Veronese’s depiction), understandably worried about their fate, have gone out to plead for their lives with the new boss.  Unfortunately they mistake Alexander’s very good friend Hephaestion for the great man; luckily Alexander sees the funny side, forgives them and chivalrously takes them under his protection.   Interested spectators line the balustrades above the courtyard (no doubt mightily relieved that the Macedonians haven’t already sacked the palace).   To the right the armoured winners strike macho poses of domination, backed up by their dogs and even the head of Alexander’s massive horse Bucephalos; on the left the court dwarf and his spaniel huddles up with what I take to be a couple of court eunuchs guarded by a halberdier.   The contrast between masculine winners and feminised losers couldn’t be clearer.  What is less clear is who is who among the winners.   It’s usually assumed that the central figure in red is Alexander (probably on the argument that red is the royal colour so it must be him) but as far as I’m aware there’s no positive written evidence to confirm this and to my eye the body language points to the figure in armour in the right as the king, whose identity has just been revealed to the women.   Either way, there’s a lot of ambiguity here- and we as the audience are placed firmly on the same level as the feminised vanquished.  Veronese is often described as an unintellectual painter but this is a highly sophisticated and ambiguous theatrical effect- as well as a fine example of Veronese’s taste for depicting magnificence and courtly splendour in its full pomp.

This taste got him into the one tight spot recorded in his generally uneventful life- one which gives us a rare chance to hear the painter’s own voice.  He had been commissioned to paint a Last Supper for a Venetian monastery.   Veronese turned this into a Venetian patrician’s fantasy of a meal, in sumptuous surroundings with Jesus and his disciples almost lost among a host of liveried servants, buffoons, uniformed halberdiers, monkeys and so on.   The Venetian Inquisition took exception and hauled him in for interrogation.   This took a rather surreal turn at times- Veronese was pressed over the halberdiers, who were potentially German Lutheran heretics, for instance- and his answers to questioning on why he had included this or that decorative element were almost simple mindedly naïve and literal.   In the end he was released and the painting approved by the Inquisitors- but under the new name of “The Feast at the House of Levi” (on the argument that the biblical Levi, being a very rich man, would have lived in the style suggested in the painting).   You can still see it in the Accademia Gallery in Venice.  There’s been lots of speculation over this episode.  At one extreme it’s been suggested that Veronese was a crypto-Protestant (as, intriguingly, Isetto del Porto was).   At the other, his responses have fed the image of Veronese as a virtual simpleton without a coherent thought in his head.   My guess is that this does him a disservice- playing a bit dumb was a sensible tactic in the situation- but I very much doubt if he was seriously suspected of heresy.   The rules on what a painter could and couldn’t put into a religious painting were very much in flux in the 1570’s and neither the artist nor his questioners were on entirely sure ground.  The Council of Trent had certainly reaffirmed that religious paintings were acceptable in principle (as against much more restrictive Protestant views) but with some rather ill-defined qualifications whose implications were still being worked through when Veronese was interrogated.  One message emerging from the process was that “unnecessary” or “inappropriate” splendour was not allowed any more.

 

This didn’t rule magnificence out, of course, in the right place.   It was fine in an Adoration of the Kings, for instance and, as the example above shows, Veronese could do a suitably splendid Adoration (the exhibition in fact hung two that he had done for different Venetian patrons at about the same time in close juxtaposition- and they weren’t the carbon copies of each other that one might have expected even if there were some common elements).   In the version above the Bethlehem stable becomes a kind of jerry built lean-to extension of a set of massive classical ruins but the three kings are magnificently attired and come with the train of servants suitable to their rank (including a slightly improbable camel).  In addition to them, the Angelic Host provide an audience- as does someone hanging off the roof timbers of the shed.   It’s assumed he’s one of the shepherds, moved over to make way for their betters after leaving a couple of lambs in a cage which would certainly have animal rights enthusiasts in a fury.  By extension it’s also assumed that the figure in white with a similar soft felt hat in the bottom right is also a shepherd, though the author of the exhibition book notes that he must be the best dressed shepherd in art when one takes account of the quality of his clothes and I’m sure the dogs he’s holding never herded sheep in their lives; my guess is that he’s a royal huntsman with his lead dogs.    It’s interesting to note that, while the oldest king and his African colleague reappear in other Adorations and are presumably artist’s models (clearly it wasn’t too hard to find African faces even in a city like Venice somewhat removed from the Atlantic slave routes) the middle king varies.   “Spot the Patron”?

The post-Tridentine rules for religious painting favoured clarity and a degree of restraint in depicting miracles- as well as a certain modest stripping away of the more improbable apocryphal legends associated with certain saints.   The martyrdom of St George above perhaps fits into this mould.   The dragon is nowhere to be seen, long dead (or perhaps tamed, depending on the version).   Instead of glorying in the multiple martyrdoms inflicted on the saint as earlier depictions did (he was martyred seven times, using an ingenious variety of methods of torture but survived them all- in some popular versions rose seven times from the dead), we are at the moment just before the final, definitive, blow from the headsman’s sword.   The saint seems almost oblivious to the pagan priest going through the motions of exhorting him to worship Apollo; calm and composed, he has his eyes fixed on heaven where the saints are already interceding for him and whence an angel has been sent carrying his personalised martyr’s palm.   For all the brutality and anger on the faces around him, it’s a surprisingly calm and composed image without the blood and violence often associated with depictions of martyrdoms.   With the focus on saintly intercession it’s nicely theologically on message and one knows George will make a good end when the sword swings at his neck without having to see the gore.   It fits the churchly rules of the times- and possibly also Veronese’s temperament as he doesn’t seem to have relished the depiction of violence to anything like the same extent as some of his contemporaries.

Not everything Veronese did was on a large scale.  He also did smaller pieces more suitable to private devotions, like the depiction of St Helena’s dream above.   St Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine, was responsible for rediscovering what was believed to be the actual cross used for the Crucifixion of Jesus; the inspiration for undertaking this early example of Holy Land archaeology was believed to have come to her in a dream.    Again Veronese did more than one account of this theme and they looked radically different.   In the version shown here, a youthful looking and well-dressed lady sits by a window, resting her head on her hand; above her, cherubs heave a cross across her putative line of sight.   There’s nothing to show explicitly that she’s the mother of the Roman Emperor (unlike another version in which she’s clad in royal robes and wears an imperial crown) and she seems to be daydreaming rather than deep in slumber.  The cherubs look as if they’re being hoisted into the flies of a theatre, after playing their role in a piece of devotional drama.  The overall atmosphere is calm and we as viewers are privileged to spectate on the dissolution of the barriers between the visible and invisible; by inference, this can happen to anyone with enough faith, not just the very great and putatively good.

The final piece nicely ties some of these devotional themes together- even if it does come from the late, dark-toned, period.   This was done for the church of St Pantalon in Venice.  St Pantalon isn’t a big name in Western Christianity; he’s a much more familiar figure in the Orthodox world and his presence underlines Venice’s role as cultural intermediary between Christian traditions as well as between Christian and Islamic worlds.   According to legend, he was a medical doctor who converted to Christianity after healing a child through use of a Christian prayer.   Here he is shown about to perform the miracle; he looks upwards for heavenly assistance while a mutilated statue of a pagan deity averts its gaze with what looks like a faintly sardonic expression on its face.   Pantalon’s young assistant offers him his usual medical kit, not required in this case.   The child lies across the knees of an older man in clerical dress.  This is in fact a portrait of the priest who had commissioned the work for his church (“”spot the patron…”)- somewhat daring as this kind of self-glorification by someone of only modest importance was rather frowned on in Venetian church circles.  His presence does however underline the importance of the priesthood in linking heaven and earth as well as its important social and charitable role, all points stressed by the Council of Trent.  Veronese was back on message…