Great exhibitions /1 - from Leo n°27 written by Fabrizia Callegaro
Veronese at the Correr
At the Correr Museum in Piazza San Marco, from 13 February to 29 May 'Paolo Veronese: myths, portraits, allegories'. Arranged in collaboration with the Musée du Luxembourg, and curated by Giandomenico Romanelli and Claudio Strinati. Set up in the splendid rooms of the Napoleonic palace, the exhibition features some thirty masterpieces, mainly on secular subjects, which to date have not been exhibited in modern times. The works are from European and American museums and deal with mythological subjects, allegorical scenes and portraits. The admission ticket is also valid for the Veronese itineraries at the Biblioteca Marciana (St Mark's Library) and the Ducal Palace and, in collaboration with the Chorus Association, includes some important Venetian churches, including San Sebastiano with Veronese's celebrated cycle of paintings.
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Colours of the myth
Fabrizia Callegaro
In 1854, Eugène Delacroix wrote excitedly: 'There's a man who manages light without violent contrasts, who paints the plein-air, which was always said to be something impossible: this man is Paolo... I owe everything to Paolo Veronese.' This was the genial and surprising intuition of the founder of Romanticism, but a short time later the official critique discovered that Veronese applied the laws of complementary tones well before physics established its scientific principles. And Delacroix points out that, over two centuries before contemporary painting, Paolo abolishes black from the palette and utilizes coloured shadows, complementary and subordinate to the standard reference colour. Some would even discern in his brush strokes an anticipation of the pointillist
Some of the works displayed at the Museo Correr until 29 May
doctrine, though making the distinction that, in Veronese's art, nothing is mechanical, virtuoso, or complicated, but is purely instinctive, without schemes and guarded calculations. It is unsurprising therefore that the impressionists were fond of the painting of Paolo Veronese and with a particularly happy outcome for Renoir who, besides employing an endless range of pinks and blues, seems to share with the Veneto master a vital and sensual adherence to his subject. With the necessa-
ry caution, there is the temptation to compare the epic of Renaissance Venice to the similarly outstanding one of the Paris of the fin de siècle: Veronese and Renoir, trustworthy witnesses of an astonishing theatre of the world, sparkling with lights and a loud and an unabashedly worldly humanity. A world deliberately consigned to posterity through a poetic that entrusts everything to colour, as the most immediate and authoritative vehicle for sentiment. If the painted reality is by definition destined to suffer
the multifaceted attacks of history and the changes in taste, art can trust to time and to the abstract state of its passing. If Renoir's impressionism was a key factor in the creation of the legend of Paris, Veronese's colourist style was the undoubted artifice of the Myth of Venice; and it is indicative that both employ instantly comprehensible images, totally justifiable by their presence alone and with no need for meaning. It has been observed that Veronese carries Carpaccio's visual empiricism to extreme ends and that he transcends both the Veneta tonal tradition and Tintoretto's luminism. It has been ascertained that his provincial apprenticeship has refined any mannerist component and that the craft of mosaics might have influenced his pictorial technique. Leaving aside considerations made by the critics, the art of Paolo Veronese seems still utterly focused on that disconcerting phrase quoted from the minutes of
the Inquisition relative to the trial of 1573, when on being required to give an explanation for the buffoons, drunks, parrots, dwarves, Germans and like scurrility in his Last Supper, the painter replied: 'We artists take the same license as poets and madmen.'
August 2010 
