If, after boating through Venice to stand face to face in every corner of the city with this Michelangelo of the lagoons, we try to clear our conception of his art, the first impression is one of size and multitude, of enormous walls pullulating with human and animal forms, in a thousand degrees of beauty or ugliness, in a carnal confusion that has only this excuse, that it is life. This man who shunned and hated crowds saw them everywhere, and reproduced them with fierce veracity. He seems to have taken little interest in individuals; if he painted portraits it was frankly to earn a fee. He saw humanity in the gross, interpreted life and history in terms of masses of human beings struggling, competing, loving, enjoying, suffering; virile and comely, diseased and crippled, saved or damned. He covered canvases of awesome immensity, because only such expanses gave him scope to picture what he saw. While never completely mastering, as Titian did, the technique of pictorial art, he worked out for himself the method of these gigantic paintings, and to him above all is due the grandeur of the rooms in the Palace of the Doges. Therefore we must not ask of him any finesse of finishing. He is crude, rough, hurried, and sometimes creates a scene with a splash of the brush. His real fault is not this coarseness of surface—for even a coarse surface may illuminate significance—but the theatrical violence of the episodes he chooses, the unhealthy turbulence of his moods, the gloom in which he bathes the life he shows, and the tiresome repetition of his crowds; he was infatuated with number, as Michelangelo with forms and Rubens with flesh. And yet even in these multitudes what a wealth of meaningful detail, what accuracy and insight of observation, what inexhaustible individualization of the parts, what courageous realism where before there had only been imagination and sentiment!
Our final feeling in the presence of these pictures is one of affirmative response: this is art in the grand style. Other artists have painted beauty, like Raphael, or strength, like Michelangelo, or the depths of the soul, like Rembrandt; but here in these cosmic canvases—as in the roar of a city, or in mute masses at prayer, or in the troubled and affectionate intimacies of a thousand homes—is humanity. No other artist has ever seen it so large or pictured it so completely. Sometimes, silent before those fading walls in the Palace of the Doges or in the Confraternity of St. Roch, the canvases of better artists fall from our memory, and we feel that if he could have finished like a jeweler after so conceiving like a giant, the little dyer would have been the greatest painter of them all.
V. VERONESE: 1528–88
Let us honor, in passing, some stars of the second magnitude; they too were part of the luminosity of Venice. Andrea Méldola was a Slavonian, and received the name Schiavone. He studied with Titian, and made a pretty Galatea on a chest in the Castello of Milan. In a Jupiter and Antiope (Leningrad) and a Presentation of the Virgin (Venice) he essayed a larger form, and produced canvases of brilliant coloring. Artists praised him, patrons ignored him, and Andrea had to carry his bearded dignity in rags. —Paris Bordone was the son of a saddler and the grandson of a shoemaker; but in the admirable democracy of genius—which appears in every rank-he made his way almost to the top in a Venice teeming with talent. Coming from Treviso to study under Titian, he matured so rapidly that at the age of thirty-eight he was invited to Paris by Francis I. He turned out some excellent religious pictures, like The Baptism of Christ (Washington) and The Holy Family (Milan), and reached his high point in The Fisherman Presenting St. Mark’s Ring to the Doge (Venice); but the painting that has ferried him over the years is his Venus and Eros (Uffizi) —a stout blonde who uses a fine robe to reveal her breasts, while Cupid clamors for her attention.*—Iacopo da Ponte, called il Bassano from his birthplace, reached a modest fame and fortune when Titian bought his Animals Going into the Ark; he painted some good portraits—e.g., The Bearded Man (Chicago)—and managed to live to the age of eighty-two without leaving behind him any pictured humans not clothed from head to foot.
About 1553 there came from Verona to Venice a youth of twenty-five, Paolo Caliari, of a type contrasting sharply with Tintoretto: tranquil, friendly, sociable, self-critical, and only occasionally passionate. Like Tintoretto and nearly all educated Italians, he loved and practised music. He was generous and honorable, never offended a rival, never disappointed a patron. Venice called him il Veronese, and so the world knows him, though he adopted Venice as his home and one of his loves. He had many teachers in Verona, including his uncle Antonio Badile, who later gave him a daughter to wife; he was influenced by Giovanni Caroto and Brusasorci; but these factors in the development of his style soon faded in the warm brilliance of Venetian art and life. He never ceased to wonder at the changing skies playing their colors upon the Grand Canal; he marveled at the palaces and their tremulous reflections in the sea; he envied the aristocratic world of secure incomes, and artistic friendships, and gracious manners, and garments of silk and velvet almost more tempting to the touch than the beautiful women they enclosed. He wished himself an aristocrat; he dressed like one in lace and furs, and imitated the high code of honor that he ascribed to the Venetian upper class. He hardly ever painted poor people, or poverty, or tragedy; his aim was to put this bright and fortunate world of the Venetian rich upon immortal canvas, and make it fairer and finer than wealth without art could ever be. The lords and ladies, the bishops and abbots, the doges and senators, took to him fondly; and soon he was working on a dozen commissions.
As early as 1553, when he was only twenty-five, he was asked to paint a ceiling for the Council of Ten in the Ducal Palace. There, likening the Council to Jove, he pictured Jupiter Overthrowing the Vices, now in the Louvre. It was not especially successful; the heavy figures cavorted precariously in the air; Paolo had not quite caught the spirit of Venice. But two years later he found himself, and touched mastery, in painting The Triumph of Mordecai on the ceiling of San Sebastiano; the face and figure of the Jewish hero were forcefully rendered, and the horses breathe reality. Titian himself may have been impressed, for when the Procurators of St. Mark’s charged him to organize the decoration of the Libreria Vecchia with pictured medallions, he allotted three to Veronese, one each to other artists and himself. The Procurators offered a golden chain for the best medallion; Paolo won it with a representation of Music in the form of three young women—one playing a lute, another singing, a third intent upon her viola da gamba—and a Cupid at a harpsichord, and Pan puffing at his pipes. In some later pictures Veronese portrays himself wearing his golden chain.
Having acquired high repute for decorative painting, Paolo now received a lucrative assignment. The rich and lordly Barbaro family built in 1560 a luxurious villa at Macer, near that same Asolo where Caterina Cornaro played queen and Bembo played with Platonic love. The Barbari chose none but leading artists to make this “the finest pleasure house of the Renaissance”:35 Andrea Palladio to design it, Alessandro Vittoria to ornament it with sculptured stucco, Veronese to fresco the ceilings and walls, spandrels and lunettes with scenes from pagan and Christian mythology. On the vault of the central dome he pictured Olympus—the gods who knew all the joys of life but never grew old and never died. Amid ethereal scenes the impish artist introduced a hunter, a monkey, and a dog so perfect in its form and alert vitality as to be fit to be a hound of heaven. On one wall a painted page looked across a distance at a painted maid, and she at him, and for an immortal moment they too fed on ambrosia. It was such a pleasure palace as only the more refined taste of Kublai Khan’s Chinese could have surpassed.