Paolo Veronese

Paolo Veronese was a Venetian painter of the High Renaissance and one of the supreme colorists in the history of Western art. Born Paolo Caliari around 1528 in Verona — from which city he took the name by which he is known — he trained in the Veronese workshop tradition before moving to Venice in the 1550s, where he would spend the remainder of his career and rise to become, alongside Titian and Tintoretto, one of the great triumvirate of late Venetian painting.\n\nVeronese was a master of large-scale decorative painting, celebrated above all for his sumptuous feast scenes — vast canvases filled with architecture, silks, animals, musicians, and hundreds of figures rendered with a lustrous palette of silver, gold, and cool blues that is entirely his own. His Wedding at Cana (1563), commissioned for the refectory of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice and now in the Louvre, is one of the largest paintings in existence. His treatment of religious subjects was so lavishly secular — filled with dwarfs, dogs, jesters, and contemporary Venetian dress — that in 1573 the Inquisition summoned him to explain why his Last Supper contained such inappropriate elements. His response was to rename the painting The Feast in the House of Levi, a practical solution that satisfied the tribunal.\n\nBeyond feasts, Veronese produced magnificent ceiling decorations, altarpieces, and mythological paintings — among them the allegorical cycle for the Doge's Palace and the frescoes at the Villa Barbaro at Maser, where he collaborated with the architect Palladio. His influence on later Baroque painters, particularly Rubens and Tiepolo, was immense, and his mastery of architectural space, pageantry, and color remains a benchmark of Western decorative painting. He died in Venice in 1588.