Veronese, Paolo

orig. Paolo Caliari

(born 1528, Verona, Republic of Venice—died April 9, 1588, Venice) Italian painter. Son of a stonecutter from Verona, he was apprenticed at 13 to a painter. After 1553, when he received the first of many commissions in Venice, he became a major painter of the 16th-century Venetian school, a group of Renaissance artists known for their splendid use of colour and pageantlike compositions. His first works in Venice, ceiling paintings for the Doges' Palace, employ skillful foreshortenings that make figures appear to be floating in space. He decorated the villas and palaces of the Venetian nobility and received many commissions for frescoes, altarpieces, and devotional paintings, including numerous “suppers” (e.g., The Pilgrims of Emmaus and Feast in the House of the Pharisees) that allowed him to compose large groups of figures in complex Renaissance architectural settings. In decorating a villa built by Andrea Palladio at Maser (c. 1561), he brilliantly interpreted its architectural structure, breaking through the walls with illusionistic landscapes and opening the ceilings to blue skies with figures from Classical mythology. Whimsical details in his Last Supper (commissioned 1573) caused him to be summoned before the Inquisition. Painters from the 16th century on were inspired by his use of colour to express exuberance as well as to model form.

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