Virginia Brilliant and Frederick Ilchman, eds. Paolo Veronese: A Master and His Workshop in Renaissance Venice Paolo Veronese: A Master and His Workshop in Renaissance Venice by Virginia Brilliant; Frederick Ilchman Review by: Susannah Rutherglen Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 3 (Fall 2013), pp. 981-983 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Renaissance Society of America Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/673609 . Accessed: 09/09/2013 17:29 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . The University of Chicago Press and Renaissance Society of America are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Renaissance Quarterly. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 108.28.30.226 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 17:29:17 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REVIEWS 981 Virginia Brilliant and Frederick Ilchman, eds. Paolo Veronese: A Master and His Workshop in Renaissance Venice. London: Scala Publishers, 2012. 288 pp. $30. ISBN: 978–1–85759–766–0. Paolo Veronese’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt, the centerpiece of a recent exhibition dedicated to the Venetian Renaissance master at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, justifies his long-standing reputation for bold grace and coloristic spectacle. Seated before a vibrant tropical jungle, the Holy Family is accompanied by angels, one of whom dangles from a palm tree to harvest dates, while others attend to the refugees and their donkey. Extravagantly folded and layered garments, iridescent wings, and varied figural attitudes lend the altarpiece an impression of splendid dynamism and magnificent surface pattern. However, further study reveals countless somber intimations of Christ’s Passion within this scene of joyous action at rest. Paolo Veronese: A Master and His Workshop in Renaissance Venice, organized by Virginia Brilliant with the assistance of Frederick Ilchman and other experts, aims through such close observation to overcome reflexive appreciations of the painter as superficially elegant or decorative. Veronese (1528–88) was praised by the seventeenth-century connoisseur Marco Boschini as a master of invention, but the intellectual depth and calculated meanings of his works have generally been neglected in favor of summary praise of their visual appeal. At the same time, recent restorations and technical studies of individual paintings make possible a deeper comprehension of the artist’s This content downloaded from 108.28.30.226 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 17:29:17 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 982 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY vaunted colorism, while clarifying problems of condition, dating, and attribution. This authoritative and searching exhibition appraises the full range of issues in Veronese scholarship, while bringing together much of the painter’s achievement in North American collections. The modern exhibition history of Veronese began with Rodolfo Pallucchini’s Mostra di Paolo Veronese of 1939 in Venice, where many of the artist’s vast paintings for civic and church settings remain in situ or in the Accademia galleries today. A 1972 exhibition in Birmingham and Montgomery, Alabama, featured Veronese’s works in American collections, but raised problems of quality and attribution. The 1976 catalogue raisonne of Terisio Pignatti paved the way for the international loan exhibition organized by William Rearick and Beverly Louise Brown at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in 1988, the 400th anniversary of the artist’s death. The Ringling exhibition is the first large-scale assessment of the artist in the United States since then, and has taken advantage of intervening discoveries by scholars such as Hans Dieter Huber, Xavier Salomon, Claudia Terribile, and Maria Elena Massimi. The catalogue opens with a survey of Veronese’s career by the distinguished scholar David Rosand. Beginning with the mainland upbringing of ‘‘Paolo Caliari da Verona,’’ the son of a stonecutter, Rosand explores the artist’s training and the emergence of leitmotifs in his oeuvre: his ‘‘predilection for asymmetrical design’’ (16); ‘‘the flight of Paolo’s brush . . . its impulse to assert an independence beyond merely mimetic responsibility’’ (17); and the painter’s aesthetic appropriation of architectural space, particularly in the newly restored paintings in the church of San Sebastiano (1555–56), where he was buried. The catalogue includes lucid introductions to the artist’s training and workshop practice, by Diana Gisolfi; mechanisms of his civic, church, and private commissions in Venice, by Blake de Maria; and the taste for Veronese in America, by Brilliant. Rather than belaboring a systematic catalogue of works on display, the volume comprises essays on portraiture, classical subject matter, altarpieces, and recurring religious themes. Paintings in the exhibition are interspersed with other relevant works from the artist’s corpus, rendering the book useful as a survey of Veronese, but sometimes generating confusion about the location and sequence of illustrations. Among the thematic essays, Inge Reist’s account of Veronese’s mythological and allegorical works stands out for its convincing analysis of the painter’s intellectual investment in his vocation, his sophisticated relationships with humanist patrons, and his immersion in the antiquarian culture of the Venetian mainland. Also noteworthy is Rembrandt Duits’s poetic and learned meditation on draperies in Veronese’s art, which emphasizes the technical expertise and aesthetic considerations underlying his ostensibly superficial textures, and also complements costume-oriented labels and fabric samples in the exhibition. The gallery installation, too, is conceptually organized according to themes rather than chronology, but is helpfully bookended by early and late works. It begins with the Ringling’s portrait of the nobleman Francesco Franceschini (1551), which is not only the earliest painting on view, but is also Veronese’s earliest dated This content downloaded from 108.28.30.226 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 17:29:17 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REVIEWS 983 full-length portrait: a type for which he would become well known, as explored in John Garton’s catalogue essay. The latest and last painting in the exhibition is the Baptism of Christ of ca. 1590 by the self-styled ‘‘heirs of Paolo Veronese,’’ his brother and sons, who assumed workshop responsibilities upon the master’s untimely death. The presence of this work, signed ‘‘Haeredes Pauli Facerunt,’’ emphasizes the fraught problems of attribution and dating throughout Veronese’s oeuvre, discussed in greater depth by Stephen Gritt in the catalogue. The exhibition includes a number of workshop paintings and a choice group of studio drawings, accompanied by an exemplary essay by John Marciari. These emphasize the collaborative nature of the Veronese atelier and the unified appearance of works bearing the master’s imprimatur, despite some predictable variations in quality. In this wide-ranging survey of works in the United States and Canada, the representation from many generous institutions was outstanding, although paintings were missing from Los Angeles and Baltimore. Among the most revealing loans to the exhibition was the workshop Venus and Adonis (Seattle Art Museum), whose recent restoration and technical study by Nicholas Dorman and Katie Patton clarified aspects of the master’s practice. This painting’s brilliant blues were achieved largely with azurite and ultramarine, whereas the skies of many other works in the exhibition are composed of glass-based smalt and have grayed considerably over time. Discriminations of color invisible to the overexposed modern eye would have been immediately evident to Veronese’s contemporary viewers, and the artist played upon their fine perceptions with consummate skill. Paolo Veronese thus suggests that both the content and the celebrated surfaces of the artist’s works are the product of a vigorous intelligence, meriting further investigation and informed appreciation. At the same time, this exhibition in an important regional venue draws attention to the fascinating permanent collection of the Ringling Museum and fosters public engagement with the Venetian Golden Age in an underserved region of the country. SUSANNAH RUTHERGLEN University of Toronto This content downloaded from 108.28.30.226 on Mon, 9 Sep 2013 17:29:17 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions