Paolo Veronese (1528-1588)

Paolo Veronese, Susannah and the Elders, c. 1580, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.

The first major monographic exhibition in Spain devoted to Paolo Veronese, this exhibition highlights the pictorial intelligence of a superlative artist who created a unique formal universe; a painter with an all-embracing concept of art that encompassed an infinite number of aesthetic and cultural references which he expressed with enormous formal and conceptual freedom.

Veronese was active at a critical time for Venice, when religious tensions were surfacing and the first signs of an economic and political decline were becoming evident, all masterfully camouflaged by the brushes of an artist who decisively contributed to capturing in images the "myth of Venice" that has survived to this day. Furthermore, like all great artists, Veronese transcended his own time. The beauty and elegance of his compositions captivated collectors and artists for centuries, from Philip IV and Louis XIV to Rubens, Velázquez, Delacroix and Cézanne.

These and other themes are reflected in the exhibition through more than 100 works loaned from prestigious international institutions, including the Musée du Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery, London, the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. These works establish dialogues with key paintings from the Prado’s own collection.

With Paolo Veronese(1528-1588) the Prado is concluding an ambitious programme of research, restoration and exhibitions initiated more than two decades ago and devoted to Venetian Renaissance painting, the foundation stone of the former royal collection and the current Museo del Prado.

The exhibition Paolo Veronese (1528-1588) represents the culmination of a lengthy process of research and reassessment of the Museo del Prado's Venetian painting collection, one of the most important in the world and a cornerstone of the former Spanish royal collection. Following the successful exhibitions dedicated to The Bassanos in Golden Age Spain (2001), Titian (2003), Tintoretto (2007), and Lorenzo Lotto. Portraits (2018), this latest exhibition completes an exceptional survey of Venetian painting of the Renaissance.

The exhibition is structured into six, alternating chronological and thematic sections. The first, From Verona to Venice, focuses on the artist’s training in his native Verona, a city with a rich Roman past in which the local artistic tradition coexisted with contributions from Venetian artists (particularly Titian) and Central Italian ones such as Raphael and Parmigianino. From these starting points Veronese soon developed his own style, characterised by formal and compositional elegance and contrasting colours, which facilitated his triumphant appearance in Venice in 1551. The second section, “Maestoso teatro”. Architecture and stage design, addresses Veronese’s approach to understanding space and presenting narratives - in which he combined the Venetian tradition and the theatrical and architectural ideas of Palladio and Daniele Barbaro - and compares it with the alternative vision embodied by Tintoretto and with Serlio’s ideas on staging. There is a particular focus on the celebrated Suppers, sumptuous manifestations of the refinement and material culture of the Venetian patricians. The third section, Creative process. Invention and repetition, focuses on Veronese's pictorial intelligence and his approach to heading one of the most prolific and best studios of the day. This was the case due to a rigorous control of the creative process and a judicious distribution of functions within the studio, in which drawing was fundamental. The fourth section, Allegory and mythology, reveals the artist’s outstanding abilities in two fields particularly appreciated by the social elites: allegory and mythological fable, in which Veronese revealed himself as the only artist capable of competing with Titian, which allowed him to inherit his powerful clientele, both inside and outside Venice. The fifth section, Late Veronese, analyses his final decade and reveals a notable shift in his painting, with unstable compositions painted in a more somber palette and with a focused and often symbolic use of light, works in which the landscape acquires a new prominence. This change, which heralds the great pictorial achievements of the Baroque, was a response to various factors: some aesthetic, such as the impact of the contemporaneous work of Tintoretto and Jacopo Bassano; and others "contextual," such as the religious climate following the Council of Trent. The exhibition concludes with a section on the artist’s legacy, entitled “Haeredes Pauli" and Veronese's admirers. These were on the one hand family members, who for a decade continued to mechanically reproduce his models under the name "Haeredes Pauli", and on the other, artists of true ability who assimilated and disseminated his legacy. The exhibition centres on those who immediately followed him, such as El Greco, the Carracci brothers and Peter Paul Rubens, but Veronese’s status as a "painters’ painter" continued into the 20th century and includes artists as diverse as Velázquez, Tiepolo, Delacroix and Cézanne. The exhibition concludes by recalling his privileged position within European collecting, the ultimate reason for his outstanding representation in the collections of the Museo del Prado.

The exhibition Paolo Veronese (1528-1588) thus offers visitors a unique opportunity to gain a detailed vision of the work of one of the most brilliant and dazzling artists of the European Renaissance, which is essential for both an understanding of the artistic taste of the social elites of the time and the artist’s decisive influence on Spanish Golden Age painting.