Paolo Veronese: A Master and His Workshop in Renaissance Venice

This volume is the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition of the same name at The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida (December 2012-April 2013). Most of Veronese's greatest works are frescoes or enormous canvases decorating walls and ceilings in Venice, and they must be seen there, since they are far too large to be transported. But, as Virginia Brilliant, Curator of European Paintings at The Ringling and editor of the catalogue, points out, the range of examples of Veronese's art that can be assembled for an exhibition is quite broad enough to support a survey of his oeuvre as comprehensive as this one is. Surprisingly, it turns out that Veronese is so well represented in North America that this entire show of paintings, drawings, and prints could be put together from twenty-six public and some private collections in the US and Canada. Even more surprisingly, Sarasota turns out to be a logical place to mount a major Veronese exhibition, since it is home to a number of important canvases, including the most celebrated "Rest on the Flight to Egypt" (1572, the cover illustration), which was John Ringling's first purchase for his new museum--and his most fortuitous, it having been deaccessioned in 1925 from Munich's Alte Pinakothek in the mistaken belief that it was in fact by Veronese's son Carletto. That erroneous misattribution is a result of the circumstance that is the central thesis of this exhibition: that Veronese's work cannot be judged truly except in the context of his workshop productions. What is wholly autograph, what only partly so and what is mostly or even entirely workshop product is a vexing question in all Venetian bottega painting, but perhaps especially so in the case of Veronese, who ran one of the tighter organizations of the sort. It is illuminating and instructive to follow the experts' reasoning as they analyze the paintings and tease out the varying contributions.There are seventeen diverse scholarly essays by thirteen writers, some of whom (among them David Rosand, Frederick Ilchman, and John Garton) are familiar from recent Veronese studies. They range in topic from the artist's education in the workshop tradition and the organization of his own workshop to the iconography of his religious paintings to special studies of his drapery effects, a technical examination of his materials and techniques, etc. I found almost all of these pieces to be interesting and informative. There are seventy catalogue entries supported by eighty-seven companion illustrations and several detail studies, making the catalogue a much broader pictorial survey than the exhibition. The reproductions are for the most part sharp and in excellent color; the saturation of the jacket illustration is fairly representative of the whole. The apparatus includes an exhibition checklist with pertinent curatorial data, provenance, and selected references; a chronology of the artist's life; a bibliography of works cited; and a comprehensive index. This is not a huge volume (288 pages), but it is excellently edited, beautifully produced, and a substantial contribution to the literature on Veronese.

This has formed part of my preparation for the exhibition currently at the National Gallery. It will certainly be read again.