Early Work
The painters of Verona from about 1510 and 1540 favored firm, clearly defined objects, strong, highly contrasting colors, and conventionalized figures. Veronese combined these elements of the local High Renaissance style with elements of Mannerism, including complex compositional schemes that often employ a so-called worm's-eye view perspective and figures reminiscent of those of Italian artist Michelangelo, in powerful foreshortened or contorted poses. The resulting combination of styles and influences was handled with increasing mastery in the Temptation of St. Anthony, done for the Cathedral of Mantua in 1552 (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Caen, France), and ceiling paintings (1553-1554) for the Doge's Palace (Palazzo Ducale), Venice.
Mature Style
The first phase of Veronese's artistic maturity, about 1555 to 1556, is well represented by his many canvases for the Church of San Sebastiano in Venice. Their interweavings of brilliant, luminous hues are harmonies of contrast (artful blending of contrasting colors) in the tradition of Verona rather than Venetian harmonies of tone. The striking compositions often involve multileveled settings and dramatically steep perspectives, especially effective in the ceiling paintings. Veronese's fresco decoration (1561) of the Villa Barbaro at Maser, the one such cycle by him to survive, comes from this period. Here he extended the actual architecture of the villa (1555-1559), built by Italian architect Andrea Palladio, with painted illusory architecture and populated these illusions with both mythological figures and fictional representations of the villa's real inhabitants.
Veronese's growing interest in the artistic representation of architecture, inspired partly by the real architecture of such contemporaries as Palladio and partly by contemporary theater stage settings, is evident in his vast Marriage at Cana (1562-1563, Louvre, Paris), virtually a cityscape in which figures receive only incidental attention. The painting initiated a series of paintings of biblical feasts, which Veronese represented in terms of opulent Venetian patrician life with actual portraits included. In 1573 Veronese was charged with impiety by the Holy Office of the Inquisition for his painting The Last Supper, a depiction of Jesus Christ and his disciples in a grand Venetian gallery adorned with animals, clowns, and other colorful figures. Ordered to make alterations to the elaborate work, Veronese instead changed the name of the painting to Feast in the House of Levi (1573, Accademia, Venice).
The work of Veronese's full maturity, from about 1565 to 1580, is marked by quieter, more classical compositions, an even greater feeling of formality, and still more dazzling light and color harmonies. This resplendent style is occasionally modulated into a lowered tonality, as in The Crucifixion (1572, Louvre). Such paintings, in which a new emotional commitment to the subject appears, were more frequent toward the end of his career. By about 1583, he was representing luminous twilight rather than noonday splendor, and festivity was replaced by seriousness in his works. The moonlit Pietà (1585, Hermitage, Saint Petersburg, Russia) is an example. From this period, however, comes the most overwhelming of his ceiling paintings, the Triumph of Venice in the Doge's Palace (Palazzo Ducale) in Venice. Here, Venice, personified, floats on clouds halfway up a towering, two-tiered architectural construction thronged with people, all seen from below in steep perspective against a sapphire-colored sky.
Veronese died in Venice. Although highly successful during his life, he had little immediate influence. To Flemish baroque master Peter Paul Rubens and to 18th-century Venetian painters, especially Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, however, Veronese's handling of color and perspective supplied an indispensable point of departure.