Splendid hedonism: Peter Humfrey reviews an exhibition of Veronese's secular art, which transfers from Paris to Venice later this month

Apollo, Feb, 2005 by Peter Humfrey

The magnificent sensuousness of the art of Paolo Veronese sometimes makes it easy to forget that the great majority of his paintings are religious in content. True, the religious message of Veronese's sacred pictures may often be more serious and thoughtful than we might realise at first sight; (1) even so, the abiding impression left by a masterpiece of his middle career, such as the huge Wedding Feast at Cana of 1562-63 in the Louvre, is of a splendid hedonism.

A decade later, as the religious reforms promoted by the Council of Trent began to bite, the painter was summoned before the Inquisition: not, surely, as two of the contributors to the catalogue of the present exhibition suggest (pp. 33, 111), because he was suspected of holding dangerously heretical opinions, but simply because of the worldly irreverence with which he had treated a theme so central to the Catholic faith as the Last Supper.

In the end, not only was he not prosecuted, he was allowed to install his painting in the refectory of the Dominican house of SS Giovanni e Paolo without making a single alteration, except to the title. As a representation of the doctrinally much less sensitive subject of the feast in the house of Levi, Veronese's richly festive painting (Accademia, Venice) was evidently still deemed to be perfectly acceptable for a convent of friars. Only later, in the 1580s, did his religious works become more sober in mood, and more explicitly pious in expression.

Yet if Veronese enjoyed a highly successful career as a religious painter, both before and after the episode of 1573, there is no doubt that his particular talents were ideally suited to the demands of mythological and allegorical painting. His ability to conjure up the most magical effects of light, colour and texture, and the refinement with which he was able to combine eroticism with emotional poignancy, made him equally effective as a teller of Ovidian tales of the loves of the gods, and as a glorifier through allegory of the Venetian government's pursuit of peace and prosperity. Perhaps not quite on the same superlative level of accomplishment, but nevertheless making a distinguished and original contribution, is Veronese's work in a third area of secular painting, that of portraiture.

The idea of an exhibition on the 'profane' Veronese is, in short, a good one, and the organisers, Giandomenico Romanelli and Claudio Strinati, have succeeded in assembling a very attractive group of thirty-one paintings, together with eleven drawings. Of course, most of Veronese's finest allegorical paintings remain in situ, above all on the ceilings of the Doge's Palace and Marciana Library. Nevertheless, effectively representing Veronese's activity as a painter of allegorical ceilings are three early, delicately executed canvases from Rome (Vatican and Capitoline Museums), which apparently originally decorated a ceiling of Palladio's Palazzo da Porto in Vicenza; the more mature and opulent Venice with Hercules and Neptune of c. 1575 from Budapest; and a sheet of studies from Kassel for the Venice enthroned fresco on the ceiling of the Anticollegio in the Doge's Palace.

Similarly, many of the greatest mythologies could not be lent. Among the most notable absences are the Venus and Mars united by Love in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hermes, Herse and Aglauros in the Fitzwilliam

Museum and the two versions of the Venus and Adonis, the earlier in Augsburg and the later in the Prado. Present, however, are three sparkling little friezes from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, one of them providing a serenely idyllic rendering of the Diana and Actaeon story; (2) the delightfully humorous Mars and Venus from Turin, in which Cupid arrives with Mars's horse just as the lovers are getting to the point; the touchingly melancholy Death of Procris from Strasbourg; and, most impressive of all, The rape of Europa from the Doge's Palace. In the exhibition this ravishing painting is much more legible than in its usual home, and certain details become much more evident, such as the dog on the far left, and the head of a second bovine at the far right (is the latter a cow, perhaps jealous of the attention that the white bull is paying to Europa?).

Another large-scale mythology--or perhaps mythological allegory--to be brought into focus by the exhibition is the Venus and Mercury with Eros and Anteros from the Uffizi. In the catalogue entry Filippo Pedrocco dates the picture to c. 1560-65, but stylistically it seems closer to Veronese's documented works of c. 1555, with their light colour range and relatively smooth pictorial handling. Since Veronese's pictures are sometimes difficult to date accurately within two decades or more, it may seem petty to quibble about the odd five or eight years; but in this case the matter is important, because on it depends the entire question--not properly raised in the catalogue--of the chronological relationship of Veronese's mythologies to the celebrated poesie painted by Titian for King Philip II of Spain during the course of the 1550s. Until then, very few Venetian patrons commissioned large-scale mythologies for their palaces; thereafter, they became much more common. Veronese made a major contribution to this process; but how dependent was he on the example of Titian?