16th century AD

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 2001 by Allison Fukardt Ledes

Paolo Veronese was one of the most gifted easel painters and fresco artists working in Italy in the sixteenth century. His exquisite, highly illusionistic frescoes that adorn some of Andrea Palladio's villas in the Veneto region are marvels of trompe-l'oeil painting. Critical opinion of his work has undergone the vicissitudes of prevailing tastes in art. He was praised in his own lifetime by the artist and chronicler Giorgio Vasari, while the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds pronounced his work too ornamental. The writer and artist John Ruskin admired the witty sense of humor in his art, and Bernard Berenson, the writer and erstwhile dealer (who steered many works to the legendaay Isabella Stewart Gardner), adored the joyfulness and lyrical quality of his paintings.

Gardner's Venetian-style palazzo, erected on Boston's Fen way Court between 1899 and 1901, contains a large ceiling painting by Veronese entitled The Coronation of Hebe, which can now be seen in all its glory after recent extensive conservation. The work was executed in Veronese's studio in the 1580s for a ceiling in the della Torre palace in Udine, Italy, where it remained until the eighteenth century. Veronese's two sons, Carlo and Gabriele, and his brother Benedetto Caliari, were employed in his workshop at the time the picture was executed.

Gardner purchased the painting in 1899 and set it into a painted and gilded coffered ceiling in what is known as the Veronese Room. She arranged the room to resemble a Venetian antechamber, or private salone, and it contains many Venetian objects as well as paintings and pastels by James McNeil Whistler. The Veronese is so large that it does not fit through the doors of the room and therefore had to be conserved in situ.

Also of great interest in the Veronese Room are the painted leather wailcoverings, which date from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Gardner scoured Europe for them between 1892 and 1901. She found more than five hundred leather panels made in France, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands, which comprise some twenty-seven different types, making this room an encyclopedic collection that has no parallel in the United States. While most of the panels were made to embellish walls in domestic settings, some were altar frontals. These were changed, much like a priest's vestments, according to different events in the church calendar.

Since their installation a century ago, many of the panels had suffered from extremes in humidity, which caused tears and wrinkles. All the panels were removed for conservation in stages beginning in 1997. Because the majority of them are painted and decorated with silver leaf (often treated with a yellow-toned varnish to simulate gold leaf) conservation was laborious.

The techniques for making what is often called Spanish gilt leather are believed to have Arabic origins. Muslim craftsmen emigrated from North Affica, and by the fourteenth century, Cordoba, Spain, was the center for this craft. In the sixteenth century many Muslim leather workers left Spain for Venice, where they continued their trade. In the seventeenth century the Netherlands became a center of production and the Dutch introduced the use of large wooden and metal molds, which expedited embossing and saved time and expense.