Paolo Veronese by ACC Art Books

“Abiti gravi, abiti stravaganti”: Veronese’s Creative Approach to Drapery REMBR ANDT DUITS

“The painter of beautiful things.” Thus is Paolo Veronese qualified in the great panegyric of Venetian painting published by Marco Boschini in 1660, La carta del navegar pitoresco (The Map of Painting’s Journey).1 Indeed, Veronese’s paintings are filled with beautiful things, from sumptuous silverware to shining silk fabrics. And the master excelled at representing the materials and textures of these riches in a way that engages the viewer with loose brushwork and clever play with the effects of light, while at the same time making the material presence of the objects strongly felt. This talent of his appears to have been highly appreciated from his own time until well into the nineteenth century. In 1843, John Ruskin, responding to Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana in the Louvre (fig. 1), wrote that “from the simplicity of Greek design, concentrating, I suppose, its skill chiefly on the naked form, the course of time developed conditions of Venetian imagination which found nearly as much interest, and expressed nearly as much dignity, in the folds of dress and fancies of decoration as in the faces of the figures themselves.”2 Ruskin also warns, however, against reducing the work of Veronese to a show of costumes and accessories: “Take out the faces; leave the draperies, and how then? Put the fine dresses and jewelled girdles into the best group you can: paint them all with Veronese’s skill: will they satisfy you?”3 These remarks by Ruskin seem to indicate a turning point in the reputation of the master. The presence in his work of so many 50

“Abiti gravi, abiti stravaganti”: Veronese’s Creative Approach to Drapery REMBR ANDT DUITS

beautiful things beautifully rendered has met with a problematic reception in modern art history. It has earned the painter a reputation of being “decorative” and his paintings of lacking the seriousness of high drama. In his 1976 monograph on the painter, Teresio Pignatti writes of the “great mantles in green and red, pink, blue…” which demonstrate that “Paolo remains fundamentally a great decorator.”4 Kurt Badt, in his 1981 study on Veronese, labels the artist as the creator of a “fairy-tale style” halfway between solemn tragedy and farcical comedy.5 Only recently have there been signs of a renewed interest in the “beautiful things” Veronese was actually depicting.6

Drapery as Invention The discrepancy between modernist expectations of art and Veronese’s original intentions is perhaps particularly apparent with drapery. Veronese obviously took delight in the representation of luxurious fabrics and their use as props in his compositions. To the modern eye this may seem trivial, but writers on art from the artist’s own time onward seem to have thought of his draperies as an important aspect of his artistic talent. Giorgio Vasari, in the few remarks he devotes to Veronese in the second, 1568 edition of his Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori (Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects), remarks about the Wedding Feast at Cana that it was “a marvelous work on account of its size, the number of figures, the variety of costumes, and the inventiveness [of the artist]…”7 The Netherlandish author Karel van Mander (the “Dutch Vasari”), referring to the same painting in his Het schilder-boeck (Book of Painting) of 1604, adds that the canvas is “very rich in its arrangement of figures and amazingly well painted. It contains sumptuously beautiful architecture, a dresser or Credenza, with many good jars and jugs of gold and silver, everything rendered with great skill, be it faces, flesh, or drapery, so that it fully satisfies both the connoisseur and the common man.”8 This thread of drapery as a demonstration of Veronese’s pictorial invention and skill is picked up by Marco Boschini in La carta del navegar pitoresco. Boschini writes of “an invention of costumes so great” that it puts tailors to shame.9 He also elaborates poetically on what the richness of the artist’s invention in this area entails: Costumes, solemn or extravagant in style, Cuts, slashes, colors of livery, stripes and appliqué, Cloth of gold or silver, satins and twills array’d With patterns of damask and velvet pile. Majestic garments of the Persian kind, Arabesques and motifs varied in a thousand ways, Real and fantastic clothes of different shapes, Accessories, superb and fittingly designed. Fig. X. Wedding Feast at Cana, 1562–63, oil on canvas, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Light silk fabrics, plain or with a pattern weave, Woolen cloth of Florentine and Venetian fashion, The finest inventions for which the world holds a passion, Each and all can in this Painting be perceived.

Colors of shot silks, without end, Beauties that make mother Nature jealous; April and May are like a desiccated carcass Next to the garden this canvas does present.10 Boschini’s comments are all the more interesting because the author did not praise any other artist in a similar fashion. Moreover, Boschini sometimes even extols the virtues of a style of drapery painting that was almost the opposite of Veronese’s. On Tintoretto, for instance, he remarks that the primary function of his costumes is to show and accentuate the shapes of the body underneath the clothes, claiming Tintoretto’s draperies are “like a crystal” through which one sees “the living flesh moving, pure and unadorned.”11 Clearly, Boschini judged artists according to their different abilities and in the case of Veronese singled out the painter’s aptitude for rendering costumes and fabrics.

Veronese’s Silks Boschini’s panegyric is of course not free from poetic exaggeration. It was also written almost a century after the Wedding Feast at Cana was made, and more than seventy years after Veronese’s death, so it should not be interpreted as an eyewitness account from the painter’s own time. Yet, in light of the earlier remarks by Vasari and Van Mander cited above, it is likely to be close in spirit to how contemporaries of Veronese would have experienced his work. It is therefore worthwhile to try and use Boschini as a guide not just to the Wedding Feast at Cana, but to Veronese’s use of drapery in his paintings in general, focusing on works illustrated in this volume. In doing so, there are at least two features that warrant special attention: Boschini’s use of textile terms derived from the world of actual fabrics, and his emphasis on variation and invention. Many modern commentators tend to treat Veronese’s drapery rather uniformly (e.g., the “great mantles in green and red, pink, blue…”). Boschini, on the other hand, distinguishes a range of individual fabrics, from cloths of gold (in line 3 of the passage cited here) to shot silks (line 13). Some of the terms he uses—sami (line 3: “twills”), ormesini and cendali (line 9: translated as “light silk fabrics”)—will probably have little resonance with modern readers, but likely evoked rather precise images among an audience that derived much of its wealth from the manufacture of luxury textiles and also used these same fabrics for dress and household furnishings.12 It is probably no coincidence that the great majority of the specific textile terms in Boschini’s passage refer to silk fabrics. Silk manufacturing was one of Venice’s main economic activities, which involved people from all social classes: the rich financed the expensive raw materials, and many of the not-so-rich performed the manual tasks required for the various stages of production, such as the spinning of silk yarn, dyeing, and weaving.13 Venice not only produced silk fabrics for domestic consumption, but also exported raw silk, silk thread, and finished textiles to the rest of Italy, northern Europe, and the Near East. Luca Molà has shown that the Venetian silk industry of the sixteenth century was also a theater of constant innovation, where new technical devices were

developed to improve production, and new dyes and new types of fabrics were created to maintain the Serenissima’s international market share.14 The abundance of silk-related terms in Boschini’s text corresponds to Veronese’s work, as the artist, too, seems to have had a preference for depicting silk textiles. Many of his draperies have a strong sheen that prior to the introduction of synthetic fabrics in the late nineteenth century could have been seen only on natural silk. Veronese replicated this effect using a specific method, the essence of which was already contained in the recipe for painting silk fabrics in the late fourteenth-century technical handbook for painters, Cennino Cennini’s Libro del’Arte.15 Cennini advises that to represent drappo di seta, one should first paint the entire drapery in a dark color, and then retouch it with bright highlights, creating a stark contrast between the light and dark areas and leaving out the modifying middle tones used in normal draperies. Such a strong contrast matches the optical appearance of a reflective surface, which casts back the incoming light in concentrated bundles directed either toward the viewer (experienced as bright highlights) or away from the viewer (experienced as dark areas), as opposed to a matt surface, which disperses the light more evenly. It is not clear whether this recipe was actually applied in Cennini’s days, but the principle on which it was based was certainly understood by painters from the southern Netherlands in the fifteenth century, as can be seen in the liturgical vestments worn by Saint Donatian in Jan van Eyck’s Virgin with the Canon Van der Paele (1436), now in the Groeningemuseum in Bruges (fig. 2). Here, Van Eyck painted patterned blue silk velvet with additional designs in gold thread. He used a dark brown underlayer, with contrasting bright blue areas on top for the places where the velvet pile is illuminated, and hatching in lead-tin yellow (a pale yellow paint that actually forms sparkling little droplets on the panel surface) to imitate the glitter of gold thread.16 The southern Netherlandish method was imitated in Italy during the second half of the fifteenth century and developed further in Venice. In his famous portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan (ca. 1501) in the National Gallery, London, Giovanni Bellini painted the sitter wearing a cape of white silk damask with added patterning in gold thread, partially woven in little loops standing out on the fabric surface (an effect known as riccio at the time).17 A detail shows how the artist has indicated the texture of this weave by sketchily applying patches of thick, impasto paint (fig. 3).18 Veronese was the heir to this Flemish-Venetian oil painting tradition and made his own important contributions to it. The Head of Saint Michael from the Blanton Museum of Art (cat. XXX) displays Veronese’s technique. The archangel’s tunic and sash are painted in rather dark, dull tones of ocher and green. A few darker touches indicate deeper shadows, but the main structure of the folds has been sketched in bright highlights in light yellow and green, brushed loosely over the dark ground, with some impasto accents that literally catch the light. The flair of the brushstrokes is an attractive demonstration of the painter’s virtuosity; it adds an impression of transience to the optical effect described above, suggesting that it is only in this very moment that the folds reflect the light precisely in this way, and that the reflection will change in the next fraction of a second due to the movement of the figure. This method of Veronese’s has been used in the representation of

Fig. X. Jan van Eyck (ca. 1395–1441), Virgin with Canon Van der Paele, 1436, oil on panel, Groeningemuseum, Bruges. Detail from the gold-brocaded silk velvet of the cope of Saint Donatian. Fig. X. Giovanni Bellini (ca. 1430–1516), Portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan, ca. 1501, oil on panel, National Gallery, London. Detail from the gold-brocaded silk damask of the Doge’s cape.

The Drawings of Paolo Veronese JOHN MARCIARI

Paolo Veronese was one of the most inventive draughtsmen of the sixteenth century, not only with respect to his Venetian contemporaries, but more generally among the Italian artists of his time. Few artists adopted such varied use of media, experimented with so many techniques, and made drawings that offer such rewarding insights into the creative process. Veronese is a connoisseur’s draughtsman, one whose drawings delight in their pure pictorial qualities, their subtle combinations of pen and ink or brush and wash, while also posing intriguing puzzles to be solved by those wishing to understand the relationship between a sketch—or even a carefully finished drawing—and the painting to which it apparently relates. This is not to say that Veronese’s drawings make for easy study. The same restless creative energy that enlivens his pen and ink sketches often makes those sheets appear at first glance a mass of tangled lines and confused forms. Furthermore, the layering of his media, in which transparent washes are often used to pick out a preferred solution from within a nest of variant solutions, makes Veronese’s sheets even less satisfying in reproduction than is the usual case with drawings. Even apparently faithful reproductions have the effect of flattening forms and of dulling the contrasts between ink, wash, and the paper support. In addition, Veronese’s fervent inventiveness makes for difficulties in seeing the connections between his drawings in different media. How, one wonders upon first 124

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The Drawings of Paolo Veronese JOHN MARCIARI

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contemplating his drawings, is the artist responsible for a turbulent sheet like the Studies for the Allegories of Love (fig. 1) also the creator of the placid, supremely composed chiaroscuro drawings like the Rest on the Flight into Egypt (fig. XX [BM version])? Beyond the dramatic contrast between these sorts of drawings, one can add a number of similarly puzzling single drawings (or groups of only two or three) in techniques not otherwise found in the artist’s hitherto-recognized corpus: the Allegory of the Holy League (cat. XX), the artist’s only study worked up in red chalk; or the very late Saint Herculanius Visited by an Angel at Princeton (cat. 3), wholly executed with a brush and fluid ink; or the few studies in which Veronese experimented with a trois-crayons technique of black, red, and white chalk.1 Veronese’s corpus of attributed drawings numbers something around one hundred and fifty sheets, but given the variety of his invention, one might hope that still more remain to be recognized as the work of the artist. Indeed, when Richard Cocke assembled his 1984 catalogue raisonné of Veronese’s drawings,2 a group of black chalk studies from the Sagredo albums had been so recently identified that Cocke placed virtually the entire group in a section entitled “Attributed Drawings,” without offering a definitive judgment.3 Fortunately, W. R. Rearick’s series of articles and exhibition catalogues has clarified the place of these drawings in Veronese’s evolution and his creative process, such that their attribution to Veronese and their relative dating seem largely resolved. 4 Mention of Cocke and Rearick brings to the fore what is perhaps the greatest challenge facing students of Veronese’s drawings: these two scholars, whose publications and reviews of each other constitute the overwhelming majority of what has been written on Veronese as a draughtsman in the past thirty years, maintain wildly divergent ideas of what constitutes Veronese’s work, with respect to both paintings and drawings. Even when both accept a work as Veronese’s own, their dating of that work can vary by decades. For illustration of the differences—even the conflict—between these scholars who constitute the two standard references, one might look, for example, to the first five drawings that Rearick included in his 1988–89 Washington exhibition to represent Veronese’s early evolution as a draughtsman. Cocke rejects outright four of these drawings, and he holds the fifth (the Chatsworth Supper at Emmaus) to be the work of Veronese around 1560, and not from around 1549, at the beginnings of Veronese’s career, where Rearick would place it.5 Conversely, Rearick notes that he would deny Veronese’s authorship of thirty of the 153 drawings in the accepted and attributed sections of Cocke’s 126

catalogue;6 he also published as Veronese’s own work at least ten of the drawings that Cocke placed in his “rejected attributions” section. This is not the place to rehearse every argument—several other disagreements between Cocke and Rearick will, however, be explored in more detail below—but merely to highlight the problems with which writers on these drawings contend. Apart from the conflicting views of these two scholars, the chronology of Veronese’s work remains a notoriously difficult problem, as has often been noted. There is perhaps no Italian Renaissance artist of Veronese’s ability or persistent fame for whom the date of so many works is so uncertain. Many paintings, including some major works, have been dated by various experts across a window of twenty or even thirty years.7 While the uncertain dating of an artist’s drawings is far more common than are questions about the date of his or her paintings, the broad uncertainty continues to muddle the question of Veronese’s evolution as a draughtsman. The often-cited case of the Prado Christ among the Doctors (fig. TK) can serve to illustrate the matter. The painting was traditionally dated to the 1560s, until Michael Levey observed that the inscription on the edge of a book held by one of the figures in the painting seems to read “MDLXVIII” (1548). Levey argued that this was the date of the painting, an argument thereafter followed by Cocke.8 Yet, both style and internal evidence (to be described further below) place the painting securely in the 1560s. In accepting the 1548 date, however, and in thus presuming that the related study in the Getty (cat. XX) is Veronese’s earliest surviving drawing, Cocke has a skewed notion of Veronese’s early work. He rejects, for example, the Chatsworth study for Veronese’s Bevilacqua-Lazise altarpiece (fig. 2), which most scholars would today place among Veronese’s earliest surviving drawings, but that rejection is partly colored by the differences between the Chatsworth sheet and the other drawings that Cocke would place in the late 1540s, including the two studies for the Prado canvas.9 Veronese’s practices as a draughtsman, however, and the organization of his workshop are also responsible for his confused chronology. To judge from those sheets that survive—which can be only a fraction of thousands of drawings he created, most of which have been lost—Veronese rarely proceeded to a painting without having rehearsed numerous variants for a given composition or figure. Rejected studies were not discarded but could be, and often were, taken up again decades later by Veronese or by his assistants in response to a new commission. Any given work might therefore have as its starting point a similar composition made years earlier,

Fig. 2 Study for the BevilacquaLazise Altarpiece, 1546–48, pen and brush with brown ink on light blue paper with white heightening, Collection of the Duke of Devonshire, Chatsworth, Derbyshire.

Fig. 1 Studies for the Allegories of Love, pen and brown ink, brush and brown wash, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

leading to obvious similarities between paintings of very different dates. What is more, Veronese’s well-organized workshop appears to have led to overlapping “generations” of styles in its production. Benedetto Caliari, for example, had by the late 1550s adopted one mode of painting based on his older brother’s work, and Benedetto seems to have continued in that mode for decades, even as Paolo evolved and as younger members of the workshop began to work in a reflection of Paolo’s later manner. Scholars have, naturally, returned often to the problem of distinguishing between the works of Paolo himself and those of his assistants, but most efforts to separate the various hands have proven dissatisfying. Howard Coutts was surely correct when he doubted the possibility “of isolating a ‘pure’ Veronese and

putting him on exhibition.”10 There is ample evidence that most paintings from at least the final two decades of Veronese’s lifetime were collaborative works. Even in drawings that are evidently preparatory for a project, there is the persistent possibility—at times probability—that the final work was executed by someone other than the artist who drafted the sketches.11 And yet the matter is still more complicated, for there are cases where even the preparatory studies for one project seem to be by more than one hand. One can imagine Veronese and his assistants sitting at a table, each simultaneously contributing ideas for the commission at hand; it seems likely that at times, Paolo would snatch away a drawing begun by one of the assistants and make his own refinements atop the earlier sketches. Coutts proposes this collaborative invention, for example, when discussing the set of drawings in Prague that Rearick added to the previous group of studies for the frescoes at Maser.12 Perhaps something similar was the case with a drawing like the Eritrean Sibyl at Harvard (cat. 1); this does seem preparatory for the corresponding figure at San Sebastiano, but even allowing for the possibility that it was one of Veronese’s earliest drawings in black chalk (supposedly before, as Rearick posits, Veronese was fully accustomed to the medium13), and that it was made by a particularly hard and sharpened piece of chalk, it is still difficult to reconcile with any other sketch by Veronese. Might it instead have been a study supplied by Benedetto or some other assistant? In any case, these matters of collaboration, disputed chronology, and attributional uncertainty must continue to be kept in mind as one traces the evolution of Veronese’s work as a draughtsman. 127

Fig. 2 Study for the BevilacquaLazise Altarpiece, 1546–48, pen and brush with brown ink on light blue paper with white heightening, Collection of the Duke of Devonshire, Chatsworth, Derbyshire.

Fig. 1 Studies for the Allegories of Love, pen and brown ink, brush and brown wash, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

As has been noted before, Veronese’s drawing style bears no evident relationship to that of his first master, Antonio Badile, although like many of his closer contemporaries from Verona, Paolo’s early manner derives from Emilian and Lombard examples rather than those of Venice. He was obviously aware, as well, of a traditional strain, the persistence of a quattrocentesque manner, in the work of artists like his second master, Giovanni Caroto, whose meticulous chiaroscuro drawings (one thinks, for example, of the Virgin and Child at the Louvre14) surely precede Veronese’s own assimilation of the technique, albeit ultimately to much more luscious effect.15 Of Veronese’s very earliest drawings, those made before he began working in Venice around 1551, there are few surviving examples, but we can, nonetheless, view the traits of his early years in the Bacchus and Apollo (cat. 2) from the Morgan Library, drawn in 1556–57 for the Palazzo Trevisan in Murano, one of a series of studies that have been related to the project.16 The female figure at lower right demonstrates the slightly doll-like qualities of many of Veronese’s early figures and the almost crude shorthand indications of facial features and fingers found in many drawings. At the left edge of the sheet, however, we see the artist’s easy mastery of complicated anatomical poses and his almost magical ability to create volume and mass in these quick doodles through the use of transparent washes that define the forms. At Palazzo Trevisan, Veronese worked alongside a number of his contemporaries from Verona, but already, his studies display a sinuous refinement that Battista del Moro and Battista Zelotti, at least in their pen sketches, would only rarely attain. Reference to these other Veronese artists is apposite when turning to the Saint Mark, Saint Leonard, and Saint Francis (cat. 3), also from the Morgan Library, a chiaroscuro also likely to date from the 1550s, or even the late 1540s. If the pen studies for Palazzo Trevisan show Paolo moving beyond his Veronese compatriots, this early chiaroscuro finds a more ready parallel with Verona’s traditions. Although Cocke accepted both the Morgan drawing and the chiaroscuro of identical subject in the Louvre,17 there has been a tendency to dismiss both works as studio productions.18 The problem is probably one of chronology. The above-mentioned study at Chatsworth for the Bevilacqua-Lazise Virgin and Child with Saints and Donors altarpiece of about 1548 (fig. XX) is among Veronese’s earliest known drawings. Rearick also considered the Chatsworth Supper at Emmaus sketch to date from around 1549. In relation to these, Saint Mark, Saint Leonard, and Saint Francis can

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seem rather static. Yet, the Virgin and Child with Saints and Donors is a preparatory study, in a different mode, and the evidence for dating the Emmaus as early as 1549 is slim. Indeed, the muscular, foreshortened disciples in the latter relate more to the works of the early 1550s. If so, the Saint Mark, Saint Leonard, and Saint Francis could occupy a middle position, dating to around 1549–51 (before Veronese’s permanent move to Venice), for the poses could be compared to the similarly “contained” figures of the Pinacoteca Capitolina Allegories of circa 1551–52 or the Giustiniani altarpiece of 1551 in San Francesco della Vigna.19 At this early date, the relationship between the Saint Mark, Saint Leonard, and Saint Francis and the traditions of Verona seem more clear, and the drawing can be compared to the highly finished sheets of artists like Caroto, Battista del Moro, Domenico Brusasorci, and even the young Paolo Farinati. Rather than a later echo of Veronese’s betterknown and more accomplished chiaroscuri, the Morgan drawing would consequently stand as a stage in the evolution toward those works.20 This seems the moment to address the question of the function of these chiaroscuro drawings. Some of Veronese’s chiaroscuro drawings must have been made as presentation drawings for specific projects—one thinks of the Saint Roch in Glory (cat. xx) that will be discussed further below—but the majority are not preparatory works, nor can they all be considered ricordi of finished projects, for too few of them correspond to paintings. They must instead be completed works in their own right. It has sometimes been suggested that they were made for connoisseur-collectors, but too many seem to have similar provenances to indicate that they were widely dispersed. Most probably they remained in the workshop, functioning like the model-book drawings of the Quattrocento.21 Realistically, Veronese’s studio was probably not so different from a traditional family workshop like that of the Vivarini family, and just as the Vivarini cleverly devised means of replicating compositions and motifs for paintings sent to a widely scattered clientele, so too Veronese could have meant these carefully finished drawings to last as more permanent models of inspiration for future work. Although the chiaroscuri have often

Figure of a Woman Seated with her Back Turned (Eritrean Sybil), 1558, black chalk with traces of white chalk, on off-white antique laid paper, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Mass.

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Figure of a Woman Seated with her Back Turned (Eritrean Sybil), 1558, black chalk with traces of white chalk, on off-white antique laid paper, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Mass.

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for a Crucifixion / Two Sketches for a Circumcision (cat. xx) of the same years. The recto studies for a Crucifixion relate to one of Paolo’s own paintings, the small Crucifixion in the Louvre that appears to be his reduction of the huge mural made for San Niccolò della Lattuga, now at the Accademia. The Circumcision drawings on the verso, however, relate instead to a Presentation in the Temple in an English private collection, a painting whose execution was probably entirely by Benedetto or another member of the workshop.39 Also similar are the Studies for Baptism of Christ at Harvard (cat. xx), written on the back of a letter from February 1588, and thus drawn only a few months before the artist’s death. With the similarly delicate studies on a small sheet in Edinburgh, 40 the Harvard drawings served as an early stage in the evolution of two paintings of the subject, at the Redentore (fig. xx) and at Saint John the Divine in New York (cat xx.), which were completed only after Veronese’s death and were signed, poignantly, by the “Haeredes Pauli.” It is also amid Veronese’s last great rush of invention—he was only sixty years old, but one senses in the scratchy lines of the drawings the slightly unsteady hand of a man in less than perfect health—that he made the beautiful wash drawing of Saint Herculanius Visited by an Angel in Princeton (cat. 7). In this study, for a painting executed probably by Benedetto Caliari and sent to the provincial church of Sant’Andrea in Toscolano Maderno on the west shore of Lake Garda (fig. 5), Paolo did not even begin with a few preliminary lines made with the pen or chalk, but proceeded directly to the brush and wash, creating a drawing unique in his surviving oeuvre but fully imbued with the light that illuminates the best of his paintings. 41 The Haeredes Pauli, the surviving members of his family workshop, continued to produce “Veronesesque” paintings, making use of the great surviving store of drawings, for at least a decade after the master’s death. What must have been thousands of sheets remained with the family, many of them eventually dispersed to collectors and many more lost. At some point, a good number of the sheets were given inscriptions naming them as the work of Paolo or Carletto or another member of the workshop, but these inscriptions rarely stand up to scrutiny and must have been added long after Paolo’s death, by someone who could not tell which of the older artists was responsible for the work. Despite the paintings made by the workshop in Veronese’s style, and despite the many drawings that the workshop must have created even during Veronese’s lifetime, there is no second draughtsman’s hand whose work approaches the quality and invention of Paolo’s own. Benedetto, often with Paolo’s assistance, 138

Fig.5 Benedetto Caliari (1538–1598), Saint Herculanius Visited by an Angel, ca. 1587–88, Church of Sant’Andrea, Toscolano Maderno.

was able to paint canvases that were a good approximation of a “Veronese” product, but his own drawings (cat. xx) never demonstrate the verve of Paolo’s. Benedetto’s study for the Birth of the Virgin he painted in 1577 for the Scuola dei Mercanti (now Venice, Accademia; on deposit at the Ca’ Farsetti) adopts the media that Paolo used for his chiaroscuri, but where Paolo’s chiaroscuri are finished works in their own right, exploiting the possibilities of the media, Benedetto’s modello is more strictly descriptive and prosaic. This comparison is perhaps unfair, for the elaborately detailed modello seems to be unique in Benedetto’s work and may have been something required by the patron rather than a sheet that came organically out of Benedetto’s usual preparatory process. An earlier pen and ink study in the Louvre42 reveals that Benedetto could be a far more spirited draughtsman at times. Nonetheless, Benedetto remains, both as a draughtsman and as a painter, in Paolo’s shadow, and any study of his work is complicated by the scores of “not-by-Paolo” drawings and paintings that have

Saint Herculanius Visited by an Angel, 1586–87, wash on blue paper, Princeton University Art Museum.

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Fig.5 Benedetto Caliari (1538–1598), Saint Herculanius Visited by an Angel, ca. 1587–88, Church of Sant’Andrea, Toscolano Maderno.

Saint Herculanius Visited by an Angel, 1586–87, wash on blue paper, Princeton University Art Museum.

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