Works by Paolo Veronese

Paolo Veronese filled huge Venetian canvases with feasts, shimmering finery and crowds under open skies, in colours that Delacroix saw keep their strength even in shadow.

A stonecutter's son from Verona, he was first called Paolo Spezapreda, after the trade, then took the surname Caliari from his mother's noble father. He trained under Antonio Badile, whose daughter Elena he married in 1565, and settled in Venice in 1553 after a state commission for ceilings in the Doge's Palace.

For The Wedding at Cana the monks of San Giorgio Maggiore asked for a canvas of 66 square metres, blues made with lapis lazuli and as many figures as would fit. He gave them a banquet between colonnades under a bright sky, with musicians in front and portraits of Titian, Tintoretto and himself in the crowd. A decade later a Last Supper crowded with soldiers, dwarves and animals brought him before the Inquisition; painters, he told the tribunal, were as free as poets and madmen, and in the end he had to retitle the picture Feast in the House of Levi.

In The Family of Darius Before Alexander the figures move across the front like a procession, before a white arcade set square to the picture. He headed a family workshop, and after 1580, Nicholas Penny writes, one can rarely be sure his was the only hand, which matters for the later canvases below. Collectors already wanted his drawings in his lifetime. The Martyrdom of Saint Justina is a finished design for an altarpiece in Padua, in ink and white on blue-grey paper, squared in chalk for transfer.

Sources: Wikipedia, National Gallery, J. Paul Getty Museum, Louvre. Portrait: Workshop of Georg Engelhard Schröder.