Veronese, even more than Titian

Veronese, even more than Titian, whom in colouring he sought to emulate, and Tintoretto, whom in this respect he certainly excelled, expresses the spirit of the Venetians of his time—a powerful and noble race of human beings, as Kugler calls them, elate with the consciousness of existence, and in full enjoyment of all that renders earth attractive. By the splendour of his colour, assisted by rich draperies and other materials,decorative painting, by a very clear and transparent treatment of the shadows, he infused a magic into his great canvases which surpasses almost all the other masters of the Venetian School. Never had the pomp of colour, on a large scale, been so exalted and glorified as in his works. This, his peculiar quality, is most decidedly and grandly developed in scenes of worldly splendour; he loved to paint festive subjects for the refectories of rich convents,cheap oil paintings,  suggested of course from particular passages in the Scriptures, but treated with the greatest freedom, especially as regards the costume, which is always of his own time. Instead, therefore, of any religious sentiment, we are presented with a display of the most cheerful human scenes and the richest worldly splendour. That which distinguishes him from Tintoretto, and which in his later period, after the death of Titian and Michelangelo, earned for him the rank of the first living master, was that beautiful vitality,art oil painting online, that poetic feeling, which as far as it was possible he infused into a declining period of art. At the same time it becomes more and more evident, as our attention is turned to the deeper and nobler spirit of the earlier masters in Venice, that the beauty of his figures is more addressed to the senses than to the soul, and that his naturalistic tendencies are often allowed to run wild.
The most celebrated, and as it happens the most historically interesting, of his great pictures is the Feast at Cana, in the Louvre, measuring thirty feet wide and twenty feet high. This was formerly in the refectory of S. Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. The scene is a brilliant atrium,frames for oil paintings, surrounded by majestic pillars. The tables at which the guests are seated form three sides of a parallelogram. The guests are supposed to be almost entirely contemporary portraits, so that the figures of Christ and His mother, of themselves insignificant enough, lose even more in the general interest of the subject. Servants occupy the foreground, while on the raised balustrades and the balconies of distant houses are innumerable onlookers. The most remarkable feature of the whole composition is a group of musicians in the centre of the foreground, which are portraits of the artist himself and Tintoretto, playing on violon-cellos, and Titian, in a red robe, with the contra-bass. abstract art oil paintings