Unfinished business

Xavier Salomon, The Chief Curator at The Frick Museum, makes no secret of his fondness for the art of Paolo Veronese. In the two most recent episodes of ‘Cocktails with a Curator’ he looks at Veronese’s Wisdom and Strength and Veronese’s Choice Between Virtue and Vice. The episodes can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H4Z0ISUUWU&list=PLNVeJpU2DHHR_0y_Zvgn3MgZQQFcFx2eI&index=3&t=0s and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhSE5KvOZ-Q&list=PLNVeJpU2DHHR_0y_Zvgn3MgZQQFcFx2eI&index=1

A couple of week’s earlier, Salomon ‘hosted’ a virtual tour of the Andrea Palladio designed and Veronese decorated Villa Barbaro, Maser in his ‘Travels with a Curator’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5XZ3LbLhsg Salomon has also edited and translated a book, ‘Lives of Veronese’ published by Pallas Athene Arts, London, in 2009.

Paolo Veronese was one of the great painters of the Venetian Renaissance. Born in 1528 to a stone cutter and the illegitimate daughter of a local noble, Paolo was given the nickname of his place of birth, Verona, as his creative moniker. After an apprenticeship at the age of 15 with the artist Antonio Badile (whose daughter he later married), Veronese spent most of his life in Venice after moving there in the 1550s.

Veronese’s practice was influenced by the northern Italian classical taste promoted by the artists Correggio, Parmigianino, and Giulio Romano, as well as Titian’s approach to composition, narrative and colouring. During his prolific career, he painted portraits, historical and mythological pictures, complex fresco decorations and small devotional paintings.

For most of his career, Veronese worked for religious and secular patrons in the Veneto region. He became famous in the 1550s for his altarpieces, the ceiling and wall paintings of the Doge’s Palace, the frescoes of the Villa Barbaro and the full-scale decoration of the Venetian church of San Sebastiano.  From the 1560s onwards, Veronese also produced mythological and allegorical pictures for an international clientele.

Working from a workshop with his brother, Benedetto, and sons, Gabriele and Carlo, Veronese specialised in large-scale works which often depicted multiple protagonists, ornate architecture, beautiful animals and many other curiosities. One example, a painting of the Last Supper painted for a Dominican friar in 1573, created such controversy through the inclusion of an extraordinary range of participants, that Veronese ran foul of the Inquisition and changed the name of the painting to ‘Feast in the House of Levi’ rather than altering the picture as ordered. The painting is now in the Academia in Venice.

In 1660, more than seventy years after Veronese’s death, Marco Boschini (Italian painter, engraver and writer) described Veronese’s art as: ‘never has been seen among painters such regal pomp and circumstance, such majestic actions, such weighty and decorous manner! He is the treasurer of the art and the colours. This is not painting, it is magic that casts a spell on people who see it.’

As can be seen by Boschini’s ‘reverence’, Veronese was not only popular in his lifetime but also after his death. The influence of his art can be seen in the work of Carraci, Rubens, Tiepolo and even the Ballarat-born Australian artist, Isaac Cohen.

The National Gallery of Victoria has twenty works which reference Veronese’s art. Most of these are engravings ‘Unknown – after Veronese’ which depict scenes from the life of Christ or from the lives of saints.

In 1947, Sir Kenneth Clark, acting for the Felton Bequest purchased a painting by Veronese from the collection of Sir Herbert Cook. While unsigned and undated, Bernard Berenson in the 1936 edition of ‘The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance’ titled the painting Tentazione del filosofo and attributed it to the later work of Paolo Veronese. The painting now hangs with the title Nobleman between Active and Contemplative life in the National Gallery of Victoria c. 1575.

Seated before an open folio which rests against a globe, a young ‘fashionable in black’ nobleman is distracted from his studies by three alluring women. On the left, with her foot resting on a solid square block representing stability, we see the ‘sensibly-attired’ goddess of wisdom, Minerva, who represents the Contemplative Life. Behind the nobleman, Juno is more luxuriously clothed in an ermine cape as she offers him a crown and sceptre – symbols of the Active Life. Juno’s arm directs our gaze to the right where scantily clad Venus is outside a marble palace with huntsmen, a horse, falcons and dogs – the accessories of a life of pleasure – as she tempts him with Luxury. Various cherubs attempt to distract him but the cupid, modestly covering its genitalia asleep at his feet, suggests wisdom and not passion will assist decision-making.

As Ursula Hoff points out in her discussion of Veronese in ‘National Gallery of Victoria – Painting Drawing Sculpture’ from 1968, ‘real and symbolic elements mingle freely in this scene, which may lead us to remember the importance attached by the Renaissance to the education of the nobleman’. She reminds us that Baldassare Castiglione’s guidebook ‘The Courtier’ from 1528 encouraged the well-rounded prince to be brought up to be contemplative and active – but that his way to virtue should also be ‘decked out with honest pleasure’.

Veronese painted many examples of heroes at the moment of making a choice – the same three goddesses feature in the Judgement of Paris (which will result in the Trojan War) – and Salomon also picks up on this theme in the works in The Frick Collection.

In ‘European Painting and Sculpture before 1800’ by Ursula Hoff, 3^rd edition 1973, Hoff also provides a rather critical ‘condition report’ of the painting at the time of acquisition. She writes: ‘unfinished; there is evidence of some alterations in the figure of Venus, whose right leg should take her weight rather than her left as it does at present. The unfinished sky shows underpainting in a strong blue-green, which also underlies the platform on the right, the balustrade and the figure of the nobleman. The group of falconers, the dogs, horse and architecture on the right are all unfinished’.

In 1992, John Payne, Painting Conservator at the NGV, had an opportunity to explore the construction of the painting in depth. He concludes: ‘The painting … presents a mixture of skilled and clumsy brushwork, of expensive materials and awkward anatomy. There is a sense of struggle with the detailing of the work. But the question is, whose struggle was this? Could so much alteration be the work of studio assistants? In what context was this painting begun and in what context was it finished?’ For the full essay see: https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/veronese-and-friends-a-technical-examination-of-nobleman-between-active-and-contemplative-life/

In 2016, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York took over the old Whitney Museum building on Madison Avenue. The opening exhibition ‘Unfinished – Thoughts Left Visible’ addressed the question of when is a work of art finished? Comprising almost 200 works dating from the Renaissance to the contemporary, the exhibition examined the term ‘unfinished’ in its broadest possible sense. Some works were left incomplete by their makers (which gave insight into the process of their creation) while other works were ‘intentionally unfinished’ embracing an unresolved and open-ended aesthetic. Objects from the exhibition and audio guides about many of the works (from Titian to Rodin) can be found at: https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2016/unfinished

I was fortunate to see this illuminating and exhilarating exhibition and it is one of the shows that has stayed with me. ‘Unfinished art’ gives an added layer of interest that provokes further looking and more questions.  As John Payne reminds us: ‘Paintings such as Nobleman between Active and Contemplative life should be a resource for expanding our understanding of the painter and the studio, but are too often the subject of simple appraisal’.  The ‘NGV Veronese’ would have been an excellent addition to the Met Breuer show and is a great example of Veronese’s interests, ideas and also his technique.

Postscript: For another (and risqué ) ‘take’ on Nobleman between Active and Contemplative life see Hannah Gadsby’s recent stand-up comedy show, ‘Douglas’.