Verona Celebrates Paolo Veronese with a Major Exhibition at Palazzo della Gran Guardia

| Sun, 07/27/2014 - 04:06

Around one hundred masterpieces by Paolo Caliari , known as Il Veronese, coming from major national and international museums and art galleries are back in his native Verona, for a special exhibition dedicated to the man and his work, 'Paolo Veronese. The illusion of reality’.

The exhibition has been promoted and organised by the Verona City Council’s Department of Art Museums and Monuments, together with the University of Verona and the Sovraintendenza of Verona, Rovigo and Vicenza, in association with the National Gallery in London, where the largest exhibition dedicated to Paolo Veronese ever organized in the UK- 'Veronese: Magnificence in Renaissance Venice' – has just come to an end.

Mounted in Verona’s monumental Palazzo della Gran Guardia, in Piazza Bra, this exhibition takes place 26 years after the 'Veronese and Verona' show held in 1988 at the Castelvecchio Museum.

Verona is not only is birthplace, but also the city where he first trained as an artist with Giovanni Caroto, Antonio Badile and, above all, Michele Sanmicheli, before moving to Venice where working alongside Jacopo Sansovino and Andrea Palladio, he became a leading figure in the city’s artistic scene along with Tiziano Vecellio and Jacopo Tintoretto.

Both a virtuoso and a craftsman, Veronese created works ranging from complex frescoes to altarpieces, mythological, allegorical, historical and devotional paintings as well as portraits. Therefore, to better explore the historical and artistic complexity of one of the greatest artists of Italian Renaissance, around one hundred of his pantings and drawings have been presented through six thematic sections dedicated to various aspects of his work: his training in Verona; his fundamental relations with architecture and architects(from Michele Sanmicheli to Jacopo Sansovino and Andrea Palladio); his patrons; allegorical and mythological themes; religiousness; and his collaborations and workshop.

The exhibition features numerous exceptional drawings of great thematic and technical variety, with the aim of outlining the role of planning and graphic reflection both in Veronese’s creative process and in the productive dynamics of his atelier.

The centre piece of the exhibition is 'The Feast in the House of Levi' which was recently restored after a series of complex operations to demount it and transport it, like the following video shows. It was then fixed onto state-of-the-art aluminium frames in constant and even tension, before proceeding with the cleaning and then retouching. The brightness of the colours, with various contrasting tones of yellow, red, greens and blues, emerged in a surprisingly natural manner.