Veronese: Gods, Heroes, and Allegories

Paolo Caliari-better known as Veronese-is the "profane" painter par excellence. Veronese gave expression to a secular and progressive vision that brought him into direct collision with the Church hierarchy, prefiguring the collision of the academy and modern art. This catalog brings together a series of paintings by the 16th-century Italian artist emphasizing the spectacular in Veronese's work which in turn reveals multiple facets of Venetian life.
This sumptuous catalogue from the Musée du Luxembourg exhibition aims to underline the profane aspect of the artist, leaving aside religious works and altarpieces. His paintings of Biblical subjects are not actually excluded, for Veronese approached Holy Scripture and mythology in the same spirit, bringing out the emotional aspects of the Bible rather than the symbolic and didactic as other Venetian artists of his time did.
In this richly illustrated volume, Veronese can be seen as the quintessence of the classicism that exalted drawing and color, magnificence and quality, that aimed to organize the episodes from mythology and the Bible in a grandiose manner, and to bring out the profound self-awareness of the subjects of his portraits.