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The 100 Most Influential Painters 7 & Sculptors of the Renaissance
paintings represent the most authentic expressions of the last 15 years of Veronese’s life; for discernible in the large decorations for the Palazzo Ducale begun during this period—including the Rape of Europa and the Apotheosis of Venice—is a greater participation of his workshop, where his brother Benedetto, his sons Carlo and Gabriele, his nephew Alvise dal Friso, and others were employed. In 1588 Veronese contracted a fever and died after a few days of illness. His brother and sons had him buried in St. Sebastiano, where a bust was placed above his grave. The sons continued their father’s work, signing it haeredes Pauli (“Paul’s heirs”). They were able to make use of a quantity of splendid sketches and drawings. Among Veronese’s last works were superb allegorical fables, such as a series for Rudolph II that included The Choice of Hercules and Allegory of Wisdom and Strength; and Mars and Venus United by Love, in which the figures are bound to each other by harmonious rhythms. His final work also included biblical scenes with agitated, gloomy landscapes. A pathos-filled small altarpiece of St. Pantaleon Healing a Sick Boy and versions of the Pietà exhibit a dramatic quality and a meditative mood unusual in Veronese’s works. It is the other, the serene Veronese, characterized by splendid colour and a luminosity that animates groups of figures and pure architectural structures, who above all was loved in his time and in the following centuries. Various leading artists of the 17th century found him a source of inspiration—as did Sebastiano Ricci and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, who renewed the vital chromatic idiom of Venetian decorative painting. Nineteenth-century French painters from Eugène Delacroix to Paul Cézanne looked to Veronese, inspired by his use of colour to express exuberance as well as to model form.
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