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Updated 4-10-08
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Paolo Cagliari called Veronese (c. 1528-1588)
North Italian Illuminated Manuscript / Italian School, 16th and early 17th-Century Drawings
Cherubino Alberti / Michelangelo Buonarotti (After) / Annibale Carracci / Parmigianino / Marcantonio Raimondi
Giulio Romano / Jacopo Palma il Giovane / Andrea Schiavone / Tintoretto / Titian (after) / Veronese / Federico Zuccaro
Italian School, 17th-Century Drawings / Simone Cantarini / Domenichino / Guercino / Pier Francesco Mola
Italian School Printmakers, 15th-17th Centuries: Venetian School, c. 1500 / Raphael School / Giovanni Jacopo Caraglio
Marcantonio Raimondi / The Master of the Die / Anea Vico / Agostino Veneziano / Nicholas Beatrizet
Michelangelo Buonarotti (After) / Girolamo Fagiuoli / Cherubino Alberti / Titian (after) / Tintoretto (after)
Parmigianino / Giorgio Ghisi / Diana Scultori / Annibale Carracci / Ludovico Carracci / Simone Cantarini / Elisabetta Sirani
Gerolamo Scarsello
Netherlandish School, 15th-17th-Century Drawings / Flemish School, 17th-Century
Bernaert van Orley / Lucas van Leyden / Hans Sebald Beham / Peter Paul Rubens / Jan Baptiste de Wael/ Rembrandt School
18th-Century Drawings / 19th-Century Drawings / 20th-Century Drawings
Titian, Veronese, and Jacopo Tintoretto dominated the Venetian art scene for most of the 16th century, winning most of the public and religious commissions during that period. The Doges' Palace in Venice is particularly rich in work by Veronese. Veronese's studio was active and works from it were eagerly sought. Sir Philip Sidney, the English poet, diplomat, and soldier, after fleeing the St. Bartholomew Day's massacre in Paris in 1572 went to be mentored by Hubert Languet at the Emperor's Court. Several years later, wanting to commission a portrait for Languet before he went back to Engliand, he went to Venice, where, after visiting the studios of both Veronese and Tinrotetto, he commissioned his portrait from Veronese. Veronese was also popular with the nobility, who commissioned works for their villas and studies, often of an allegorical nature.
Select Bibliography: Art Gallery of Toronto, Titian, Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese with a group of sixteenth-century Venetian drawings (Toronto: Art Gallery of Toronto, 1960; Richard Cocke, Veronese Drawings. A catalogue raisonne (London: Sotheby Publications, 1984); Remigio Marini, L'opera completa del Veronese, Classici dell'Arte 20 (Milano: Rizzoli, 1968); Antoine Orliac, Veronese (Paris: Hyperion Press, 1940); Terisio Pignatti and Filippo Pedrocco, Veronese 2 vols. (Milano: Electa, 1995); Giandomenico Romanelli et al, Veronese: Gods, Heroes and Allegories (Milan: Skira, 2004); David Rosand, Painting in Sixteenth-Century Venice : Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); David Rosand, Veronese & His Studio in North American Collections (Birmingham Museum of Art & Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, 1972); Veronese e Verona (Verona: Museo di Castelvecchio, 1988); Veronese. Une Dame Venitienne dite la Belle Nani (Paris: Musee du Louvre, 1996); Bruno Visentini, ed. texts by Alessandro Bettagno, W.R. Rearick, Staale Sinding-Larsen, and Lionello Puppi, Paolo Veronese. Disegni e dipinti. Grafica Veneta 5 (Vicenza: Neri Pozza Editore, 1988); Peter Watson, Wisdom and Strength: The Biography of a Renaissance Masterpiece (NY: Doubleday & Co. New York, 1989).
Veronese, Virgin and Child with Musical Angels in the Wilderness. Pen and brown ink and wash with white lead heightening. One of a group of chiaroscuro drawings that Veronese, according to Cocke, executed from the late 1550s to the early-1560s (see Cocke, Veronese's Drawings, p. 71), but which may have continued in technique if not in spirit to the late 1570s, according to Annalisa Scarpi's annotation on a drawing in pen and brown ink with white lead heigtening that Veronese prepared in connection with his Triumph of Venice for the ceiling of the Sala del Maggior Consiglio above the Doge's throne commissioned 1579 and completed by 1582 (see Giandomenico Romanelli et al, Veronese: Gods, Heroes and Allegories [Milan: Skira, 2004], p. 140; see also p. 142, where Scarpi dates another of the chiaroscuro drawings, The Triumph of Fame over Evil to the 1580s).
Cocke's comments on these chiaroscuro drawings are useful: "The independent chiaroscuro drawings were among the most admired of Veronese's drawings, being the only ones mentioned by his first biographer Ridolfi in 1648. Ridolfi's enthusiasm is understandable, for they were planned as independent works in preparatory drawings and executed with a brilliance and fluidity in the white heightening that was copied but never equalled. Veronese here turned to an older tradition of Venetian drawing with a sense of invention in conventional subjects, both religious and allegorical and in unusal variations on well-established themes (p. 71).
Our drawing is on cream laid paper with a watermark close to Briquet 7112 (Salerno 1570) and 7113 (Ferrarra 1570) and a worn collector's mark on verso. There is a variant of the drawing in the Louvre titled "Pittura Quarta," depicting the Virgin and Child surrounded by six angels (see Cocke, Veronese's Drawings, p. 76). The Louvre drawing, which suffers from fading due to over-exposure in the 19th century, presents the Virgin and the standing Child at the same column base. The Virgin holds the same "strange implement (a Pair of tongs?)" while Jesus reaches up to caress her face. On the left side, three musical angels in similar positions in a similar arrangement are serenading them; on the right, three more angels play for her, one of whom, seated playing a lute is close to ours, the only one on the right side of our drawing. In the background are the ruins of a building (perhaps the manger). Our drawing is circular, the Louvre's is rectangular. Both are beautiful and well-executed drawings, ours, perhaps a presentation drawing, seems more brilliant, finished and assured. According to Cocke (p. 77, note 7), the Louvre's Veronese remained in Veronese's studio during the artist's lifetime: "That it remained in the studio may be confirmed by the painting in the collection of Antonio Zecchini in Pescara, which measured about the same size as the drawing and was, to judge from the engraving by Diogini Valesi, a studio derivation from the drawing." Our Veronese, by contrast, shows precisely the characteristics that Cock praises: "independent works in preparatory drawings and executed with a brilliance and fluidity in the white heightening that was copied but never equalled."
One of Veronese's small ink drawings sold at auction at Chirstie's London on Dec. 5, 2006 for £180,000 (then $356,148). We offer ours for a bit less than half that price.
Image size: 285mm diameter. Price: $180,000.
Veronese School (Venice, late 16th-early 17th century) Allegorical figures of Africa and Asia. Brush and brown ink and wash and black chalk on cream laid paper, c. 1600. Titian, Paolo Veronese, and Jacopo Tintoretto dominated the Venetian art scene for most of the 16th century, winning most of the public and religious commissions during that period. The Doges' Palace is particularly rich in work by Veronese. With inscriptions in ink. Image size: 262x188mm. Price: $3650.
