Veronese and the Crises of Late Sixteenth-Century Venice

The last decades of the sixteenth century were a time of severe crisis for the Venetian Republic: From 1575-77 the Venetians suffered one of the worst plague outbreaks in their entire history, followed by famine and a devastating blow to the economy due to the discovery of new oceanic trade routes around the Cape of Good Hope to India and the East Indies. These crises triggered not only changes in the religious practices of the Venetians, but affected also the production of images.

Veronese in particular, who self-fashioned himself as the first painter of the Venetian »magnificenza« with his monumental representations of feasts, faced the potential danger of alienating himself from the new climate in the Republic. He therefore developed in his late works a new pictorial language that sought to convey the religious messages of redemption more drastically in accordance with the demands of the new leading political faction in Venice of the so-called »giovani«.

To analyze this last phase of the artists career, my dissertation project focuses on the different sociopolitical contexts from which Veronese’s late works emerged. Thus, the project will bring together a series of case studies that include such diverse individuals as the »cittadino« Simone Lando, the nuns of the reform movement of the Cassinese Congregation and Veronese’s paintings for the Islamophilic »Scuola del Santissimo Sacramento«.

The characteristic features of Veronese’s late works – for example the emotional and direct communication of his figures as well as the dark chromaticism – are thus interpreted as elements of a continuous experimentation with which the artist responded to the demands of a fast-changing reality during a time when the loss of political and economic power of the Republic was accompanied by a last creative outburst of sixteenth century Venetian culture.