Paolo Veronese

Paolo Veronese (1528–1588) took his name from Verona, where he was born the son of a stonecutter; he later used the surname Caliari. By 1541 he was apprenticed to Antonio Badile, whose daughter Elena he married in 1565. After early commissions in Verona, near Treviso and in Mantua, he settled in Venice in 1553 and died there. With Titian and Tintoretto he is one of the three painters who dominated sixteenth-century Venice, and he was known above all as a colourist. He made his name with ceilings in the Doge's Palace, San Sebastiano and the Marciana Library, then frescoed Palladio's Villa Barbaro at Maser. His vast biblical feasts for monastery refectories, crowded with figures among grand architecture, are especially famous. In 1573 the Inquisition questioned him over the liberties taken in a Last Supper for Santi Giovanni e Paolo, and he was obliged to retitle it The Feast in the House of Levi. Two works here: Raising of Jairus' Daughter and The Wedding at Cana, painted in 1562–1563 for the Benedictines of San Giorgio Maggiore, which includes portraits of Titian, Tintoretto and the painter himself.