Paolo Veronese was a painter of light. What does that mean? He didn’t make a light-dark picture the way all the others did. He rounded out his figures with more color, not dark shadows.
Ever since Apollodorus had invented shading and shadows, to give the objects in a picture the look of roundness and depth, painters had made very heavy use of them. Pictures were light on one side and dark or darker on the other. Some painters went very far in contrasting the light and the dark. Chiaroscuro is what the Italians called the technique. Leonardo toyed with it, Rafael toyed with it. Caravaggio later made it the hallmark of his pictures. And Rembrandt……..
“Rembrandt,” wrote the British art critic John Ruskin, “Rembrandt darkens five-sixths of his picture just to give you the not very important truth of the gleam on a helmet or a sword.” Ruskin thought the Dutch painter’s dramatic effects were achieved only by sacrificing color in most of his painting.
Veronese painted pictures without a strong contrast—almost without shading and without shadows. Most painters couldn’t even do that: they NEEDED the contrast to give their figures weight and depth. Their very choice of colors depended on a strong shine of light from one side of the picture. The object in their picture was one color. Its unlighted side was a darker version of that same color. And the shine of light on it was a third. That was how painters had learned to paint and it had always come out very well.
Veronese painted as though his scenes took place outdoors in full daylight (but not direct sun). The scene was all color. “Veronese is the one man who achieves clarity without big contrasts….,” the French painter Delacroix wrote in his journal, “and that was always considered impossible. In my opinion he is the only one who has known how to catch the complete secret of nature.”
Indeed, achivieng clarity (simili contrast) withought value contrast it’s something extraordinary. Maybe the degree of saturatiom played a part also… but seeing The Feast of levy’s I wouldn’t say there are quite strong contrasts there… Maybe he achived mainly with color the “contrast” but he did use also value contrast. Probably I should study more painting of Veronesse before concluding…
Maybe it IS a great achievemant to paint scenes without that usual light-dark contrast but I always missed it in Veronese and Tintoretto too. Many of their works seem to have no color focus. Everything seems of equal importance. I used to think of some of his paintings as faded tapestries, where all the colors have the same magnitude. Color seems too abundant, too diverse, too cheap.