Paolo Veronese and the Nobility of Painting - Tom Nichols

Hi everybody, today we're very fortunate to welcome Tom Nicholls. Tom Nicholls retired from his post at Glasgow University in 2025, having taught there since 2013 and having previously taught at the University of Aberdeen. There's a special first edition of Artibus et Historiae which is forthcoming to celebrate his retirement and his achievements. Before taking up his post, Tom completed his higher degree at the Courtauld Institute of Art and the University of East Anglia. His two main areas of academic interest lie in Venetian Renaissance painting, especially intersections between style and identity, and the depiction of low, marginal, or outcast social groups in early modernity. And on this latter topic, he's published the book The Art of Poverty, Irony and Ideal in 16th Century Beggar Imagery, which came out with Manchester University Press in 2007. And he has another volume that is forthcoming. Also with Manchester University Press, provisionally entitled Picturing Peasants, Images of the Rural Class from Bruegel to Tiepolo. His books on Venetian painters include the wonderful Tintoretto, Tradition and Identity, which I have a copy of here, Titian and the End of the Venetian Renaissance, and Giorgione's Ambiguity, all published by Reaction. His most recent monograph, however, is Paolo Veronese and the Nobility of Painting, which was also published by Reaction in May of this year. And it's this book that will be the focus of your talk today. Over to you, Tom. Well, thank you very much to Alex for that introduction and to Brian as well for inviting me to talk tonight. I hope you can hear me okay. If not, let me know somehow, maybe send something through chat. So yes, I'm going to talk about this recent book of mine, Paolo and the nobility of painting. Just to say a little bit of... background about this book, really. It's part of the Reaction Books' Renaissance Lives series, which has been going for a number of years. And I'm sure you'll know about these, but they are relatively cheap, usually hardbacks. There are some paperbacks as well, which come in at under £20. They're about 60,000 words long. With painters, they have maybe up to 60 illustrations, but it's not just painters in this series. We have books on all sorts of different figures, including Petrarch, etc., lots of Renaissance figures. And I think, so when I was kind of asked to write this book, I kind of... I had to kind of keep that brief, if you like, in mind. It's a 60,000 word text. And I'm thinking of audiences, I'm thinking of an audience that is, yes, educated, potentially already interested in art history, but not necessarily art historians. It's maybe slightly less specialist to some extent than would be the case with the university press book. And there's an issue you have to kind of cover, in a sense, an artist. And when you think of someone like Veronese, you've got maybe something like in the region of four to five hundred paintings. Certainly, if you include those by his workshop, a very prolific artist, then you've got to make quite a lot of choices. So the coverage is a kind of aspect, but I didn't just want to write a book that was. A recapitulation of the kind of cliches about Veronese. There are many texts on Veronese that one can refer to. They're not just cliches. There's some great scholarship there. And of course, I draw very heavily on that. But I did want to kind of move things on a little bit and not just provide a kind of synthetic overview of the existing literature. So essentially I'm asked to write this book and I've got a kind of personal history with Veronese, which goes back to my long distant, I'm afraid to say, PhD years where I was supervised by a great authority on Veronese's drawings, Dr. Richard Coke at the University of East Anglia. And Richard and I used to sit around and he would take the side of Veronese and I would take the side of Tintoretto because that's what my PhD was on. And I would kind of argue for the popular, exciting, dynamic, changing Tintoretto, the son of a dyer. And he would kind of temper this kind of populism of mine with reference to the courtly Veronese. And so there's this kind of polarity between these two painters in mid-16th century Venice. And they do come to dominate Venetian painting after about 1550. These are the painters who are leading the way in the city. So writing this book I've become much more aware I think not so much of the opposition between these two painters but perhaps more about the kind of overlaps between them Thank and I think the core of this is not so much that Thank You know, a kind of antipathy between the courtly Veronese and the popular Tintoretto, but actually a shared interest that they both had in art itself, you in painting itself, you. very and in visuality. And I think you can see this, that both of these artists were extraordinarily prolific. They ran extensive workshops based on their families. much. And it kind of covered most of Venice with paintings. And I think that's a kind of shared, if you like, a visual loquacity that they both have. And that's quite contrasting, I think, in some ways to the older generation of artists in the city. And so like Titian himself, and now I'm showing you that famous detail of the marriage at Cana, Where we possibly see... Veronese and Tintoretto. Tintoretto looking like he wants to bite Veronese's neck. I'm sure he's not going to do that. But that could be Tintoretto just to the back left of Veronese, who is adorned in these wonderful silvery lemony robes. But of course, they're both opposite what looks like a portrait of Titian playing the double bass there. So, this kind of rivalry between the two artists has kind of exercised people a lot. There was a whole exhibition mounted in Boston in 2009, I think it was, Rivalry in Renaissance Venice. I've become... less inclined to see it as a rivalry and if it was a rivalry then it was a very carefully constructed one with relationship to in relationship to the kind of art market the market for paintings that was emerging in in Venice. Now I think both these artists played their part in kind of I think encouraging the growth of that market through their ability to work quickly, to work at volume and to deliver paintings relatively cheaply and looking at the business practice of both artists, there's a lot of overlap between them. On the other hand, it's undoubtedly true, and you can see it from this image here, this marvellous image of Veronese as this supremely sophisticated, beautifully dressed, lavishly dressed musician at the Feast of Marciana. That is a difference. Tintoretto, I think, does play the card of the popular artist, the little dyer, Tintoretto, the man who's come from below, who associates himself with the non-noble population of Venice, the wider population. Veronese, on the other hand, when he arrives from his native Verona, just after 1550, starts to play the opposite card. If Tintoretto is local, then he's non-local. And if Tintoretto is the little dyer, then he is a Calliero. He's a member of the Calliero family, this aristocratic family from Verona. I mean, looking more closely at this, he... He probably isn't really an aristocrat, or at least his mother potentially was, although she was born out of wedlock. And, you know, up until 1553, in fact, Veronese himself, Paolo himself, is describing himself as Paolo Spezzapreda, Paolo stonecutter. That's quickly dropped when he moves to Venice and kind of constructs himself. As Paolo Calliero Veronese, this figure from an old Veronese aristocratic family. Let's not quibble too much about whether or not he was aristocratic, but it seems, you know, the same probably applies to Tintoretto. How much he really was a man of the people seems very, very questionable. But these were constructed identities that helped these artists to kind of share the market for paintings. Now, um... I'm looking here at a fairly early-ish Veronese. One thing I've noticed about Veronese when I started to look at him more closely, I thought to myself, what's going to be my methodology here? Am I going to go from context? to the paintings or am I going to look really hard at the paintings and I think I've been kind of taking that latter approach now for a number of years in my art history. Slow looking, close looking, looking into details and finding the kind of truth of these painters to some extent there rather than trying to kind of associate them with texts, iconographies, a wider context. I'm aware of both artists shaping reality as they paint and as they kind of expand their visual domain. This is a particularly fascinating and quite typical early Veronese. In a way, Veronese's style doesn't change that much. It kind of comes out almost ready-made. His first painting is possibly around 1546. He dies in 1588 at the age of 60. He paints continually through that period, and, you know, it's very hard to date quite a lot of Veronese's. People have widely different dates offered, even for the painting we're looking at here, because he doesn't develop terribly much. OK, the last 10 years of his life, possibly from about 1580 onwards, there's a darkening palette. Things become more tragic. Possibly the Counter-Reformation has its... plays in, who knows, but essentially even in that period, that late period, he remains true to certain principles. Veronese was always doubted. Was he a decorator? Did he have much to say? Was it really just a series of kind of courtly templates? And did he really care too much about the subjects, the deep, meaningful subjects that he painted? That view suggests that deep and meaningful is always good of course and that superficial surfaces are not, which I think is a questionable position, but there have been some really earnest attempts in the more recent literature to show that Veronese is a counter-reformatory artist or an artist who really cares deeply and engages with his subjects. in ways that are fundamental. I would suggest, no, I stick with the older idea that Veronese is a decorative artist, but I'm not going to allow that decorativeness is the same thing as superficiality. So there I'm trying to challenge that binary conceptually to some extent. If one looks at this detail to the right of the anointing of David, one sees a kind of huge formal amalgam of almost impossible shapes and forms, illusions, one body becoming another. I mean whose foot is that approaching the altar beyond the woman with the baby? At first sight it just looks like her foot, but no there's another person, a man who's beyond them and we can see his forearm. And then where does the bull's body go? There's no space for it there. Yes, it refers to David the shepherd, and this is the point at which he's taking on his kind of kingship, if you like, anointed as the ancestor of Christ, and that would explain these old men with sticks to the left. So I'm not suggesting that it's an either-or here, that Veronese isn't aware of the subject, but I am struck in a painting like this. Just by the kind of visual difficulty, the challenge on a visual level that it takes the viewer on. So, looking at Veronese's artistic process, which one has to do because he is a kind of phenomenal draftsman, and this is kind of unusual to some extent in Venice. Remember the old clichés about the lack of drawing in Venice and lack of disegno or design from a central Italian perspective. When you come to someone like Veronese, as is often said in the literature, his approach to drawing is not something that he's learned in Venice. I think this takes us back to his place, his early years in Verona, where he's taught by two masters, local masters, and possibly taught to make a more kind of systematic approach to paintings. But even that, that idea. you know, is questionable. And in this drawing here, we see a kind of almost scattergun approach. It's not really a preparatory study. It's one of about 60 ink and wash, pen ink and wash drawings that have survived. And in this particular one, he seems to be thinking about at least At least three paintings, I think more. And so it's not really a kind of preparatory sketch as such. The figures kind of loom up. There's a spacelessness that I think we saw already in the Anointing of David, a kind of frieze-like quality, the forms pressing towards the surface, very typical of Veronese's effect. He's not really into perspective or even the edges of forms. And this is part of his kind of... His kind of resistance, I think, to the world beyond his own imaginative world. So I'm not going to go through and find all the bits for you here, but I do it in the book a little bit. Great. Essentially, we're looking at at least three paintings that he's thinking about at the same time. And that this sheet is, I mean, I can't remember what the function of it was. Maybe it's in the workshop as a kind of record of works already made, or maybe it's thinking about more than one painting at once. But, you know, potentially these paintings kind of extend over, well, 10 years or more. Thank So I think what's interesting is just how it suggests that things start with Veronese's own idea. They start in and he kind of controls you the visual world that he produces. All artists do that to some extent, and I'm aware of that. very But I think with Veronese, it's kind of a defining feature. But I'm moving on now to the Church of San Sebastiano in Venice, much. which has very recently been the restorations from, say, Venice, etc., have kind of transformed the interior here. This is maybe Veronese's equivalent to Tintoretto's work at San Rocco. It includes more than 60 paintings by Veronese. He's buried in the church, and he works there for more than 15 years, from around 1554 or 1555 onwards. It's a Hieronymite church run by the monks, but Veronese seems to, if you look carefully at the documents, seems to have had a kind of quite proactive role in the development of this commission and has ended up by painting nearly every available surface on this church. So going back to my point about his kind of visual expansiveness, which is surely very close to Tintoretto's. Interestingly, Veronese had worked quite communally at times as a fresco painter, in particular in his early career, but in this church he really becomes the kind of dominant figure, and it's an unusual kind of move away from that Venetian communality. I think Tintoretto does something very similar at San Rocco, where he dominates a single building. And I think, you know, we can see... and see that as a kind of shift in Paolo's kind of confidence and persona in the mid-1550s. He's arrived in Venice but these paintings don't really look very Venetian when you get closer to them and in fact they kind of reflect his recent time at the court of Mantua where he fulfilled several commissions in the early 1550s and he's very influenced by By the local artists there, I say local artists. Dead, now dead, artist Giulio Romano, Raphael's main pupil. And that Raphael-esque element in Veronese is often noted and I think is very much there, but mediated through Giulio Romano in Mantua. Um, but, um, yeah, I mean, you don't really have a very clear sense of the iconography in this church. And I was struck with that. I mean, people have made a lot of this and they've even called it a kind of counter-reformatory iconography on the basis that there are two crownings going on, one in the sacristy where the Virgin is crowned in heaven and a second crowning where Esther is crowned by King Ahasuerus. From the book of Esther in the Old Testament, so a kind of typological association between Esther and the Virgin, and a kind of confirmation of the Virgin. This is how the iconographical reading goes. But I'm not totally convinced by that. I feel that this is an extraordinary act of pictorialism. To me, it seems a very secular act. That image on the centre of the ceiling there, as does the one to the right, the triumph of Mordecai. Where we see where we see the uncle of Esther, who has kind of he was going to be murdered by the evil Harmon, the first minister of Ahasuerus, but he's reversed the tables. Hi, everyone. and is hung on the gallows that were prepared for Mordecai because Esther has intervened with the king. Well, none of that narrative, which I've kind of read in the book of Esther, is really apparent from this marvellous scene of kind of Roman triumph, of rearing horses that look like something out of Little Pony, if you remember Little Pony, but these feminised horses with their lovely, friendly faces. This fantastic up-and-under view in Sotto in Sù view. And the hero of the piece, Mordecai, reduced to a kind of severed head, a kind of floating head right at the centre of the image. And his body, kind of this kind of formal ellipsis, Veronese is very fond of these, which you might take for the arm and the leg below. But actually, that's a man, a servant who's ducking under his horse. And so that kind of visual play, almost ludic play, to my mind, this is not. A kind of doctrinally driven image, even if it does kind of in the end kind of support the kind of ongoing narrative. So, looking at two other images from the church, I'm afraid the one on the right is not particularly marvelous slide after the Restoration. They haven't been able to restore the skies, which are made of smalt. I'm afraid they've remained fairly incongruous. But just two smaller images that show this idea, this sense that Well, at least the one on the left is a smaller image. Veronese's tendency to kind of dip down into the everyday, into something ludic, humorous, irrelevant slightly to the narrative. This very alluring image is the image of two monks. Now is that second monk, it's up in the monk's choir, it's a fresco, it's very badly damaged. Is that second monk a person of colour? I'm not sure. I don't know. But it has sometimes been identified as such. But the way that this monk insouciantly turns his back in conversation away from the other frescoes round about is part of Veronese's joke, I think. And it's a sort of signal of the everyday world beyond the heroic narratives that he's painting of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. tragic story of Saint Sebastian. When you go to the later work in the Presbytery on the left here, it seems to be all about that story. There's Saint Sebastian in his armour pointing to his own image that's up to the right on the high altar and dragging off two followers to meet their doom for the cause of Christianity, a kind of martial. A male narrative of martyrdom. But everything else about the image seems to be Veronese. Holding that up, kind of controlling that narrative. And if you look at one of the mothers is complaining with open arms about his drive towards the inevitable end of the story. So Veronese is quite literally kind of turning the composition and many of the women with their children are turned away from... from the direction of Saint Sebastian. Is that a misogynist trope, or is that actually him supporting the possible, possible as it were rights of a mother to complain about this terrible thing that's going forward? Turning to his portraits, Veronese made about 40 of them. He worked for about 40 years, so not much more than one a year. There's probably some losses, there was maybe more than that, but there's not as many by Veronese as there are by, say, Tintoretto or Titian, of course. And to some extent, I think that's interesting from my perspective. I think I would draw from that the intimation that this was a type in which Veronese was, I wouldn't say tentative, because there are some marvellous portraits, and these two are amongst them. But I would suggest that this was not maybe a picture type in which he was not truly most at home, partially because it did involve a kind of measure of indexicality, a measure of reference to something beyond the picture itself. Remember the stability of his style away from portraits, the fact that regardless of medium, whether it's fresco or oil, he'll create the same kind of image. With these portraits, I think he probably used more than one sitting, and I think he took the features of the portrait sitter at one point and then kind of did the surrounds, as it were. I think that's particularly the case with the wonderful portrait of a blonde woman here, the Bellamani, as it's sometimes known. These are very much constructed portraits, and I think, you know, it's in keeping with that, the words I just said, that he actually kind of takes liberties with the forms that he shows. Thank I'm never quite sure where we are in space with the man holding the cap there, whether we seem to be on a kind of equal level when we look across at his eyes, but then again, you the mouldings of the architecture. Bring us into the image from below to lend him some grandeur. very And there's a contrast here between that very kind of Palladian looking monumental architecture that he's standing against much. with its kind of bronze sculpture glimpsed the legs there and a kind of contrapposto that echoes the contrapposto of the man himself. And the tiny little view off to the left there, which may show some marks. A kind of contrast between a Veneto Gothic past of Venice and a kind of contemporary, more courtly version of Venice, which I think this is fundamental to Veronese's aspirational work in the sense that he tuned in to the Venetian patriciate's desire to remake itself in a more courtly guise. And he was the perfect. So a quasi-aristocratic painter to kind of facilitate that social aspiration amongst his patrician sisters is why he became so popular with the patriciate. The Lady in Blue, did she ever wear that dress? Could she ever really have worn that jewellery, that bling? I don't know. I think about the sumptuary laws and I think about the way that Veronese would have secured a space against those sumptuary laws. I don't think they could be enacted in a painting. And so that kind of aspirational, that moment of kind of realisation could be fulfilled within the frame of his picture. And there's this extraordinary kind of girdle. She's wearing with this head and this rubies to either side, a pearl, possibly a coat of arms at the bottom. I can't quite see it, which would give you the family that she maybe came from. And, of course, relating, I think, to her fertility, given its position on her body. So moving quickly on to his other kind of major work, I suppose, from this earlier period is the frescoes at the Villa Barbaro, the serre on the mainland, where he collaborates with with Palladio, Andrea Palladio, and a lot's been made about that collaboration. But I wonder about it, really, whether Veronese is so Palladian in any way. There is a kind of expansiveness to Palladio's architecture, a simplification of elements, but I'm not sure that that really is the same thing for Veronese. They're certainly both an antica artist working in an antique style, that's for sure. They're both terra firma artists, so they have that kind of terra firma kind of kudos, if you like. But, you know, Palladio doesn't mention Veronese in his book of 1570, doesn't mention the paintings in the villa. I don't think there's hostility, but I just wonder how close the two artists really were. But when you move inside, and we're looking at the Sala dell'Olimpo ceiling here, an upper wall, you see this kind of program. Probably he's commissioned by Marc Antonio and Daniele Barbaro to leading Venetian patricians. Daniele, the more learned, perhaps, is kind of responsible for this elaborate program, astrological program, still teasing scholars to identify who exactly the woman in white is at the center of the ceiling. But looking down from these kind of abstract personifications of agrarian kind of cycles, cosmic harmony. You quickly come back into reality, don't you? You can just see her on the left-hand side there. You can see the woman of the house, Justiniana Barbara, the wife of Marcantonio, standing there with her servant, Thank a parakeet to the left, and there's a child just beyond one of her sons. You can just see the head of that child on the left-hand slide there. you So a much more kind of everyday scene. But notice how high she is on the wall very and how she is related to the three figures directly above her. Two images of Diana, one with multiple breasts, much. an image of fertility, another kissing a greyhound. And then finally, possibly, recent theory. Is that Latona, Diana's mother, the woman in white riding the dragon, in which case you'd have a kind of a kind of fourfold, if you like, kind of record a kind of representation moving up the wall, which would associate Justiniana with the chaste but fertile wife. Thank you very much. I don't know. I mean, it's possible. I'm not sure. But what's also interesting is the way in which animals, children, servants begin to kind of intrude on this world and are not cancelled at all from it. The wonderful servant to the right there. But when you move down onto the Sala Crociera, the crossing, in other words, Thank you very much. In the Villa Barbaro, you see the extent of Veronese's trompe-l'oeil, his painted world has completely transformed, dominated this interior. There's no bit of this that isn't a kind of an illusion, a fictive illusion. And it's playfully so. Surfaces, fabrics, draperies, landscapes, stone, marble, bronze, cameos. They're all imitated, and at the centre of it all, a small child opening a door. Now, who is that child? There's lots of people entering doors in this villa, and half of them may be just sort of unknown Barbaro children, perhaps, has been suggested, or maybe they're just servants or people of the place, and they have to be included in this kind of inclusive world of Veronese's art. I'm just moving on fairly quickly now, just some of the same points made with these slides here. We don't know who this gentleman hunter is. Is it a self-portrait of Veronese? Doesn't look too much like the marriage at Cana. Man, is it Mark Antonio Barbera, one of the patrons, one of the brothers? Or is it just a retainer, a hunter who's come in? Is he a gentleman or is he not? A little bit uncertain, and that ambiguity is, I think, part of the point. You've got an absolute welter of trompe l'oeil looking through these kind of, along the northern enfilade of the villa towards the portrait, so-called, The End, which kind of, again, gives you this sense of it as a kind of illusory, ambiguous image. And I think that's part of Veronese's purpose. So moving on to his more mature religious works, here's one, The Miracle of Barnabas, That's Barnabas. that he painted for a church in Verona. And I want to now just move towards this idea of the marginal figures, the attention he actually pays here to the sick, poor, and again to kind of marginal figures within Venetian society, and this fabulous Black chalk with red touches drawing of the boy to the left, the black boy to the left. He's already slightly elevated the figure who is being healed by the touch of Barnabas's Bible with reference to a classical sculpture that he'd seen in the Grimani collection. And now he's actually kind of spending a lot of attention, a lot of time with that marginal figure lighting a taper down to the left. David Rosan says the tape has gone out and therefore it's a kind of image of alterity. I don't think he's right about that. I think this is an image of inclusion. And it's actually quite typical of Veronese's tendency to include sub-Saharan Africans, dwarves, monkeys, parrots, but at the same time to divest those people of their more negative associations in social reality. Veronese's world, there's a kind of nobility which would allow you to include those people against the deprivations of social reality. This must be one of the greatest Veronese's for me. It's a very small painting, The Finding of Moses, and it's It shows the moment where Pharaoh's daughter is being persuaded to take on the baby who's been found in the river. To the left, there's a wonderful scene of dancing women who seem to have thrown off any idea of court etiquette. At the foreground, we have a wonderful image of a black man holding a picnic basket, Looking across to a dwarf who is being... Carefully, as maybe had a hostile reaction to the kind of floating baby, Moses, but is being explained, you know, a woman is taking him in and explaining to him that this is not necessarily a threat to him at court. It's an extraordinary scene of female power, I think. And it is, of course, thematically a moment where the decree of the cruel Pharaoh is. is denied or resisted by this world, this other world, this hidden world of others, if you like. So maybe you think I'm overestimating that, but that's the way I would read it. Moving on to the great six scenes of feasting that he created over the course of his career for monastic refectories, very famous works, of course. Yes, of course. And we see, again, if we pay attention to the kind of evenness, the equalization of the figures within these paintings, I think that leads us a long way to understanding Veronese. And I'm struck by the way that the poor to the left. are not marginalized in the image, despite the fact that they kind of literally are, that they're in the darkness, they're towards the edge. But actually, the eye is constantly brought back to them, maybe for textual reasons. Of course, the iconography maybe needs them to be there. But on the other hand, I'm struck by the way that they kind of echoed in their shadowiness the figure of Christ himself to the right. And there's that kind of constant movement between those two corners, if you like, of the painting or between the kneeling figure of the leper near the column and the kneeling figure of the Magdalene who is using the spikenard ointment to wash Christ's feet. I know I'm going quickly, but I don't want to run out of time. Marriage at Cana is probably, I suppose, Veronese's most famous work. We were talking about it just a little bit ago, but this is an enormous work. Veronese, if you read the contract for this painting, his patrons at San Giorgio Maggiore seem to give him more or less free play to paint what he wants as long as it shows the carna. John's passage on the Cana is very minimal and doesn't have a great big feast like this. More than 150 persons Vasari counted. Only 30 of them are seated wedding guests. There's more than 26 servants in the foreground alone. Including the disguised images of musicians that we've already seen. So the servants seem to have it. The servants seem to be in front here to some extent. And it's an extraordinary auricular image with sound. There's music. There's the sound of chatter, even if the guests' mouths remain closed. Closed. There is extraordinary kind of diversity in this image, sensuality in this image, I think, when you think that it actually hung in the refectory, a Palladian refectory, in which silence was the Benedictine rule. This is a very noisy painting. Does the often noted central lozenge of Christ with the butcher above him and the hourglass below, that kind of iconic time that's kind of embedded, Does that in the end judge the rest of what's going on in this image? I would think not. I think it's kind of embedded within it, but not allowed to kind of be above it in any way. And that gives Veronese his kind of loquacity, his ability to fill his canvas with incidents. Most famously, I think, in terms of the kind of problem that his visuality could cause for certain patrons sometimes, but certainly not all of them, would be this work, The Supper at the House of Flavius, in which we know that he ended up in front of the Inquisition in 1573, July 1573, the transcript rediscovered in the 19th century, telling us that That there was consternation amongst his inquisitors about his depiction of the figures at the front of the painting, these marginal types who are outside the loggia on our side of the space, and they make it difficult to read the narrative. So this is a kind of point of confirmation of some of the arguments I've already been making. And I'm not sure, I mean, Veronese certainly gives a lot of emphasis to those figures in front of the loggia. And he allows them to interrupt a clear view of the scene of Christ behind. I think it probably was originally a last supper rather than a feast in the house, as Simon sometimes thought. And he was merely kind of, as it were, using his artistic license, and that's one of the things he says in his reply, to kind of fill the space. And he says, we're a bit like poets or madmen, and we just do what we want. I think we can take that quite literally, is Veronese not deflecting being quite truthful. He does like to fill the space with a lot of figures, and that's what he's been doing all through his career. Just to very briefly look at a couple of mythological paintings by Veronese, I said coverage was one of the things I had to do, and I'm struck by how he kind of reorientates away from Titian's later mythologies, particularly his great Poesie series for Philip II. And reconstitutes the mythological painting as a kind of separate space that doesn't quite allow the reality in a kind of Arcadian reserved space away from present violence or present danger. And at the same time, he reconstitutes the control of women within that space. And I think that's one of the things that Titian had Kind of disturbed Renaissance mythological paintings by allowing a kind of violence between the sexes, not always initiated by. males but a kind of violence between the sexes into this kind of dream world. Veronese in this famous painting on the right, one of many versions of it, kind of makes the ball passive, moves the narrative away from the moment of the terrifying trip across the sea to Cyprus. The same kind of points can be made here, just to finish, where really Titian has again moved away from the point of rape, of violent physical assault, with staring eyes, violent thrusting. You know, you can almost miss, in his lovely Lucretia, you can almost miss the act of penetration with the dagger, which is a kind of substitute for the... The penis, which has led to the terrible reality of her suicide. And he's still interested. Look how interested he is still in that play of wonderful green fabrics and patterns, pomegranates, apples, and how he kind of conceals the violence, as it were, beneath the drapery, only the red ruby on her head. Kind of perhaps giving you a kind of an intimation of it. Finally, this is my last one, just to say that he works in the Ducal Palace and creates a series of wonderful works there, actually, late in his career. This is after the two fires in the Ducal Palace of... 1574 and 7. And in his Apotheosis of Venice, I was just looking at this again and picking up some other themes about how he consecrates women in his art and how there's a kind of a feminism there from a masterly perspective. So therefore, you know, perhaps we're even looking at something that can't be trusted quite in that way. But the way in which he intensifies existing identifications of Venice as feminine and moves the old iconography of the myth of Venice forward in images like this, where the men are kind of locked, primarily locked out of the center of the image and the patrician women of the city are lined up on that kind of balcony there. Most of the coterie above who are surrounding Venetia as she rises upwards like the Virgin are also women. There is a male piece to the left who is an interesting figure. But I think, you know, you can see a kind of world here which equates women with civilization, the civilization of Venice itself. I've almost come to an end, I'm just going to show you this final slide, just how women have come centre stage in a public official painting and just to contrast their position looking out of windows at men processing in a slightly earlier woodcut from the same city. Something has happened between these two images which I think is very interesting. So there are my final takeaways, and this is my final slide. I'm about to stop talking, and I don't know. This is kind of just a drawing together some of the various things I've argued in this book, and I'm hoping – I know it's not the last word on Veronese, but I'm hoping it stimulates more conversation about him, a truly fantastic artist. So thank you very much for listening. Tom, thank you very much for a fantastic paper. That was really tremendously rich. And I think you did a brilliant job of complicating some familiar, I wouldn't say misconceptions, but some familiar, but slightly misleading dichotomies and preconceptions about Veronese. And I certainly enjoyed it a great deal. Thank you. So I think, thanks to your superb timekeeping, I think we do have some time for questions.