Veronese: Genius or Merely Great? : His vast canvases beg the question

Great art slices many ways. At the moment the National Gallery’s dignified West Wing houses a rare American exhibition of the 16th-Century Venetian Paolo Caliari in commemoration of his demise four centuries ago in 1588 at age 60. That was a long time back, but the exhibition finally leaves us pondering the question of why those of us living today regard some great artists as geniuses and others as just, well, great artists.

Caliari was one of a line of lush classical colorists of the Serinissima that included the dreamy Giorgione and the sensuous Titian as well as a succeeding generation of Mannerists like El Greco and Tintoretto.

Caliari might be characterized as a blend of the two lines. He had the classicists’ gravitas, heroic realism and typical response to light and color grafted to the Mannerists’ sense of the theatrical. Since he came to Venice at 27 from Verona, he was nicknamed after his hometown and we know him best today as Veronese.

If you’ve had the odd art history course, made the Cook’s tour of European museums or even paid close attention to the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the name Veronese probably rings a bell without being on the short list of all time great art geniuses.

Frankly, the present exhibition--including 105 drawings and paintings and on view to Feb. 20--is not enough in itself to spark the question of genius around the name Veronese. The thing that does that trick is the lingering aura of a splendid showing of Michelangelo’s drawings of figures and architecture that closed recently in neighboring rooms. Michelangelo is justifiably on everybody’s short list of art geniuses.

But when you shuttle mentally back and forth between him and Veronese, the Venetian comes off so well you begin to wonder why his reputation lacks the Schwarzeneggerian proportions of old Mr. Agony and Ecstasy. There is no question Michelangelo was possessed of greater originality. He was a lifetime older than Veronese’s generation and bequeathed them the heroic humanism we find in the proportions of the younger artist’s figures.

But all artists are inheritors by definition, and some of them have caught the gold ring of genius. It is partly a question of transformation.

What about objective grounds? Was Michelangelo a better artist because he was painter, sculptor and architect and Veronese just a painter? If that’s the case, why is the grand Baroque sculptor and architect Gianlorenzo Bernini not on the list of Art’s Greatest Hits?

Truth is, the entire genius question is something of a blue-sky speculation; that’s what makes it interesting. One thing is fairly certain. Whoever is regarded as a genius in any epoch gets the palm because of prevailing taste. Taste is the spice that defines the spirit of one’s times. It’s all the same except the oregano. Shakespeare and El Greco were all but forgotten until 19th-Century Romantics revived them.

It’s also interesting that the candidates for election to genius in any epoch seem to come in pairs, offering the present a choice of excellences. There was Michelangelo vs. Raphael, Velaquez vs. Goya, Delacroix vs. Ingres, Manet vs. Monet, Van Gogh vs. Gauguin, Matisse vs. Picasso and Pollock vs. DeKooning.

Generally, one of each pair is tougher. One leaned to a crazy, troubled, short life, the other lived longer and more quietly. For most of the lifetimes of seasoned adults today, the tough, crazy artists who most clearly expressed their rebellious individuality have been the preferred geniuses--Michelangelo, Goya, Delacroix, Manet, Van Gogh, Picasso and Pollock. (If you can’t make up your mind Gauguin is a great compromise. He is only normal by comparison to the more tragic and emotive Van Gogh.)

The other set was strictly the preferred turf of aesthetes and insiders, but in recent years the softer artists seem to have been gaining ground. Look at the current Guido Reni revival at the County Museum of Art, for example.

This shift in aesthetic taste may account for the particular attraction of the Veronese exhibition and may even be the unconscious motive behind it. In many ways Paolo Caliari is the perfect Old Master for Post-Modern yuppies.

He is best known for canvases so vast that they make Pollock look like a miniaturist. (For obvious reasons of cumbersomeness and immobility, none of the huge canvases are in the present show.) He depicted biblical scenes like the marriage feast at Cana as if they were lavish contemporary festival pageants held in sumptuous marble loggia full of plump white-bosomed beauties swathed in pearls and velvet accompanied by dashing, beribboned cavaliers draped in damask silk. Drunks, dwarfs, dogs and peacocks caper across the stage.

Veronese’s vision was so secular that he once ran afoul of the Inquisition by painting a Last Supper so saturated with pagan luxury the priests found it heretical. Veronese saved himself by renaming it “Feast in the House of Levi” and admitting that “we painters are all a little mad.”

History takes the incident as evidence of artists’ growing ability to paint as they please, and that may be one reason we are inclined to identify with Veronese. Another may be the slight aura of, well, kitsch that creeps into the work. Veronese’s combination of realism, ornamentation and theatricality make the paintings look vaguely modern like stills from a spectacle by De Mille or Zefferelli.

Like us, Veronese dwelt in an era of fulfillment rather than innovation. His detractors have withheld him a seat in the front of the bus by styling him decorative and lacking in profundity just as critics today level the same stings at artists who work in that other Serinissima: Venice, Calif.

It’s hard to swallow the criticism of Veronese when we look at his majestically mournful “Crucifixion,” but we can see surprisingly apt links between him and our Venetians. The powdery atmospheres that permeate his skies set moods not unlike Peter Alexander’s. His mood of hedonistic lyricism gets into Billy Bengston’s watercolors. Both Hockney and Diebenkorn echo some of his marvelous color. The delicate harmonies of his silver-gray pastels are as evanescent and heartbreaking as the afterglow of an L.A. sunset.

That ought to be enough to convince anybody that pure sensuousness is expressive in itself but that there is even more to Veronese. There is a vibrant gallantry and yielding grace about this work that causes its maker to seem like the embodiment of Il Cortigiano--The Courtier--the Renaissance gentleman as envisioned by the writer Baldassare Castiglione.

The Me Generation could do worse than to study Veronese’s brand of noblesse oblige. It does not condescend, it understands.

It is not always easy to read the true character of an Old Master painter through his work. They were obliged to deal with so many conventional subjects, but Veronese’s allegories on facets of the relationship between the sexes are so moving that you feel he had a personal investment in them.

“Venus and Mars” is certainly the finest example on view here. A milky nude Venus stands with an arm draped around a seated Mars in golden armor. They are in a wood near a classical fragment of a faun. Veronese’s palette gives way to sonorous after-rain hues. Both god and goddess look at a Cupid who ties a pink ribbon around Venus’ leg. Slightly startled, they are on the brink of amusement. In the background another Cupid holds Mars’ horse at bay.

The painting seems to be about the way a harmonious liaison can create peace and a sense of wholeness. Other wonderful pieces like “Unfaithfulness” and “Disillusionment” look at the anxiety and imbalance that comes when things go wrong.

They grasp the nuances of intimacy so well despite heroic scale that we realize Veronese is a precursor of the delicate refinement of the Rococo, of Watteau’s fetes galantes .

They understand human need with such practicality and human foible with such kindness that they are like Old Master versions of modern classic love ballads written by Larry Hart and sung by Ella Fitzgerald.

We like our geniuses to be about passion, but Veronese is about love. We can do worse than that.