Venice Academy, the _Finding of Moses_ at the Brera are at hand to give
solid support to such an assertion.

In some ways Paolo Veronese may, without exaggeration, be held to be the
greatest virtuoso among colourists, the most marvellous executant to be
found in the whole range of Italian art. Starting from the cardinal
principles in colour of the true Veronese, his precursors--painters such
as Domenico and Francesco Morone, Liberale, Girolamo dai Libri,
Cavazzola, Antonio Badile, and the rather later Brusasorci--Caliari
dared combinations of colour the most trenchant in their brilliancy as
well as the subtlest and most unfamiliar. Unlike his predecessors,
however, he preserved the stimulating charm while abolishing the
abruptness of sheer contrast. This he did mainly by balancing and
tempering his dazzling hues with huge architectural masses of a vibrant
grey and large depths of cool dark shadow--brown shot through with
silver. No other Venetian master could have painted the _Mystic Marriage
of St. Catherine_ in the church of that name at Venice, the _Allegory
on the Victory of Lepanto_ in the Palazzo Ducale, or the vast _Nozze di
Cana_ of the Louvre. All the same, this virtuosity, while it is in one
sense a step in advance even of Giorgione, Titian, Palma, and Paris
Bordone--constituting as it does more particularly a further development
of painting from the purely decorative standpoint--must appear just a
little superficial, a little self-conscious, by the side of the nobler,
graver, and more profound, if in some ways more limited methods of
Titian. With him, as with Giorgione, and, indeed, with Tintoretto,
colour was above all an instrument of expression. The main effort was to
give a realisation, at once splendid and penetrating in its truth, of
the subject presented; and colour in accordance with the true Venetian
principle was used not only as the decorative vesture, but as the very
body and soul of painting--as what it is, indeed, in Nature.