To put forward Paolo Veronese as merely the dazzling virtuoso would all
the same be to show a singular ignorance of the true scope of his art.
He can rise as high in dramatic passion and pathos as the greatest of
them all, when he is in the vein; but these are precisely the occasions
on which he most resolutely subordinates his colour to his subject and
makes the most poetic use of chiaroscuro; as in the great altar-piece
_The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian_ in the church of that name, the too
little known _St. Francis receiving the Stigmata_ on a ceiling
compartment of the Academy of Arts at Vienna, and the wonderful
_Crucifixion_ which not many years ago was brought down from the
sky-line of the Long Gallery in the Louvre, and placed, where it
deserves to be, among the masterpieces. And yet in this last piece the
colour is not only in a singular degree interpretative of the subject,
but at the same time technically astonishing--with certain subtleties of
unusual juxtaposition and modulation, delightful to the craftsman, which
are hardly seen again until we come to the latter half of the present
century. So that here we have the great Veneto-Veronese master escaping
altogether from our theory, and showing himself at one and the same time
profoundly moving, intensely significant, and admirably decorative in
colour. Still what was with him the splendid exception was with Titian,
and those who have been grouped with Titian, the guiding rule of art.
Though our master remains, take him all in all, the greatest of Venetian
colourists, he never condescends to vaunt all that he knows, or to
select his subjects as a groundwork for bravura, even the most
legitimate. He is the greatest painter of the sixteenth century, just
because, being the greatest colourist of the higher order, and in
legitimate mastery of the brush second to none, he makes the worthiest
use of his unrivalled accomplishment, not merely to call down the
applause due to supreme pictorial skill and the victory over self-set