Of the triumvirate of sixteenth-century Venetian painters, Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto, Paolo [Caliari] Veronese (1528-1588) best conveyed Venice's civic splendor. His masterpieces in the Doge's Palace conferred on the Republic a magnificence and authority that was rapidly dwindling by the end of the Renaissance. But on a private level, he also reshaped the fashions of the Serenissima through a steady stream of portrait commissions. Many members of Venice's most elite families sat for Veronese, as did notable artists and authors, including Titian and Sir Phillip Sidney. Once regarded as Venice's best portraitist, his talents in this genre unfortunately remain largely unknown to modern audiences. This book offers the first comprehensive study of the approximately forty portraits that survive. Shedding new light on early works, such as the pendants of the Da Porto and the frescos of the Barbaro in the Palladian villa at Maser, Professor Garton also examines Paolo's images of women within the larger polemics surrounding the anonymous beauties of Giorgione, Palma il Vecchio, and Titian. The author analyzes Veronese's innovations in martial portraiture, melancholic portrayals of artists and nobility, and evocations of the antique. Relevant issues of social history, class insecurity, and poetic convention are all brought to bear in deciphering the meanings of these images and what they reveal about the painter and his clientele. This layered study of Venice's golden age of painting ends appropriately with a glance at the moderns who profited most from the study of Veronese's portraits: Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Henri Fantin-Latour, Mary Cassatt, and Henri Matisse. A complete catalogue of Veronese's portraits follows the chapters.

Catalog of the exhibition "Veronese: magnificence in Renaissance Venice" held March 19-June 15, 2014 at the National Gallery, London.

This beautifully illustrated work brings together more than one hundred objects from the J. Paul Getty Museum’s collection of European decorative arts. Included here is a generous selection of French and Italian furniture from the mid-sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Masterpieces by André-Charles Boulle, Bernard (II) van Risenburgh, and others reveal the virtuoso craftsmanship that makes these objects such compelling examples of the furniture maker’s art. Many of the Museum’s finest pieces of porcelain, glass, and tin-glazed earthenware are also represented. Tapestries from Gobelins and Beauvais, bronze firedogs from Fontainebleau, and a lathe-turned ivory goblet of astonishing complexity from Saxony are among the other highlights of this handsome volume.

Thomas Cole (1801 - 1848) was an American artist. He is regarded as the founder of the Hudson River School, an American art movement that flourished in the mid-19th century. Cole's Hudson River School, as well as his own work, was known for its realistic and detailed portrayal of American landscape and wilderness, which feature themes of romanticism and naturalism.Cole was primarily a painter of landscapes, but he also painted allegorical works. The most famous of these are the five-part series, The Course of Empire, which depict the same landscape over generations-from a near state of nature to consummation of empire, and then decline and desolation-now in the collection of the New York Historical Society and the four-part The Voyage of Life. There are two versions of the latter, one at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., the other at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York. Among Cole's other famous works are the Oxbow (1836), the Notch of the White Mountains, Daniel Boone at His cabin at the Great Osage Lake, and Lake with Dead Trees (1825). He also painted The Garden of Eden (1828), with lavish detail of Adam and Eve living amid waterfalls, vivid plants, and deer.In 1842, Cole embarked on a Grand Tour of Europe in an effort to study in the style of the Old Masters and to paint its scenery. Most striking to Cole was Europe's tallest active volcano, Mount Etna. Cole was so moved by the volcano's beauty that he produced several sketches and at least six paintings of it. The most famous of these works is A View from Mount Etna from Taormina. Cole also produced a highly detailed sketch of it, entitled View of Mount Etna which shows a panoramic view of the volcano with the crumbling walls of the ancient Greek theatre of Taormina on the far right.Cole influenced his artistic peers, especially Asher B. Durand and Frederic Edwin Church, who studied with Cole from 1844 to 1846.

The painter Veronese's life is here displayed in several early biographies, each showcasing a different side of the artist "Never was a painter more nobly joyous, never did an artist take a greater delight in life, seeing it all as a kind of breezy festival and feeling it through the medium of perpetual success. . . He was the happiest of painters." --Henry James on Veronese, 1909 Collected here for the first time, these fascinating early biographies (one of which has never been translated before) describe and celebrate the astonishingly fertile art of Paolo Veronese. Most of what we know about Veronese comes from these three essays. "I have known this Paolino and I have seen his beautiful works. He deserves to have a great volume written in praise of him, for his pictures prove that he is second to no other painter," wrote Veronese's contemporary Annibale Carracci in the margins to his copy of Vasari's writings, continuing "and this fool passes over him in four lines. And just because he was not Florentine." It was indeed a measure of his fame that Vasari, whose Life of Veronese is reprinted here, should have overcome his pro-Tuscan prejudices to write about his great Venetian contemporary; and he was followed in this by another Florentine, the theorist Raffaele Borghini. But the most striking record of the impact of Veronese's art on his countrymen is the extensive biography by his fellow Venetian, Carlo Ridolfi. Entirely original in the seriousness and passion with which he approached his subject, Ridolfi permanently changed the course of writing about art. This is the first translation of his work into English, translated and introduced by Xavier F. Salomon, curator of "Veronese: Renaissance Magnificence" at the National Gallery, London. 50 pages of color illustrations cover the span of Veronese's breathtaking career.