When, however, the theme can be drawn from everyday Venice, Veronese is overpoweringly fine. Again and again in looking at the ceilings of the Ducal Palace one catches his breath before such visions of magnificence as Venice as Justice, Figure [304], Venice as Queen of the World. For all its contemporary quality, it attains a strange other-worldliness. It is as if some one had looked at superb Venice through a magnifying glass that ennobled the forms and greatly enhanced the colors. You feel how Veronese loved it all and how little he cared for anything beyond the splendor, dignity and prosperity of his adoptive city. He gives us the look of Venice at her climax of Renaissance glory, as Carpaccio had given the dying radiance of her mediæval estate. From the point of view of judgment, style and fine craftsmanship, it is impossible to overpraise Veronese. He should be regarded rather as a great painter in the narrower sense than a supreme artist. When he died in 1588, only fifty years old, he left a very enduring inheritance.
Fig. 304. Paolo Veronese. Venice attended by Force and Justice. Ceiling Panel.—Ducal Palace.
It was on the whole his moderate and judicious sumptuousness that inspired the painters of the next century. It was well that they sought his imitable merits and not the passion of Titian and Tintoretto. It was largely thanks to Veronese that Venetian art suffered no such sharp decline as befell that of Florence and Rome. The decorative tradition of Veronese sufficed to nourish a Piazetta and a Tiepolo a century and a half after his death.
Fig. 305. G-B. Tiepolo. Time revealing Truth.—Villa Biron, Vicenza.
For Giovanni Battista Tiepolo[[86]] (1695–1770) in sheer force and fertility yields to none of his Renaissance predecessors. There never was a more valiant draughtsman or a more splendid colorist. Such decorations as those of the Scuola del Carmine, and the Labia Palace fall little behind Veronese’s pageantry in grandeur while representing an audacity of stroke and coloration which Veronese lacked. So the tragic scenes of Christ’s Passion at San Luigi have the intensity of Tintoretto if lacking something of his nobility. In the ceiling decorations of Tiepolo, Figure [305], we see the freest fancies of the Baroque, its customary tumult of shimmering clouds and hovering pearly figures, repeated with a lightness and audacity and withal measure which the Baroque itself never attained save in its great initiator Correggio. Such powers as Tiepolo’s soon won him international patronage. He painted in Austria and died at Madrid. With him perishes the grandeur of the Venetian school. Only a tinge of masquerade and exhibitionism puts him lower than his constant exemplar, Paolo Veronese.
Fig. 306. Antonio Canale. Island of San Michele.—Royal Collections, Windsor.
Indeed the simplicity which is the most enduring charm of any art is more felt in the minor Venetians of Tiepolo’s time, as in Antonio Canale, called Canaletto, Figure [306], who painted the irradiated panorama of the Venetian lagoon and canals with the ardent precision of a reborn Gentile Bellini. Francesco Guardi[[87]] (1712–1765), Canaletto’s pupil, with a freer brush and fancy paints the spectacle of Venice, Figure [307], its balls and promenades and water pageants, with the sensitiveness of a Carpaccio. But Carpaccio’s youthful world is no longer there to paint. Romance has given way to casual amorous intrigue, sentiment to show. But out of the welter of sophisticated gayety still rise clean against the heavens the pale domes and bell towers of an older and finer Venice. Guardi is perhaps at his best in the numerous tiny oil sketches which deal with the remote and solitary groves and ruins of the lagoon. Here we have felicities of broken color and niceties of observation, accurate notations of evanescent effects of light, which can still give lessons to the most modern landscapists.