La bottega di Paolo Veronese tra Verona e Venezia: 1528 - 1588

In his artistic career, spanning nearly four decades, Paolo Veronese (1528 – 1588) took advantage of the active collaboration of his fruitful workshop which was comprised of permanent members, such as his brother Benedetto, and the so-called 'collaboratori occasionali'. After the master’s death, the atelier’s continuity was ensured by the artist’s family, whose members acted as Haeredes Pauli Caleari Veronensis, a unique example in the history of Venetian art. When considering the artist’s workshop, academia’s attention has focused on the identification of helpers’ cooperation within the master’s works. Such a formalistic approach, however, does not fully elucidate the complex phenomenon of Renaissance Venitian botteghe nor does it enlighten the broad artistic production of Caliari. Therefore, in order to extensively reconsider these aspects, an alternative methodology has been chosen for the present work. While the first part investigates issues related to the youth and early training of Veronese - aiming at reconstructing a complete, re-contextualized profile of the artist - the second clarifies Paolo’s working pattern by focusing on the analysis of specific drawings taken from the large corpus of the artist (and, partly, of his assistants). Understanding the mechanisms of production within the workshop, in fact, requires a deep analysis of the graphic material. This is what the proposed case study of the Coronation of the Virgin for the Venetian church of Ognissanti tries to demonstrate. The final section is dedicated to the Haeredes Pauli, a topic barely touched upon by previous scholarship. The reconsideration of historical facts and sources, together with the analysis of unpublished documents, demonstrates that the success of the Haeredes – the brother Benedetto and the grandchildren Gabriele and Carletto - was achieved by preserving the master’s organizational systems and by enduring contacts with patrons. While the most interesting considerations of Carletto are principally related to his training in the workshop of Francesco Dal Ponte (Bassano), investigation on Gabriele revealed new and original insights: documents recovered from Venetian archives not only proved his activity as a painter across the seventeenth century, but also allowed the setting forth of hypotheses about his role as a merchant.