Wit and Humour in the Work of Paolo Veronese

Abstract

John Ruskin in 1860 drew attention to Veronese's humorous and sympathetic use of domestic animals in his religious paintings. The paper begins with the example cited by Ruskin, the paintings commissioned for the Coccina family palace at the beginning of the 1570s. Veronese's humorous treatment of animals is a feature of his work from all stages of his career and, in the great Feasts, was combined with a feeling for decorum. The animals underline the narrative without distracting from the central message. A comparable approach can also be found in Veronese's treatment of the programme and of the Olympian gods and goddesses in the fresco cycle of the Villa Barbaro at Maser. This approach is extended to his mythological paintings, where the eroticism of Giulio Romano is defused through a sense of wit, which was developed from an older Quattrocento tradition.