The Apotheosis of Venice
Paolo Veronese (1528 to 1588) · about 1582
Tip your head back at the throne end of the hall and you will find Venice herself, a blonde woman in gold and white, being crowned by a winged Victory high in a painted sky. She sits on a bank of cloud above a twisted column and a balcony crowded with Venetian ladies and gentlemen, and below them, at the very bottom of the oval, soldiers on horseback and ordinary citizens crane upward to watch. It is the most confident of all the Republic's self portraits: a city that has become a goddess, receiving her crown from heaven while her people applaud.
Veronese was the great master of painted architecture, and this ceiling is his last major work in the palace, finished a few years before his death. Notice how the twisted columns and the balcony are drawn in steep foreshortening, so that the whole scene seems to open upward through the ceiling. The colours are cool and silvery, with pale blues, greys and ochres that read clearly from the floor far below. Look for the way the figures on the balcony lean on the parapet and look down at you, a device that Veronese loved and that makes the painted world and the real hall seem to share the same air.
The ceiling of the Great Council was replanned after the fire of 1577, and a committee of scholars drew up a programme of Venetian triumphs for Veronese, Tintoretto and Palma il Giovane. Veronese's oval was placed above the Doge's seat so that the crowning of Venice hung directly over the head of the man who ruled her. A detail worth finding is the pair of horses at the base of the composition, one white and one dark, that seem to stride out of the painting toward you, as if the parade were about to spill down into the room.
Did You Know? The women leaning over the painted balcony are portraits of Venetian noblewomen in the fashions of the fifteen eighties.
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