Veronese: Feast At The House Of Levi

Veronese’s most controversial paintings, which was intended to be a monumental work depicting the Last Supper but three months after its completion, Veronese had to hastily change the title of the painting. The work, which is now entitled Feast at the House of Levi, is a truly magnificent painting.

In 1573, Paolo Veronese, who was working in the Mannerist style, was awarded the commission to paint a depiction of the Last Supper for the rear wall of the refectory of the fourteenth century Basilica di Santi Giovanni e Paolo. It is one of the largest churches in the city of Venice. This painting by Veronese was to replace Titian’s painting, The Last Supper, which had been lost in a fire in 1571.

Mannerism, Italian Manierismo, (from maniera, “manner,” or “style”), is an artistic style that predominated Italy from the end of the High Renaissance in the 1520s to the beginning of the Baroque style around 1590. The Mannerist style originated in Florence and Rome and spread to northern Italy and, ultimately, to much of central and northern Europe.

Mannerism originated as a reaction to the harmonious classicism and the idealized naturalism of High Renaissance art as practiced by Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael in the first two decades of the 16th century.

In the portrayal of the human nude, the standards of formal complexity had been set by Michelangelo and the norm of idealized beauty by Raphael. But in the work of these artists’ Mannerist successors, an obsession with style and technique in figural composition often outweighed the importance and meaning of the subject matter. The highest value was instead placed upon the apparently effortless solution of intricate artistic problems, such as the portrayal of the nude in complex and artificial

poses.

Mannerist artists evolved a style that is characterized by artificiality and artiness, by a thoroughly self-conscious cultivation of elegance and technical facility, and by a sophisticated indulgence in the bizarre.

Mannerists like Veronese sought a continuous refinement of form and concept, pushing exaggeration and contrast to great limits. The results included strange and constricting spatial relationships, jarring juxtapositions of intense and unnatural colors, an emphasis on abnormalities of scale, sometimes totally irrational mix of classical motifs and other visual references to the antique and inventive and grotesque pictorial fantasies as seen in Veronese Feast at the House of Levi

The splendor of the painting probably stimulated prestigious, rather than pious appetites. Christ and his apostles are seated in the middle, surrounded by contemporary, extravagantly dressed people busily interacting inside grandiose Venetian architecture.

Veronese also included frivolities, like one apostle picking his teeth, a servant with a nosebleed and non-Gospel figures like a dog, midgets, a jester with a parrot, German mercenaries, drunks and other fantasies. Overall, it looks more like a Venetian patrician banquet than a sacred subject.

Understandably, this setting provoked grumbling about irreverence with religious hardliners. Even worse, the painting caused an investigation by the Inquisition, who accused the artist of heresy, then, a capital sin. Veronese had to explain why he painted ‘buffoons, drunken Germans, dwarfs and other such absurdities’, considering that ‘in Germany and other countries infested by heresy, it is habitual, by means of pictures full of absurdities, to ridicule the things of the Holy Catholic Church, in order to teach false doctrine to ignorant people who have no common sense’. Veronese’s inclusion of this assortment of characters into such a famous religious scene was looked upon by the Church as being irreverent, bordering or blasphemous.

In a desperate final attempt to justify the inclusion of all the extra people, both normal and strange, he pointed out that such elements that displeased the Inquisition, were all in the foreground or the sides of the painting and did not, in any way, form an incursion into the religious depiction of Christ at supper at the center of the work.

Veronese took skepticism to expand on what was presumed to be the fact and re-create his own fantasy from it, as none of it is known with any certainty anyway.

Veronese was opposed to the idea of decorum, which is the appropriateness of a representation in the visual arts. However, he shows more of the idea of poesie, where he displays fantasy and less focus on moral content.

One final thought as to why Veronese would add so many people into a religious scene. A decade earlier, in 1563, he had completed a similar monumental religious commission for the monks, entitled the Wedding at Cana, which now hangs in the Louvre. It is interesting to note that it was the monks who had asked him to squeeze as many figures into their painting, as possible. This was however at a time when the Inquisition and the upholding of Counter-Reformation ideals had yet to reach Venice.