After Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese[85] seems an anti-climax. His imagination is very limited. His greatest pictures treat the sole theme of stately feasts. His soul is that of a very high class society editor. But no well-advised person looks to Paolo Veronese for soul. One rather seeks in him judgment and fine painting. Both are at their maximum. Paolo Caliari was born at Verona in 1528, trained by a half primitive master, Antonio Badile, and influenced by the energetic compositions of Brusasorci. Paolo inherited the long Veronese tradition for spectacular narrative painting with splendid architectural accessories, and he carries the local tradition to its close and height. He came to Venice at twenty-seven, a finished and famous artist, bringing with him a novel sort of color. He avoids the contrasts and keen resonances of the true Venetians, painting rather in luminous half tones based on gray and blue. His forms are rich and solid without heavy shadow, and his canvases have the generally blond and uniform color quality of the modern out-of-door school. His preference is for feasts and pageants. We have the spectacle of a rich and gentle society, dignified in its pleasures and resplendent in its costume. Gold brocade sets off the pearly skins of the portly and gracious ladies in his pictures, and their cavaliers are as magnificently clad in satins, velvets and furs. The feasts are generally half out of doors in great colonnades, with the light glinting impartially upon fair throats and faces and upon channeled columns and sculptured balustrades. Behind, pale cornices and spires swim against a blue sky. It was the habit of the wealthy chapters of monks who maintained the great Venetian churches to paint in their refectories some Scriptural feast, as a warrant perhaps for their own daily convivialities. Earlier, the most solemn of all meals, The Last Supper, would have been chosen. Not so with Veronese and his contemporaries. They chose instead the Marriage at Cana or the Feast in the House of Simon or of Levi, Figure 301,—splendid events of small or only incidental religious significance, and treated merely as contemporary banquets. [Illustration: FIG. 301. Paolo Veronese. Feast in Levi’s House.—_Venice._ ]