Inaugural has Falls Painting

Last week the iconic 1856 painting "Niagara Falls" served as an impressive conversation piece for President Obama's inaugural luncheon. A well-known classic of 19th-century American landscape portraiture, the Ferdinand Richardt work provided a distinctively Western New York presence at the Washington, D.C., venue. Thanks and appreciation are due Sen. Charles Schumer, who seems to have taken a special liking to the city of Niagara Falls and has worked hard on its behalf for many years, for honoring us by arranging to conspicuously display this symbol of local pride, front and center, at the national celebration.

One of the striking aspects of the Richardt is that it portrays the Falls in a natural setting surrounded by trees and green space, precisely in the way his contemporary, renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, intended it to be when creating his visionary plan for what was then called the Niagara Reservation.

A century later, Maid of the Mist owner James Glynn, along with his sidekicks at New York State Parks, felled the beautiful trees on Goat Island attending the mighty cataracts in order to construct toll booths and parking lots, opening up the reservation to car, bus and trolley traffic, effectively ruining the Olmsted plan. Fast-food purveyor Delaware North joined in, with the result that the present-day Niagara Falls State Park is cluttered with food booths, snack bars, busy trolley stops, parking lots, gift and souvenir shops, coin-operated binoculars and all manner of man-made contrivances including floodlights on the falls and fireworks. All of which served to change the natural wonder of Richardt's and Olmsted's day into an exploited, Disneyfied money machine benefiting Glynn, Delaware North and State Parks.

Just as Matisse was a pillar of the glory years of 20th-century modernism, when he, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque reinvented what painting could be, Veronese was a vital presence during that astonishing moment in the 16th century when he, Titian and Tintoretto—whose careers overlapped for nearly four decades, despite the differences in their ages—together defined the Golden Age of Venetian painting. And just as Matisse's paeans to the tension between the three-dimensional world and the flat canvas have been dismissed as "decorative" because of their glorious color and patterning, Veronese's lush figure groups have been similarly labeled, for similar reasons.

On this side of the Atlantic, it's easy to see just how wrongheaded this evaluation is in relation to Matisse. The stellar examples of his work in U.S. museums are abundant evidence of his power, rigor and inventiveness. But we can't properly take the measure of Veronese without a trip to Europe. Many of his most significant works remain in situ: fresco cycles, devotional works and enormous canvases, such as the Accademia's "Feast in the House of Levi" (1573) in Venice—the vast banqueting scene that got Veronese into trouble with the Inquisition, under its original title of "The Last Supper." Yet through April 14 at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, "Paolo Veronese: A Master and His Workshop in Renaissance Venice," a thoughtful survey drawn from works in North American collections, offers an excellent introduction to the artist.

Conceived and organized by Virginia Brilliant, the Ringling's curator of European Art, in cooperation with Frederick Ilchman, curator of paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in part to set the Ringling's important Veronese paintings in context, the show is the first comprehensive overview of Veronese's work in more than 20 years. Due to the usual difficulties in obtaining loans, there are some conspicuous absences, but the selection includes enough outstanding works to provide a sense not only of Veronese's evolution and achievement, but also of the range of his themes, the way he repeated and varied those themes, over time, and how, as a successful cinquecento artist, he worked with assistants. As a subtext, we gain an understanding of the American taste for Venetian masters.

A choice group of drawings offers an intimate view of the artist, as he worked out motifs, while a selection of prints reminds us of how Veronese's work was disseminated and adds images of European masterpieces not included in the show. A small, eye-testing sampling of "problem" pictures provokes consideration of their merits through comparisons with securely attributed works.

The installation is elegant and evocative, and there's a handsome catalog with enlightening essays by Ms. Brilliant, Mr. Ilchman and other specialists, including the eminent David Rosand.

The show is organized thematically, but we first encounter the earliest included work, the Ringling's full-length portrait of Francesco Franceschini. Painted in 1551, before Veronese left the mainland for Venice, it presents an aggrandizing view of a plump, magnificently dressed young man from Vicenza. Nearby, an unidentified man in sober black, painted a quarter-century later and standing against pale, classicizing architecture, epitomizes the more restrained taste of La Serenissima with its miraculously varied textures, transparencies and sheens, within an uncompromising silhouette of inky darkness. No lack of rigor here—nor in a glowing, half-length, posthumous portrait of the hero of the battle of Lepanto, Agostino Barbarigo, all gleaming armor and brushy highlights, against a crimson curtain.

Mythological and religious paintings, including the Ringling's brilliantly colored "Rest on the Flight into Egypt" (c. 1572), are testimony to Veronese's ability not only to orchestrate gorgeous textures—fur, flesh, steel, damask—but also to stage complex scenes like a master theater director.

Large-scale protagonists occupy a shallow frieze across the canvas, with a substantial volume of space evoked by means of gesture, architectural settings, glimpses of landscape and, above all, relationships of opulent hues—burgundy, scarlet, salmon, creamy off-whites, dull greens, saturated ultramarine, chalky cerulean. Veronese is a virtuoso of gesture and posture, too. It's shocking to realize that the man embracing St. Lucy, in a late painting, is not her lover but her executioner, pressing a knife to her bosom. The lascivious sprawl of Actaeon, watching Diana and her nymphs bathe, implies that there's nothing accidental about the encounter. No wonder the angry goddess turned him into a stag—a punishment encapsulated in a larger, even more sensuous version of the story. Of course, this kind of sensuality made Veronese a specialized taste in early 20th-century America, suitable only for daring collectors.

The exhibition concludes with variations on the Baptism of Christ. We see Veronese fine-tune his conception in works from the late 1550s and from c. 1580-85, before we encounter a reprisal of the motif, painted c. 1590, after the master's death, and signed by "The Heirs of Paolo Veronese"—his sons and studio assistants, who carried on the tradition. Alas, it's disappointing. But for what Veronese was truly capable of, there's the last gallery's head of St. Michael, c. 1563-65, a fragment of an altarpiece, a marvel of loosely painted curls, tender expression and delectable color. It's decorative, but only in the sense that it delights the eye.