Paolo Veronese

Veronese is the painter of Venetian abundance: pale silvery colour, marble architecture, crowds in silk, and a light that flattens nothing. Born Paolo Caliari in Verona in 1528 — hence the name Venice gave him — he moved to the capital in his twenties and stayed.

His speciality was illusion at ceiling height. He painted architecture that continues the real architecture, figures leaning over painted balustrades, and sky where a roof should be, calibrated so it resolves from the floor. At Villa Barbaro at Maser he frescoed the entire interior this way, including painted doors that open onto nothing and a huntsman apparently walking in from outside.

It got him into trouble once. Summoned before the Inquisition in 1573 over a Last Supper crowded with dwarfs, dogs and drunkards, he declined to repaint it and instead retitled it The Feast in the House of Levi — a solution that satisfied the tribunal and kept the picture intact.

He is buried in San Sebastiano, the church whose ceiling and walls he spent years painting, and which remains the best single place to see what he could do with a whole building.