In favour of Fading: Colours in Paolo Veronese's Allegories of Love in the National Gallery, London
- Eleanor Crook
- 6 hours ago
- 4 min read
I saw these yesterday and am setting down some thoughts and research , before they fade. The four Allegories of Love by Paolo Veronese 1528 - 1588 ( from Verona but active in Venice) in the National Gallery in London hang in heavy frames but were originally made as ceiling paintings for the inspired collector emperor Rudolph II , intended for Prague Castle - he who commissioned Arcimboldo to make his surreal composites , built a Wunderkammer and patronised the astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler. No surprise then that he commissioned these delicate, esoteric allegories, whose narratives prickle the imagination and spin an atmosphere of intrigue and luxury.
I'm showing them to you as I saw them today, aganst patterned paper and lit from above, in the context the National has given them, and I'll say right away that they captivated my eye not so much by their subject as by the strange, otherworldly muted colours, the oil paint almost pearlescent and extremely restrained hues. Looking closely the brush strokes seem to be swiftly brushed onto a somewhat coarse woven canvas, with a visible centre seam.
I was inspecting the strange violet-leaden skies, remembering my trip to the Veneto one early summer when the weather over the lagoon and farmlands was unpredictable. A rare tornado had flung across the landscape recently and destroyed parts of a palazzo, cutting a slice out of a Classical facade and sending terracotta tiles sliding obliquely across a geometric garden. The sky then was heavy, sullen, bruised and I wondered if Veronese, the arch-colourist of the Veneto and admirer of Titian, had seen such a sky. The four Allegories are strangely lit , the female flesh being the most luminous parts of the canvases.
Can the muted light and the harmonious dusky pink colour underlying everything be an atmospheric observation? In all the National Gallery there are no other skies so pearly, no other lights quite as stormy as these. Inevitably the question arises as to whether the colours have always appeared as they are now; other Veroneses have bluer skies, and a less muted palette altogether, although the damask rose pinks are a signature touch that inspired Watteau and Delacroix later. The National Gallery's scientific team have inspected the skies and found they are painted with a pigment called Smalt, a cobalt glass, which over time fades - the blue focuses and contracts within its own particles, leaving a faded halo of matter around a blue core. The restrrained hue may be an unintended accident of chemistry, the fugitive nature of pigments over time
I have to confess to disappointment that the masterful muted effect may not be what left Veronese's studio en route for the Prague Castle in the 1570s, but if it is indeed an accident, it's a beautiful one. It leaves the pink flesh of women and putti luminous, and gives a neutral, serious backing tone to the stronger yellows. It seems even the greens may have darkened, as website Pigments Through the Ages gives information about the green glaze copper resinate: "A transparent jade-green glaze formed by dissolving copper salts in Venice turpentine. In the 15th and 17th centuries artists used copper resinate in order to add glaze on paintings laying a layer of copper resinate over verdigris to form a deep saturation of green color.", it being quite common that antique greens darken over centuries.
The reds and piinks persist , being , according to microscopic analysis, lake colours.Even these may be somewhat faded; the canvas where it wraps around behind the support shows richer reds. The scientific paper by Nicholas Penny , Ashok Roy and Marika Spring seems torn between accepting the scientific findings and recognising that the tonality of the Veronese works is mimicking to some degree the effect of buon fresco, the muted effect where wet plaster bodns with rapdly applied pigment, a technique suited to hot and dry climates and hard to pull off in damp rainy countries. But it's such a wistful effect: those of us who love old textiles will feel the attraction of these faded soft rose colours, gentle as the pile of the silks and velvets, against that dewy flesh, a tactile indication of the passing of youth and of time.
In the detail above - my attention was rivetted by that brilliant white cloud, next to which the sullen sky looks like tarnished silver, more splendid as it appears now than the most celestial blue could have appeared. The nostalgia of it has something now of the melancholy "Fêtes Venétiennes" of Watteau, surely a tribute to the Veronese palette although I wonder whether he could have seen Rudolph II's allegories. He did make copies of Veronese works and knew some intimately.
So I append the Watteau, a tribute to his Venetian predecessor, so you can compare the palette, atmosphere and style, and judge for yourself whether the faded damask colours, the tarnished silver - seen here even in the drapery - the green turning autumnal towards brown subdued shades, are in Veronese an accident of chemistry, seen only by our recent generations, or a tendancy of tone, which was on the canvas from the start - a choice, a matter of taste and inclination. I can hold both possibilities and enjoy the subtle tristesse of their fragile harmony. It is so hard to argue with a chemist, but the heart (and the homage of Watteau) trusts Veronese's touch.
Eleanor Crook March 30, 2025
The scientific article from the National Gallery can be read here
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