The greatest director and set designer of the Cinquecento, Paolo Caliari (1528-1588), 'Veronese' to his patrons and admirers in Venice – the city in which he lived and worked becoming its citizen – was appreciated first and foremost as a colourist, capable of proposing an unprecedented bright palette, daring combinations of colours, skilful plays of light. Furthermore, he was a sumptuous narrator. Alone he created a genre: the Cene, or Suppers, grandiose in size and display of fabrics, poses and portraits, where the evangelical event is an opportunity to stage the patrician society of his time, within architectural spaces in which the classical orders are articulated in urbanistic fantasies that are as impressive as they are creative.

Furthermore, he painted for a clientele of patricians and main religious orders an impressive variety of biblical scenes, stories of saints and martyrs, sophisticated and allusive allegories, verging on ambiguity and irony. Appreciated and admired, carefully studied, Veronese must be considered the painter who paved the way, through his illusionistic solutions and taste for staging, to 17th-century painting and was finally welcomed as a colourist by the painters of the Romantic generation and the Impressionists. This book retraces the essential stages of an early creativity, immediately masterful, then developed in 40 years of inventions boasting an inexhaustible imagination.