A restored room at the Gardner Museum.(fresco paintings of Paolo Veronese)(Brief Article)

Paolo Veronese was one of the most gifted easel painters and fresco artists working in Italy in the sixteenth century. His exquisite, highly illusionistic frescoes that adorn some of Andrea Palladio's villas in the Veneto region are marvels of trompe-l'oeil painting. Critical opinion of his work has undergone the vicissitudes of prevailing tastes in art. He was praised in his own lifetime by the artist and chronicler Giorgio Vasari, while the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds pronounced his work too ornamental. The writer and artist John Ruskin admired the witty sense of humor in his art, and Bernard Berenson, the writer and erstwhile dealer (who steered many works to the legendaay Isabella Stewart Gardner), adored the joyfulness and lyrical quality of his paintings.

Gardner's Venetian-style palazzo, erected on Boston's Fen way Court between 1899 and 1901, contains a large ceiling painting by Veronese entitled The Coronation of Hebe, which can now be seen in all its glory after recent extensive conservation. The work was executed in Veronese's studio in the 1580s for a ceiling in the della Torre palace in Udine, Italy, where it remained until the eighteenth century. Veronese's two sons, Carlo and Gabriele, and his brother Benedetto Caliari, were employed in his workshop at the time the picture was executed.

Gardner purchased the painting in 1899 and set it into a painted and gilded coffered ceiling in what is known as the Veronese Room. She arranged the room to resemble a Venetian antechamber, or private salone, and it contains many Venetian objects as well as paintings and pastels by James McNeil Whistler. The Veronese is so ...