and of
superb voluptuousness in women. He prefers to paint women draped in
gorgeous raiment, as if he had not felt the beauty of the nude. Their
faces are too frequently unrefined and empty of expression. His noblest
creatures are men of about twenty-five, manly, brawny, crisp-haired, full
of nerve and blood. In all this Veronese resembles Rubens. But he does
not, like Rubens, strike us as gross, sensual, fleshly;[282] he remains
proud, powerful, and frigidly materialistic. He raises neither repulsion
nor desire, but displays with the calm strength of art the empire of the
mundane spirit. All the equipage of wealth and worldliness, the lust of
the eye, and the pride of life--such a vision as the fiend offered to
Christ on the mountain of temptation; this is Veronese's realm. Again, he
has no flashes of poetic imagination like Tintoretto; but his grip on the
realities of the world, his faculty for idealising prosaic magnificence,
is even greater.

Veronese was precisely the painter suited to a nation of merchants, in
whom the associations of the counting-house and the exchange mingled with
the responsibilities of the Senate and the passions of princes. He never
portrayed vehement emotions. There are no brusque movements, no extended
arms, like those of Tintoretto's Magdalen in the "Pieta" at Milan, in his
pictures. His Christs and Maries and martyrs of all sorts are composed,
serious, courtly, well-fed personages, who, like people of the world
accidentally overtaken by some tragic misfortune, do not stoop to
distortions or express more than a grave surprise, a decorous sense of
pain.[283] His angelic beings are equally earthly.

The Venetian Rothschilds no doubt preferred the ceremonial to the
imaginative treatment of sacred themes; and to do him justice, Veronese
did not make what would in his case have been the mistake of choosing the
tragedies of the Bible for representation. It is the story of Esther, with
its royal audiences, coronations, and processions; the marriage feast at
Cana; the banquet in the house of Levi, that he selects by preference.
Even these themes he removes into a region far from Biblical associations.
His _mise en scene_ is invariably borrowed from luxurious Italian
palaces--large open courts and _loggie_, crowded with guests and
lacqueys--tables profusely laden with gold and silver plate. The same love
of display led him to delight in allegory--not allegory of the deep and
mystic kind, but of t