Venus und Adonis

Veronese ran the busiest painting shop in Venice in the 1570s, a family firm with his brother Benedetto and later his sons working beside him, sending mythologies out to patrons across Europe. That is why a picture like this one carries an argument with it. On a rock at the right someone painted the words Paolo Caliari of Verona made this, and experts have gone back and forth for a century over whether the inscription is genuine. Sir Francis Cook, the English collector who owned the canvas around 1900, catalogued it as studio or school of Veronese. Opinion has moved back toward the master's own hand since a cleaning brought more of the painting out from under old varnish. Its documented trail starts with a French ambassador who owned it before 1648.