Bonifazio Veronese

Despite his name, Bonifazio Veronese made his life in Venice. Born in Verona around 1487, he came to the lagoon city as a young man and trained in the circle of Palma il Vecchio, absorbing the warm colour of Giorgione and Titian, the giants of Venetian painting in his day. His real strength was a large, busy workshop that could turn out anything from a small devotional Madonna to a wall-sized narrative scene.

His biggest commission was a cycle of paintings for the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi, the office of Venice's state treasurers, which took some 20 years to complete. Through that shop passed the next generation of Venetian painters. The young Jacopo Tintoretto is thought to have studied with him. Bonifazio died in Venice in 1553, and for centuries afterwards his crowded, richly coloured canvases were often catalogued under the more famous names he had learned from.