Self-Portrait

Around 1560 Paolo Caliari, the painter from Verona everyone called Veronese, was near the top of his trade in Venice. In those very years he and the architect Palladio were finishing the Barbaro villa at Maser, out on the mainland, where among the frescoed rooms Veronese slipped in his own likeness dressed as a hunter. This panel, long taken to be the painter himself, catches him in a plainer key. He turns three-quarters toward us out of a dark, bare ground, well dressed but without props, letting the face carry everything. There are no columns, no banquet, none of the crowded splendour he was famous for on the walls of Venetian churches and refectories. Just a man of about 32 looking steadily back, the beard trimmed, the eyes measuring whoever has stopped to look.