The Adoration of the Magi

Bonifazio Veronese ran one of the busy painting shops of sixteenth-century Venice, and it is worth knowing who came out of it. The young Jacopo Tintoretto and Andrea Schiavone are both counted among the painters formed in his orbit. Bonifazio himself came from Verona, moved to Venice as a young man, and trained under Palma the Elder, absorbing along the way the warm color and soft light of Giorgione and Titian. The Adoration of the Magi was a subject Venetian painters loved, because it licensed exactly what the city's art did best: rich fabrics, an exotic retinue of kings and servants and animals, gold and brocade crowding around the plain manger. His large workshop turned out devotional pictures like this one beside far bigger commissions for Venice's halls and churches, and it doubled as a training ground, which is how a beginner like Tintoretto passed through it.