Paolo Veronese 1528–1588
NG 294 
The Family of Darius before Alexander

Nicholas Penny, 2008

Extracted from:
Nicholas Penny, The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings, Volume II: Venice 1540–1600 (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2008).

c. 1565–7

Oil on canvas, 236.2 × 474.9 cm

Support

The dimensions given above are those of the stretcher. The canvas, which is of a medium‐fine tabby weave, is composed of two pieces joined horizontally with a seam just above the heads of the queen and the queen mother. It was prepared with a layer of gesso containing a significant proportion of calcium sulphate of the anhydrate form, as distinct from the dihydrate which is natural or slaked gypsum.¹ As is also the case with a number of other large paintings by Veronese, there seems to be no imprimitura.²

Materials and Technique

Both linseed oil and walnut oil have been detected by analysis. The latter is used (as elsewhere in Veronese’s work) for the near white of the architecture because it was less yellow in colour than the former, and was believed to have less of a tendency to turn yellow.³

Red lake, derived from insect dyestuff, was used for Alexander’s crimson garments, for the boots of the boy before the queen mother, and for the rose pink of the kneeling girl’s dress; but another type, derived from brazilwood, was used for the stripes in the sash worn by the woman at the far left edge.⁴

Copper green (verdigris) mixed with lead white and lead‐tin yellow was used for the cloak of the dark‐bearded man beside Alexander. This same copper green was used as a glaze over a similar mixture for the green dress of the kneeling servant on the extreme left of the foreground and the glaze has darkened.⁵ The lead‐tin yellow already mentioned is ‘type II’ and is used, mixed with yellow ochre and some yellow lake (plant derived), for the brocade of the kneeling queen.⁶

Orpiment and realgar were employed for the cloak of Hephaestion and for the clothes of the dwarf on the left, where, however, they are mixed with the red iron oxide haematite – a mineral pigment relatively rare in oil painting – and red lead. The yellower lights on the drapery folds consist of pure orpiment.⁷

Three types of blue pigment were employed: ultramarine in all the blue garments of the foreground figures (including the blue and white overdress of the kneeling princesses); azurite as an underlayer for some of the ultramarine and also mixed with red lake (for the purple tassel on the halberd on the extreme left); smalt for the sky (where it has deteriorated to grey) and in a layer below the ultramarine glazes of the cloak worn by the foremost kneeling queen (where it has darkened).⁸

Conservation

See below under Conservation History.

Condition

The Family of Darius has long been especially esteemed for its excellent condition. Indeed, Baron Karl Friedrich von Rumohr, in his notes, made about 1825, declared it to be the ‘only surviving touchstone whereby that which was genuine in the colouring of the artist’s original works could be estimated… the treatment of colour especially in the flesh and excellence of execution are such as to render us almost unjust to other great colourists.’⁹ From the account of the picture given by O’Kelly Edwards, we may conclude that in Venice connoisseurs attributed its preservation to its having long remained in the same family’s care, and ‘above all, to the prudent resolution of the owner not to allow either whole or partial copies to be made of it, on account of the destruction of so many first‐class pictures by copyists’.¹⁰ This is a reference to the practice of ‘oiling out’ a painting that was being copied, by which means, Giovanni Battista Volpato believed, the surface of Titian’s Death of Saint Peter Martyr had been gravely damaged.¹¹

Exaggerated repetitions of the conventional estimates of the painting’s preservation continued after its removal to London, when Henri de Triqueti, the French sculptor and a well‐informed connoisseur, wrote in his Les Trois Musées de Londres of 1861 that ‘by common consent’ (‘d’un avis commun’) it was ‘the artist’s best preserved work’ (‘l’œuvre la mieux conservée du maître’). He explained that its condition was due to its never having been moved from the place where it was painted (not true, as we shall see, but it had travelled relatively little) and its never having been subjected to the attentions of picture cleaners (an absurd supposition and, as noted above, demonstrably incorrect).¹²

The green dress of the servant kneeling at the left edge and the shadows of the deep blue cloak of the foremost kneeling queen have darkened for reasons discussed in the section on Materials. These changes detract very little from the brilliance of the foreground colours, which are also enhanced by the silvery grey setting and the somewhat spectral figures in the distance – a pleasing effect that was, however, not intended. The colour of the sky has changed, for the smalt that was the chief pigment employed has turned grey. Nevertheless, the original sky may have been a relatively pale blue and it was certainly cloudy. The architecture has become translucent in parts (notably to the right), as have the horses and figures painted on top of it on the left and the figures on the balustrade. The latter figures were, however, surely meant to be pale and the supposition that they were left in an unfinished state by the artist is not supported by the fact that they are carefully, if thinly, painted in more than one layer.¹³

The relief carving of scrolling acanthus represented in the frieze of the architectural screen is interrupted above the capitals of the pair of Corinthian columns on the left side of the painting. Above and below these interruptions in the frieze, traces of a projection of the cornice and architrave may be discerned, and other such traces can be found at equivalent points in the entablature (corresponding to blocks in the balustrade above). These were more apparent before the cleaning of 1958, but Veronese’s original glazes were not, it seems, damaged on that occasion, since there are extensive vestiges of a natural resin varnish, deliberately tinted (which cannot be original, since it has seeped into cracks in [page 355][page 356]the paint).¹⁴ The breaks in this entablature were, presumably, reinforced (perhaps in the varnish layer) after a previous cleaning by someone familiar with the original appearance of the painting or with the preferences of sixteenth‐century Venetian architects – or both. Gould thought that ‘Veronese had toyed with the idea of a broken entablature. Later restorers in fact fulfilled this.’ He added that ‘these restorations were removed in the 1958 cleaning.’¹⁵

Eastlake’s Notes on the Technique and Condition

Eastlake made careful notes on The Family of Darius by ‘P.V.’ in the ‘Pisani Pal’ during his continental tour of 1852. It should be borne in mind that he was at this date writing as a historian of oil painting and not as the director of the National Gallery. He begins by observing that the Veronese is painted on ‘rather fine cloth not ticking’ (that is, a tabby weave rather than the twill weave often used for large paintings). Next, he is struck by the thickness of the blue of the queen mother’s robes – ‘very thick so as almost entirely to conceal cloth – sw. [sweep] of brush seen in its thick substance of col. [colour] perhaps w.o. [walnut oil] its thickness seen on comparing the edge behind in lower part with cols [colours] next it.’ He also remarked on the absence of craquelure: ‘no cr [cracks] anywhere except slightly from cloth – even grn dress free from cr.’ He is interested in the different textures of the paint: ‘the d. [dark] green stripes in dress of dwarf … glossy as comp [compared] with cols near it’ and a marked ‘thickness of vehicle’ seen in the dark green legs of the bearded figure immediately to Alexander’s right, as also in parts of the ‘purple gr. [grey] drap [drapery]’ of the man introducing the royal family. He remarks on the ‘system’ of ‘red macchie opp. [opposed] to cool’ – ‘macchia’ is the Italian word for spot or patch, a term that was gaining renewed currency at this date among Italian painters who valued distinct painterly touches of colour. Presumably Eastlake was struck by the way the lights are painted between eye and nose, and above all between the nose and lips, which from close to seem abrupt. As noted above, this also seems to have concerned Eastlake after the painting arrived in London. He thought the architecture ‘ruled and drawn with fine d. [drawn?] lines but not dug in – as far as can be seen’.¹⁶

Two years later he made more notes and this time he was already perhaps considering the painting’s eligibility for the National Gallery: the ‘dist [distant] figs. with only preparatory colours against the silvery architecture’, the ‘green drap. like Bonif [Bonifazio]’, the ‘head under helmet extremely fine’, and the ‘pict. altogether in fine state’.¹⁷ Returning in 1856 he was certainly looking for any possible objections to the painting, which by then he intended to purchase. He noted that it is hard to be sure whether Hephaestion’s left leg is draped or not: ‘if intended for hose it wants folds.’ ‘The only other defect (except the obvious defects in costume & character) is the sky, which in the parts intended for blue (there are light horizontal clouds besides) is a very light greenish grey, as if the colour had flown.’ He also noted the translucent figures on the left but concluded that the picture was in general indeed ‘in excellent state’.¹⁸

The Evolution of the Composition

Few, if any, of Veronese’s large paintings are likely to have been painted entirely by his hand, but the superior quality of The Family of Darius, apparent in the vital silhouettes of the smallest distant figures as in the slight variations in the ermine tails in the mantle of the foremost kneeling queen, suggests that he worked on every part of it. The fact that the original design was altered to a degree which is unusual in his large paintings also suggests that he himself was wholly responsible for the execution.

Publishing an X‐ray mosaic of the painting in 1978, Gould noted parallel horizontal lines extending from the central fountain structure towards the right and concluded that the ‘fountain started life as a wall and not as an isolated object’ (fig. 2). However, it is also possible to discern massive balusters, [page 358]the first of which is immediately to the right of the head of the bearded man in the centre, and these support the entablature, the horizontal lines of which Gould observed across the right half of the painting.¹⁹

Gould also noted what looked like a large figure in the upper part of the painting, to the right of the fountain. He wondered whether Veronese had employed a canvas upon which a different painting had been started or whether he ‘had at one time planned a high pyramidal group of figures, with this one standing at a level well above the terrace’. Once the large balusters are discerned it is clear that there were originally large figures leaning over it, almost as large as the chief figures in front of it. Veronese must have found that they competed too much with the main actors. He employed a similar scheme in his Marriage Feast at Cana (Paris, Louvre, fig. 4), painted for the refectory of S. Giorgio Maggiore between 1562 and 1563, where large figures hang over the balustrade immediately behind Christ and the disciples, but in that case there is less confusion of form because the figures in front of the balustrade are seated.

When Veronese decided to create the rusticated fountain structure in the centre, he incorporated the entablatures of the balustrade he had originally planned, and the edge of the pier concluding it, but extended the structure to the left of the pier, thereby encroaching on the distant Corinthian screen, which he had already begun to paint and which he seems to have planned from the start for the left side of the picture – a structure not unlike the one employed to the right of his large painting of Sebastian exhorting Marcellus and Marcellianus to go to their Martyrdom, painted for S. Sebastiano in 1565 (fig. 5). Finally, he continued the distant screen across the right side of the painting. The form which the fountain structure was to take was not, it seems, settled immediately. Gould observed that the corners were originally articulated with pilasters. In addition it may at one stage have been envisaged as a pedestal not for an obelisk but for a statue – perhaps a statue of Darius?²⁰

Veronese’s final revisions are visible to the naked eye. He added the horses and other figures in front of the screen on the left and, last of all, added the head of a halberdier to clarify the sudden change in level and mask the abrupt transition. The halberd is painted over the cloak of the man behind (Veronese could not resist rhyming its blade with the raised leg of the horse).

Traces of preliminary drawing probably in charcoal are apparent in the thinly painted background figures and in the architecture. Black and red particles found in the upper layers of the gesso ground in some sections suggest that red chalk was also used for this purpose. Given the revisions described above, it is not surprising that some of the drawing was made on top of paint layers.

Conservation History

Giuseppe Bertani, a minor painter and prominent restorer in Venice, received payment on 9 October 1770 for work done on the painting.²¹ The nature of his intervention was described to Mrs Merrifield in the 1840s by O’Kelly Edwards, who claimed that the painting had merely been lined and cleaned and some small losses retouched. In addition, the blue sky had been restored to its original colour. The varnish had not changed but, Edwards noted, the blue sky had turned greenish since it was not ‘ultramarine’ but ‘turchino’.²² It is unclear whether Edwards, knowing that the sky had changed colour, merely imagined that it had turned greenish (as is the case with many paintings by Veronese in which azurite was employed) or whether he was referring to the way that the overpainting on the sky, concealing the grey of the original, had turned greenish. Edwards’s source was his father, Pietro Edwards, the leading restorer in Venice and one of the leading connoisseurs of old master painting there between about 1780 and his death, at the age of 76, in 1821.²³ O’Kelly Edwards (or Merrifield) was mistaken as to the date of the work, which was said by him to be 1778, and also mistaken in claiming that it was done under his father’s ‘superintendence’. But Pietro Edwards and Bertani had been associates, and Pietro Edwards left numerous notes on his work and may often have spoken of the Veronese (one of the most famous pictures in the city), so the testimony is of real value. The canvas may not have been lined before 1770 but it had almost certainly been cleaned at least once, and the sky had, it would seem, been extensively overpainted.

According to Levi, the painting was also restored by Lattanzio Querena in about 1800.²⁴ On 31 March 1857 the painting was removed from its stretcher and rolled.²⁵ On 12 August 1857 Eastlake wrote to Wornum from Cologne:My thoughts are of course much with the Paolo & the question of the length for the stretching frame recurs to me. In any view of the matter Mr Bentley will have something to do to the right hand edge, & if he can make the whole of that repainted strip look quite like the old work the composition would gain by it, as the arm and hand would be rather unpleasantly cut off if that side were reduced by two or three inches. The question may therefore depend on what Mr Bentley says as to the possibility of a perfect operation. The addition not being by the master himself is certainly rather against it being included, but it is not impossible that it may have been originally by him & that in consequence of chippings and rents at the edge may have been repaired as it is. The present repaint of that strip is worthy of a sign painter, & if done afresh it should be perfect as a restoration, the correct drawing & marking & finally the granulated effect of glazing or of dirt being recovered.The discolouration in the sky under the arch as well as in and above the balustrade will also require careful revision. The left edge & the upper & lower edges should be left as they are – any little spots where the colour has chipped off being made good.²⁶

It is probable that the strip on the right (perhaps Querena’s work?) was repainted and other minor work must have been covered in general payments made to Bentley early in 1858.²⁷

In a memorandum Eastlake further noted that the painting had been lined ‘more than 50 years since’, that he would recommend that Bentley ‘avoid taking off all the brownish Venetian dirt’, that there was a ‘spot in the face of the wife of Darius’ which required attention. In the manuscript catalogue this ‘spot’ is further described as a ‘rather abrupt’ patch of red, ‘possibly from the flesh of the women having been, at some former period, partially cleaned’. The effect was, presumably, softened by Bentley, who also ‘varnished the picture with mastic varnish’.²⁸ Since the work is recorded under the date of October it must have been undertaken when the picture was already on the wall – Wornum records that it was hung on 16 September and varnished on 19 September.²⁹

The painting was surface‐cleaned and varnished by Dyer in 1888, and cleaned and varnished by Buttery in 1913. It was very slightly damaged at the lower left‐hand corner in 1917 (it had been in a cellar for safety during the war). Minor spots and damage at the edges were treated by Vallance in 1935. In August 1939, during the painting’s transit to Bangor in Wales, three vertical bands of damage were caused to the varnish, which Holder repaired in November 1941. The painting was ‘polished’ in 1946. It was cleaned and restored in October and November of 1958. One reason for this seems to have been that the damage caused in 1939 was showing again. Complete though the National Gallery’s records are, it is not clear at what stage the narrow strip added to the right edge, which we know that Bentley retained, was removed. Since its removal would have supplied a pretext for the reframing, which seems to date from after the 1958 cleaning, we may conclude that it was silently discarded at that date. On the other hand, it is not visible in any of the early photographs of the painting.

Attribution and Date

The painting has always been acknowledged as by Veronese and the quality is such that his workshop is not likely to have been much involved. There has, however, been little agreement on the painting’s date. Osmond in 1927 thought it might be as early as 1560³⁰ and Gould proposed that it was executed as late as 1573.³¹ It is likely that Gould arrived at this date by way of his conviction that the painting was made by Veronese not only for a Pisani villa but when he was actually staying in one, in accordance with a tradition discussed in a later section in this entry. This conviction led Gould to [page 361]identify a period when Veronese might have wished to retire from the city; an obvious date was after 1573, when he had been obliged to defend himself before the Inquisition.³²

A date in the early 1570s, or in the early 1560s, does not seem impossible, but Pallucchini’s suggestion of 1565–7³³ has more to recommend it, since in this case the painting would be contemporary with, or a little later than, the pair of large lateral paintings that Veronese made for the tribune of S. Sebastiano, Sebastian exhorting Marcellus and Marcellianus to go to their Martyrdom (fig. 5) and The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. These works are closely related to NG 294 in their compositional type and architectural settings, but also have some less conspicuous but telling details in common with it: the device of a monkey crouching on a parapet is employed on the left in Sebastian exhorting Marcellus and Marcellianus, as on the left in The Family of Darius. In the Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian the profile of the statue on the left of the composition is identical to the one to the right of the central fountain in The Family of Darius.³⁴ The horse’s head on the extreme right of The Family of Darius strongly recalls the one on the right of his Martyrdom of Saint George for S. Giorgio in Braida, Verona (fig. 1, p. 330), which there is good reason to date to the mid‐1560s.³⁵ When NG 294 is compared with the S. Sebastiano narratives it must be acknowledged as more lucid in composition, with a more telling use of interval, and with the foreground drama more carefully related to the background architecture. The way that the rhythm of the arches and the fountain niche relates to the movement of the figures from the left is especially effective, as is the way that movement comes to a halt with the verticals framing the shocked profile of the queen mother, whose triangular pose is echoed by the superstructure of the fountain. For this reason The Family of Darius must surely be a little later in date. As is mentioned below, a document has now been published which reveals that the painting must have been completed by 1568.

Subject

After his victory over Darius III at Issus in 330 BC, Alexander, then aged 23, visited the distraught family of the defeated Persian emperor, who had fled the field. Sisigambis, the mother of Darius, made obeisance to Alexander’s closest friend, Hephaestion, mistaking him for the victor, but Alexander comforted her by graciously observing that Hephaestion was ‘another Alexander’ (that is, so close a friend that they were as one). Sisigambis was accompanied by Darius’s sister, Stateira, who was also his queen, and by the queen’s two daughters, both unmarried, the eldest also called Stateira (or, in some accounts, Barsine). These are the figures who kneel, in that order, in the painting. A young son of Darius was also present and is represented by the boy in red beside Sisigambis. Alexander received the family nobly, in the words of Plutarch (as translated by Sir Thomas North) ‘ensuring that they never heard word, or so much as any suspicion that should make them afraid to be dishonoured or deflowered’,³⁶ and insisting that they all be treated as royalty and retain their finery. When Darius died he declared that the gods would reward Alexander for the kindness he showed to Sisigambis and his wife and children. Alexander’s biographers stress that no greater deed was ever recorded of him.³⁷

There have been different interpretations of the figures on the right in Veronese’s painting but Hephaestion must be the figure in dark armour with an orange cloak, who seems, literally, taken aback, and Alexander must be the figure in rose, calming the royal ladies with one hand and indicating his friend, ‘the other Alexander’, with the other. If this seems too precise a reading of the hand movements, it must be allowed that Veronese often used such gestures to indicate speech and it is Alexander, not Hephaestion, who is recorded as speaking on this occasion.³⁸ Other interpretations are mentioned in the next section.

Charles Locke Eastlake, nephew of Eastlake the director and himself keeper of the National Gallery, suggested sensibly that the horse ‘towering above the figures’ was ‘probably intended to represent Bucephalus, Alexander’s famous charger, of whose huge proportions and sagacity curious stories are told.’³⁹

Ancient Sources

Arrian (Lucius Flavius Arrianus),⁴⁰ reviewing the numerous earlier accounts of Alexander’s life, doubted that his visit with Hephaestion to the family of Darius had ever taken place. He found it recorded in some sources, but according to others Alexander had sent his general Leonnatus to comfort them. It is the latter event which is described in Plutarch’s account of Alexander in his Parallel Lives, and such was Plutarch’s fame that it is natural to suppose that he was Veronese’s source. But Plutarch wrote the Lives in Greek and, although printed in Florence in 1517 and by the Aldine Press in Venice in 1519, it was not available in a modern language before Jacques Amiot’s translation (published in French in 1558 and then translated from French to English by Sir Thomas North in 1579). Knowledge of Plutarch was widespread in the seventeenth century and Ridolfi, in the earliest known mention of the painting,⁴¹ regarded it as illustrating Alexander’s continence and magnanimity, ‘little imitated by captains of troops for whom murder and rapine are the trophies of victory’ – qualities that Plutarch expands upon, mentioning also Alexander’s indignant rejection of captured boys and his moderation at table.⁴² But it is surely impossible that Plutarch was Veronese’s source, for Plutarch never has Alexander address the women, makes no mention of Hephaestion in connection with their meeting, and does not describe the queen mother’s error. Moreover, he emphasises the fact that the chief cause of the family’s distress was the sight of Darius’s chariot and bow, which they mistook for evidence of his death, and neither is present in the painting.

The two fullest accounts of the visit of Alexander and Hephaestion to the family of Darius can be found in the Historical Library of Diodorus Siculus⁴³ and the History of Alexander the Great by Quintus Curtius Rufus.⁴⁴ The former is a less likely source since it was in Greek, and the relevant chapter was not even available in Latin in Veronese’s day. The latter was written in Latin and was printed by the Aldine Press in Venice in 1494 and 1510, and printed at Strasbourg with a [page 362][page 363][page 364]commentary by Erasmus in 1518. These, however, include numerous details that Veronese does not follow: the women are in Darius’s tent; Alexander is only accompanied by Hephaestion – who, it is emphasised, is superior in height; Sisigambis’s error is pointed out by captive eunuchs; and Alexander raises her as he speaks.

It therefore seems most likely that the artist’s source was the simplest and shortest of all those available to him – the Factorum et Dictorum Memorabilium of Valerius Maximus – which includes none of the above‐mentioned details, although Hephaestion’s imposing presence is remarked upon. Here the episode is isolated from a larger narrative of Alexander’s life and used as an illustration of noble friendship.⁴⁵ Jean‐Paul Richter, who was the first to note Veronese’s dependence on this source,⁴⁶ pointed out that Valerius Maximus had been printed by the Aldine Press in 1534. Even more significant is the fact that it was readily available in Italian – Valerio Maximo Vulgare was printed in Venice in 1504, 1509, 1526 and, in octavo, 1537. Indeed, it was as familiar in the Renaissance as it is obscure today.⁴⁷

A recent claim that Plutarch is ‘the source’ rests on the ‘crown on the arm of Darius’s eldest daughter which is taken to allude to her imminent marriage to Alexander’.⁴⁸ It is possible that Veronese attempted to conflate the princess’s prospects as a bride with obeisance to the conqueror – although Plutarch does not in fact mention that any idea of marriage was considered at this moment, the offer was made two years later, before the Battle of Arbela, and the marriage actually took place in 324 at Susa, after the death of the girl’s parents.⁴⁹ Even so, such a reference would make Plutarch not the only or principal source but, rather, a supplementary one. However, it seems more likely that the crown belongs to the queen and is being carried by her elder daughter, since this would hardly be the right moment to wear it. Apart from the danger that the crown might fall off the queen’s head, obeisance necessitates its removal (as is invariably the case with the kings in depictions of the Adoration).

The same scholar argues that Alexander could be ‘the more macho figure in the more honorific cloth of gold with laurels on his armour standing close to his standard attributes, the shield and the horse’.⁵⁰ Goethe seems to have thought this too (see appendix, below). The possibility of confusion is necessary if we are to understand the queen mother’s mistake, but, as explained above, it is Alexander who makes the gracious speech and we would also expect him to be placed nearer the centre of the composition. As Gould correctly observed:The figure in red is not only the more conspicuously dressed of the two: he is also the central point in the composition of the picture. And the latter is a factor which does not affect the other characters in the painting, but only ourselves as spectators of it.… If, therefore, the figure in red is intended as Hephaestion, Veronese would have been intentionally deceiving not only the family of Darius but also everyone who saw his picture. And this seems to me quite uncharacteristic of him.⁵¹

Dress, Armour and Accessories

Like many other paintings by Veronese, The Family of Darius presents a mixture of contemporary dress with the exotic, the fantastic and the imaginatively archaeological. This mixture was sometimes regretted in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but by the 1880s it was widely felt that the ‘frank introduction of the costumes of the painter’s own time … gives to his pictures a living interest that more than compensates for any anachronism.’⁵²

The plate armour worn by the figure here identified as Hephaestion and by the bearded soldier on Alexander’s other side is an accurate representation of Italian armour of about 1560–90. Hephaestion’s armour is extremely close, if not identical, to that worn by Saint Sebastian in Veronese’s Saint Sebastian exhorting Marcellus and Marcellianus of 1565. The guards behind Hephaestion and the soldier with a green cloak wear a type of helmet known as a burgonet, which was used by light cavalry and infantry all over Europe in this period. Their halberds (like the one on the left side of the painting) are of ‘a kind that seems to have been used mainly by bodyguards rather than people actually going out to fight battles’.⁵³ The halberd nearest to the centre of the painting has an unusual trefoil opening in the axe blade and an equally unusual point.⁵⁴ In the equipment mentioned so far only the gilded mask on top of the breastplate worn by the soldier with a green cloak and the victorious laurel damascened into the steel of Hephaestion’s armour (so as to resemble a reflection) recall the fanciful decorations of parade armour made for courts of the mid‐sixteenth century.

Alexander’s armour, on the other hand, is based on antique sculpture, which also inspired some of the more elaborate parade armour of the period, such as Bartolomeo Campi’s outfit for Guidobaldo II della Rovere dated 1546,⁵⁵ and costumes worn in masques. The cuirass (presumably of leather) moulded in the form of the torso (with the navel very evident), the girdle (cingulum) at the waist, and the pleated skirt below are all derived from Roman armour, and the buskins (cothurni) could have been studied from those in antique statues of Diana. Like his companions to right and left, Alexander wears a long cloak probably inspired by the paludamentum of Roman generals. His is deep rose in colour and is carried by a page whose apparently disembodied head appears behind him, whereas his companions hold up their own. However, some modern features intrude even in Alexander’s dress. Under his cuirass he wears a mail shirt with a striped pattern in the sleeves made partly of brass and partly of steel rings. His sword is not of an antique pattern but it resembles the ornamental weapons illustrated by Filippo Orsoni of Mantua, whose pattern book of 1554 is in the Victoria and Albert Museum.⁵⁶

The page on the extreme right may be intended as the page who would normally carry the prince’s parade shield and helmet. The shield is decorated with a harpy‐like creature whose split foliate legs curl over her arms – a close relative of the creatures with lowered heads, pointed breasts, raised hands and projecting bellies found here on the fountain and in many ornamental bronzes in Venice from the [page 365]1550s onwards (figs 8 and 9). The high relief and the colour suggest the parade shields in steel, gold and silver that were made by the Negroli in the mid‐sixteenth century.⁵⁷

The page leans forward, revealing an imperial eagle emblazoned on the back of his silver jacket. The use of the emblem of the Holy Roman Empire to recall the ancient Roman Empire is found in a shield in Titian’s Ecce Homo of 1543 in Vienna, and on a banner in his Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, upon which he was working throughout the 1550s.⁵⁸ Veronese had taken up this idea for the banner and surcoats of the imperial Romans in his Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian of 1565.⁵⁹ But to find it used for the Macedonian emperor is perhaps surprising.

The family of Darius wear Venetian dress of the 1560s, but some features seem fanciful, notably the cameo in an elaborate setting which fastens the queen mother’s veil at the back of her neck. However, the huge jewel fastened on the breast of the queen and attached by chains to clasps on her shoulders is smaller than the jewelled gold mounts on the dresses worn in Veronese’s portrait known as La Belle Nani (Paris, Louvre).⁶⁰ The blue, white and yellow brocade worn by the two princesses appears to be of the same pattern as that worn by Saint Catherine in Veronese’s altarpiece for S. Caterina (Venice, Accademia).⁶¹ The crown carried by the older princess is also very similar to the heavenly crown carried by the angels in that painting: so these may have been studio props. Both princesses wear this brocade for sleeves and overskirt, an arrangement not dissimilar to the dress of Santa Giustina in the high altarpiece Veronese sent to Padua in 1575.⁶² The way that their shoulder capes are attached with jewelled chains is reminiscent of The Rape of Europa in the Doge’s Palace.

The queen mother wears a blue cloak lined with ermine and with a mantle of the same fur. The two rows of separate pelts may be discerned in the mantle, and the black tails of the lower pelts hang free. Ermine was not only the most valued fur but the one that was associated with rulers. The doge kneeling before the Virgin in Veronese’s Madonna del Rosario of 1573 wears a mantle with three rows of ermine.⁶³

The dress worn by the dark‐skinned kneeling attendants on the extreme left may be inspired by ‘Turkish South Central European’ dress, as Stella Mary Pearce (Newton) proposed. The horn‐shaped caps also make an occasional appearance in paintings of the Adoration of the Kings.⁶⁴ An Eastern setting is more vaguely suggested by the onlookers’ turbans.

Probable Patrons and Recorded Owners

The Pisani family, which sold Veronese’s Family of Darius to the National Gallery in the nineteenth century, owned the painting in the mid‐seventeenth century and they must have commissioned it in the mid‐sixteenth. The family claimed descent from the ancient Roman patrician family of Piso and certainly did include a great Venetian hero – Vettor Pisani, the great admiral who fought in the wars with Genoa during the fourteenth century.⁶⁵ Modern genealogists trace the family back to Nicolò Pisani, son of a wealthy fur merchant, who was admitted to the Maggior Consiglio in 1307.

From Nicolò’s two sons, Bertuccio and Almorò, stem the branches of the Pisani family that came to be known as the Pisani dal Banco and the Pisani Moretta, respectively. Towards the close of the fifteenth century members of the latter branch, whose wealth had been acquired from the salt trade and from banking, acquired estates in the terra ferma, including the extensive ‘camerlengaria estense’, which were divided between four of the sons of Francesco Pisani, who died in 1491.⁶⁶

Of these estates, those at Montagnana were bequeathed by another Francesco to the eldest male descendants of his cousin Zan Mattio (Zuan Matteo) by primogeniture. The first beneficiary was around ten years old in 1567 when Francesco died, and he took the name Francesco (or perhaps had done so already), as did his successors through four generations – a condition of inheritance that was not uncommon in Venice. The reader will find it helpful at this point to consult the simplified family tree (fig. 10) (it only includes Pisani mentioned in this text).

Ridolfi wrote in 1646 that the Veronese was owned by the Pisani.⁶⁷ The actual owner must have been the Francesco [page 366]who died in May 1648. His eldest son, also Francesco, born in 1619, was elected procurator of S. Marco in 1649 and died in 1673 – he was grandson of the Francesco who inherited Montagnana. Martinioni’s 1663 edition of Sansovino’s guide explicitly identifies the owner as Francesco Pisani, procurator of S. Marco.⁶⁸

The son of this procurator, also Francesco and also a procurator, witnessed the expiration of the male line when his only son was drowned in 1697, and he spent his last years hoarding wealth for his daughter, Chiara, who was married to Gerolamo Pisani of the Dal Banco branch and thus retained the family name. As will be shown, she seems to have provided Veronese’s painting with a spectacular setting.

Returning to the sixteenth century, we must consider the question of which of the Pisani is likely to have commissioned Veronese’s painting. The most obvious candidate is Francesco Pisani, who died in 1567. He was the son of Zuanne, a prosperous banker, and both his wealth and perhaps his interest in art are reflected in the splendid villa built for him by Andrea Palladio and adorned with sculpture by Alessandro Vittoria, which still stands just outside the walls of Montagnana, inscribed prominently with his name. The villa was being built in the early 1550s⁶⁹ and it has been plausibly supposed that Francesco used his influence in 1555 to obtain for Veronese the commission for the high altarpiece of the Transfiguration in the duomo of Montagnana. We know that the ‘scritto d’accordo’ between Veronese and the local officials and magistrates was signed on 3 June 1555, ‘fuori di Montagnana nel palazzo del Mag. Miss. Francesco Pisani’.⁷⁰ It has often been thought likely that Veronese’s Family of Darius was made for Montagnana.⁷¹ A document recently published by Claudia Terribile establishes beyond reasonable doubt that it was in the villa when Francesco died in 1567. A year later Francesco’s widow was accused of attempting to sell or appropriate parts of the property at Montagnana bequeathed by her husband to his nephew, and in particular it was alleged that she had [page 367]begun to ‘levar per fino le telle et il ferro del quadro pretiosissimo della historia di Alessandro Magno’ (‘even to remove the canvases and iron [fixtures] of the most precious picture of the story of Alexander the Great’).⁷²

The subject was, as will be shown, one that was favoured for the decoration of villas in the Veneto in this period. What is curious is that it is painted in oil on canvas. There is no certain record of any other painting by Veronese on canvas made for a villa, nor indeed any record known to me of a highly esteemed oil painting being commissioned for, or kept in, a Venetian villa in the sixteenth century. The explanation may be that the villa – usually called a palazzo – was not the occasional residence but the principal seat of its owner.⁷³

Portraiture in The Family of Darius

It has often been assumed that The Family of Darius is a glorified family portrait. Hazlitt, for example, called it a ‘family picture’; the National Gallery catalogues stated as a fact that ‘the principal figures are portraits of the Pisani family’; Cecil Gould declared that such a conclusion was ‘inescapable’, at least for most of the main figures.⁷⁴ However, when Veronese introduced the likeness of a contemporary into heroic company, he usually did so in a more obvious fashion. Examples are the man in red (surely the donor, Simone Lando) on the extreme right of the altarpiece of the Assunta, painted about 1584 for the high altar of S. Maria Maggiore;⁷⁵ the portrait of the donor Bartolomeo Bonghi supporting the boy healed by Saint Pantaleone in the altarpiece (originally above the high altar) in S. Pantaleone, painted in 1587; the grey‐bearded man in the centre of the group under the right‐hand arch of the Feast in the House of Levi painted in 1573 for the refectory of SS. Giovanni e Paolo (now in the Accademia);⁷⁶ and five of the heads (one of them painted on paper and superimposed) at the right‐hand table of the Marriage Feast at Cana painted in 1562–3 for the refectory of S. Giorgio Maggiore (now in the Louvre; fig. 4).⁷⁷

The family to which the actors in The Family of Darius belong is more probably the ideal family of Veronese’s imagination. If the warrior with a black beard and receding hair whose head is to the right of Alexander’s is one of the Pisani, then we have to ask why the same member of the family would be present in the foreground of The Coronation of Esther, painted on the ceiling of the nave of S. Sebastiano by Veronese in 1556.⁷⁸ Gould proposed that this figure was not one of the Pisani but a self portrait, although he did not explain why Veronese would portray himself wearing armour. Alexander himself is similar in type to several of Veronese’s young male saints, such as Saint John the Evangelist, painted on the ceiling of the sacristy of S. Sebastiano in 1555⁷⁹ (he has the same sideboards and wispy beard), and the grey‐bearded counsellor who commends the kneeling women is also a type who is familiar as, for example, the brother of the expostulating elders beside Christ in the Feast in the House of Simon, painted in 1560 for Verona and now in the Galleria Sabauda, Turin.⁸⁰ It is true that the queen herself might be a sister of ‘la belle Nani’, the sitter of the celebrated female portrait in the Louvre, but she also resembles the artist’s Saint Catherine and his Venus. It is not clear whether Ruskin had the queen or the elder princess in mind when he claimed that the whole composition was ‘painted only to introduce portraits of the Pisani, and chiefly to set off, to the best advantage, the face of one fair girl’.⁸¹ But, in any case, if there is a single figure that seems most like a portrait it is surely the junior princess, precisely because she is not very attractive.

Even if the Pisani are not represented here, it seems likely that the subject of the painting had special associations for them. It was, however, a familiar one which at least two other prominent Venetian families commissioned in the same period (see below). Nevertheless, it is certainly worth recalling that the Pisani were not merely involved with finance, trade and agriculture but were in the service of the church and state, counting among their kinsmen at this date one great cardinal – Alvise Pisani, Bishop of Padua – and one notable general, Piero, brother of Zan Mattio, who, in the war of Cyprus against the Turks, relieved Capocesta in Dalmatia (1570) and fought at the battle of Lepanto (1571),⁸² although he was not noted for the clemency exemplified in this painting.

Family Traditions and the Copy by Minorello at Este

The French engraver Antoine Dézallier d’Argenville (1680–1765) recorded in his Abrégé de la vie des plus fameux peintres that when he was shown the great painting of The Family of Darius, its owner, ‘Procurateur Pisani’ (who died in 1737), told him how the painting had come into his family’s possession: Veronese had chanced to be travelling in the neighbourhood of Venice when he was caught by bad weather. He asked for refuge in a country house of the Pisani, where he was made most welcome. During his short stay there he painted The Family of Darius ‘sécrettement’, rolled it up and put it under his bed when he departed, and afterwards sent word to the Pisani that he had left something in payment for the cost of his stay.⁸³

This story is related without a flicker of scepticism, yet it is unlikely that Veronese could have found a suitable canvas waiting for him, unlikely that he would have been able to work on such a large painting in secret, unlikely that he would have rolled it up while still wet, and very unlikely that any bed would have been large enough to conceal it. It is also very difficult to believe that a composition like this could have been planned and executed in such a short time and in the absence of a specific commission. All the same, there may be a grain of truth in the story: the painting did come to Venice from one of the Pisani villas and perhaps Veronese did paint the picture as some sort of favour.

Twenty‐five or so years after the publication of d’Argenville’s account, Goethe noted that ‘a strange story is told about the painting; the artist had been well received [by the Pisani] and for a long time honourably entertained in the palace; in return he secretly painted the picture and left it behind him as a present rolled up under his bed.’⁸⁴ Although the country house was omitted from this version, it doubtless remained in others known to the Venetian antiquarian and chronicler Emmanuele Antonio Cicogna, who recorded in 1834 that the painting was said to have been made for the Pisani villa at Este and left there in return for hospitality.⁸⁵ Variations on the same story survive also in later literature.⁸⁶

A full‐size copy apparently made by Francesco Minorello (1624–1657), a native of Este, hung in the Pisani villa there. Minorello’s copy was taken to Palazzo Pisani to replace the original when it was sold to the National Gallery, and it has been supposed, reasonably enough, by Gould and others that it might have been made to replace the original when that picture was transported to Venice. However, the inscription recorded on it by Mündler included the digits 165‐.⁸⁷

If Minorello did paint the copy as a substitute for the original we must ask why he would have painted a pendant for it – for we know that he painted another episode from the life of Alexander on a canvas of the same size, Alexander bestowing Campaspe upon Apelles, which also hung in the villa at Este. There is no evidence to suggest that Veronese’s original was one of a pair and it would be odd if it had been hung for a century in a room that called out for one. A more likely explanation is that Minorello was simply decorating the villa at Este, mostly with copies of famous paintings but also with one composition of his own. Indeed, Mündler also saw in the villa a copy of Veronese’s Adoration of the Kings in S. Silvestro, Venice, which he thought to be ‘probably by the same hand’.⁸⁸ There were three other copies after Veronese in the villa and copies after other artists as well, including Titian’s Caesars. Cecil Gould identified a space in the largest room of the villa (then a school) where the painting could fit (rather tightly) but it would have been astonishing if there had not been such a space, since we know that Minorello’s full‐size copy had hung there.⁸⁹ It is now clear not only that the painting was made for another villa, that at Montagnana, but that it was made for a patron, Francesco Pisani, who did not own the villa at Este.

The ‘Quadro di Paolo’ in Palazzo Pisani Moretta

Giovanni Antonio Massani, reporting to Cardinal Francesco Barberini on 10 July 1632 on paintings by Veronese that [page 369]were perhaps available for sale in Venice, mentioned the four great paintings in the Cuccina Palace (now in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden), which were available for 12,000 ducats, and an ‘historia di Alessandro Magno’, surely The Family of Darius, which one of the noblemen of the city was prepared to sell for 3,000 ducats.⁹⁰ This is the earliest reference to the painting in Venice. The nobleman in question was almost certainly Francesco Pisani (1588–1648). Although his family’s chief residence in the first half of the seventeenth century is said to have been in the parish of S. Gregorio,⁹¹ Francesco’s will dated 27 October 1647 cites ‘la mia casa … a S. Polo da me comprata’ (‘my house in the parish of S. Polo bought by me’) and since the will further cites that it was flanked by ‘Ca Barbarigo’ we may be sure that this was the palace still known as Pisani Moretta.⁹² The palace had been sold to him by the Bembo family in 1629 and although there were legal obstacles to full occupancy⁹³ the will makes it clear that he and his family resided there. It is not unreasonable to assume that the Veronese was moved there soon after 1629, presumably from the villa at Montagnana.⁹⁴ Francesco wanted this new palace, and presumably its fittings, to descend to his male heirs. When Ridolfi described the painting in his life of Veronese in 1646 as in ‘casa Pisani’, he doubtless meant this palace. Two years later Francesco Pisani died. In the following year his principal heir, also a Francesco, who was to have occupied the piano nobile of the palace together with his mother, Chiara Mocenigo, was elected a procurator of S. Marco. This explains why Boschini in his Le Ricche Minere della Pittura Veneziana of 1674 describes the picture as in ‘Casa Pisana nelle Procuratie di San Marco’, evidently Francesco Pisani’s residential quarters within the procuracy.⁹⁵

It is noteworthy that the Veronese is one of only two paintings⁹⁶ specifically mentioned by Boschini in an introductory account of the artist’s merits. For him the picture exemplified in particular the splendour and variety of colour and ornament in the retinues of ‘knights, soldiers, pages, grooms and dwarves’ (‘cavalieri, soldati, paggi, staffieri, e nani’) that Veronese devised for princes. He admired how the family of Darius kneel in homage – ‘the action is so masterly in representation that we are prompted to imitate it’ (‘azione cosi maestosa, che invita ogn’astante à far il medesimo’). This passage is not only proof of the painting’s fame but suggests that access to it cannot have been difficult. It was still in the procuracy in 1691 when it was engraved for Patina’s anthology of prints, as described below under Prints.

The next reference to the painting which is known to me comes from the great French connoisseur the Comte de Caylus, who was in Venice in early 1715 and noted: ‘dans la maison de Pisani j’ai vu le chef d’œuvre de Paul Véronèse représentant “La Famille de Darius aux pieds d’Alexandre”.’ There can be little doubt that the ‘maison’ in question was the Palazzo Pisani Moretta at S. Polo on the Grand Canal (figs 13 and 14) because Caylus proceeds to describe paintings by Titian in the neighbouring Palazzo ‘Barbara’ – meaning Barbarigo – ‘della Terazza’.⁹⁷ The Veronese, which is recorded in the procuracy of S. Marco in 1691, moved back to the palace at some time between then and 1715. Caylus noted that the owner was so mad that he made it difficult to view (‘le maître de la maison est assez fol pour ne le montrer qu’avec peine’) – a reference to Procurator Francesco Pisani, who was by then notoriously miserly and reclusive. ‘Few have seen and know the work’ (‘Peu de gens l’ont vu et le connaissent’), he concludes, though he was presumably directed to it by another connoisseur.

The painting was sought out by subsequent French travellers. Thus Charles de Brosses, who was in Venice in August 1739, noted that it was ‘admirable’.⁹⁸ In that year work began on the complete reconstruction and redecoration of the palace, although its beautiful gothic façade was preserved (fig. 14). This conversion was the work of Chiara Pisani. Her father had died in 1737 and her husband had died in the following year.

Between 1745 and 1747 payments are recorded in the family’s ledger to Giovanni Battista Piazzetta (1683–1754),⁹⁹ then probably the most admired painter in Venice, for the dark and tragic canvas showing Alexander moved to tears by the sight of the corpse of the defeated Emperor Darius and removing his cloak to cover it. This painting, now in the Museum of the Eighteenth Century in Ca Rezzonico,¹⁰⁰ is similar in size to Veronese’s (240 × 480 cm is the official measurement) and, given the subject matter, it must have been made as some sort of companion for it and in some sort of competition with it.¹⁰¹

Charles‐Nicolas Cochin in his Voyage d’Italie published in 1758, but recording the visit he made in the company of the Marquis de Marigny in June 1751,¹⁰² described the Veronese and the Piazzetta together, as did other later visitors. It is not, however, certain (as has been assumed by most scholars) that the two paintings originally hung as pendants in the same room, for the contrast in colour, mood and figure scale would have been painful. It is noteworthy that there are references in the palace accounts to a ‘cameron Piazzetta’, and no room containing a Veronese would have been thus described.¹⁰³ Furthermore, Cochin does not mention that they are pendants, as he does in other such cases in this and other palace collections.¹⁰⁴

We would expect paintings of this size and format to hang in the portego of the palace and they may have done so (the portego was completely redecorated in the 1770s), but it seems more likely that the Piazzetta was originally hung in the room facing the canal on the piano nobile, to the left of the portego, now known as the Sala Giallo, the ceiling of which was painted by Giuseppe Angeli in the early 1740s.¹⁰⁵ The Veronese was probably hung in the corresponding room on the right – the room it is known to have occupied in the nineteenth century, where Minorello’s copy hangs today. This room is a little over seven metres wide and twice as long. The Veronese would presumably have occupied the centre of the long wall opposite the entrance from the portego. It was the vault of this room that Tiepolo was commissioned to fresco in 1743.¹⁰⁶

Angeli (1709–1798) was a pupil of Piazzetta and it seems likely that their paintings were planned to harmonise. The ceiling by Tiepolo was also surely intended as a homage to the Veronese, matching not only its colours and tonality and its compositional movement but perhaps also its theme. The subject of the painting is usually described as Mars and Venus but this cannot be correct. Michael Levey has proposed instead that it represents the apotheosis of Vettor Pisani¹⁰⁷ – and certainly Venus does seem to be conducting a great warrior, dressed all’antica, to Olympus. Tiepolo was acknowledged as the spiritual heir of Veronese but nowhere else could their paintings be seen together like this. (The influence of Veronese’s painting on Tiepolo is discussed in another section of this entry.)

After Chiara Pisani’s death in 1767 her elder son, Pietro Vettore, continued the work on the palace. In 1752 he had made a splendid marriage with Caterina Grimani, niece of Pietro Grimani (doge between 1741 and 1752), but not long after his mother’s death he seems to have despaired of having children; in any case, arrangements were made for his younger brother Vettore to marry Cornelia Grimani, a kinswoman of his wife. This was Vettore’s second marriage, his first, in 1753, to the daughter of a mirror engraver, having been annulled. The wedding took place in April 1773 and major works on the piano nobile are recorded in the preceding years. The portego (now called the Salone) was completely redecorated with stucco decorations, probably by Pietro Castelli, curling around mirrors on the walls and around frescoes on the ceiling by Giacomo Guarana, these latter [page 371]completed just before the wedding.¹⁰⁸ In this period there are references in the ledger to the cleaning and restoration of both the Piazzetta and the Tiepolo. In April and May 1772 Domenico Maggiotto was paid a total of 1,100 lire for work on the ‘quadro del Piazzetta’ and on 9 October 1770 ‘Iseppo Bertani’ was paid 620 lire for ‘spese fatte nel quadro di Paolo’. Bertani was paid again on 14 October 1772 ‘per aver accomodato un quadro’, that is, for having put a picture in order, or perhaps for having set a picture in place.¹⁰⁹ Maggiotto (1713–1794) was doubtless selected to work on the Piazzetta because he had been a pupil of that master. Giuseppe Bertani, who died in 1799 at more than eighty years of age, was during the 1760s and 1770s the leading picture restorer in the city and the one who enjoyed most favour with connoisseurs. He was described by Pietro Edwards in 1777 as ‘maestro di tutt’i restauratori’.¹¹⁰ The cleaning is likely to have been carried out in connection with a new display which entailed new framing. At this point or soon afterwards the two paintings were both placed in the Sala with the Tiepolo ceiling, where they were both still described in the 1850s.¹¹¹ The frames made for them are now on the Minorello copy of the Veronese, which was taken here after the Veronese was sold, and on Minorello’s companion picture, Alexander bestowing Campaspe upon Apelles, which took the place of the Piazzetta (they are described in the section on framing below). This was the magnificent setting in which Goethe saw the Veronese in 1786. It was the only painting that he described in his account of Venice in his Italian Journey, and probably the most celebrated painting in private possession in the entire city.

The Sale of The Family of Darius

Pietro Vettore Pisani, the son of Vettore by his first marriage, had difficulty establishing his rights as a patrician. Long after his success in achieving this in 1784, claims continued to be made by his half‐sister which were a serious drain on his wealth. On the other hand he did nothing to alienate either the French or the Austrians, and the latter officially recognised his title as Conte di Bagnolo in 1819.¹¹² Palazzo Pisani Moretta remained one of the great attractions of the city, on account of the Veronese, but also because of Canova’s Daedalus and Icarus, his earliest masterpiece – completed for the palace in [page 372]1779 (today in the Museo Correr) – and, gradually, also for its gothic façade.

William Hazlitt, who was in Venice in the spring of 1825, described the palace in his travel notes for the Morning Chronicle as second only to Palazzo Grimani in its ‘elegance and splendour’: ‘from its situation on the Grand Canal, it admits a flood of bright day through glittering curtains of pea‐green silk, into a noble saloon, enriched with an admirable family‐picture, by Paul Veronese, with heads equal to Titian for all but the character of thought.’¹¹³ The palace was mentioned in all the guidebooks and probably gained additional visitors from its proximity to Palazzo Barbarigo, where a group of paintings by Titian, arranged in what was believed to have been his studio, was a more or less compulsory sight for all visitors to the city.¹¹⁴

Count Pietro Vettore Pisani died in 1847. The painting and the palace were inherited by his son Vettore (commonly known as Vettor and by the English as Vittore) Daniele, then agd 57. In the following year Venice revolted against Austrian rule, and its provisional government immediately found itself in desperate need of financial support. In May 1848 Count Vettore Pisani contributed larger loans than any other nobleman, with the exception of the Giovanelli brothers.¹¹⁵ By September the situation was even more desperate and a new bank was established, with its paper money (‘moneta patriottica’) underwritten by a ‘voluntary’ loan of three million lire by the Republic’s richest citizens. Again Vettore was one of the chief contributors – only the names of Giovanelli, Treves and Papadopoli are higher on the list. In April of the following year he paid out again, and then again in August.¹¹⁶ On 22 August 1849, not long after he had made his last contribution, Venice submitted to Austria. Count Pisani must have seen very little prospect of ever recovering the more than half a million lire that he had been obliged to contribute to the short‐lived Republic and his rents and other income would also certainly have been in decline during these hard years.

In September 1850 Fedor Bruni, director of the Imperial Picture Gallery in the Hermitage, purchased the entire picture collection of the neighbouring Palazzo Barbarigo for 562,000 lire. Probably two years later he wrote to St Petersburg to point out that he knew that Count Pisani would be willing to part with the Veronese if he received a large enough offer for it. Bruni had already offered the 230,000 francs (£9,600) remaining in his budget, and it was not enough, but he believed that another 100,000 would secure the work. It was, he emphasised, the greatest work of this great master. Tsar Nicholas I, having read this appeal, annotated it with a question concerning the cost of the Campana collection (the Marchese Campana’s Etruscan antiquities had recently been offered to him), which he evidently regarded as of higher priority, and the comment that there were no additional funds available for Brum’s use.¹¹⁷

It is likely that Count Pisani received other offers in the early 1850s and it was said that he authorised his agent, Signor Zen, to accept 15,000 napoleons in the early part of 1853, although he later withdrew this authority.¹¹⁸ The National Gallery made an offer through Clinton G. Dawkins, consul general for Lombardy and Venice, but it too was rejected.¹¹⁹ A greater attraction in Venice for collectors and dealers in these years was the Manfrin collection, which was full of masterpieces that were suitable in size for any gallery, whereas the Veronese was difficult to accommodate and its export required special diplomacy. The most obvious buyers were the British government, the French emperor and the Russian tsar. But during 1854 and much of 1855 these three great powers were at war in the Crimea and support for extra public expenditure on works of art was most unlikely.

In early 1856 it was reported that Signore Dubois, the count’s son‐in‐law, had received an offer of £10,000 from an ‘English gentleman’.¹²⁰ This was perhaps Alexander Barker, the wealthy London collector who also acted as an agent for the Rothschilds. In June Eastlake obtained the support of the Trustees for an appeal to the Treasury to permit an offer of 10,000 guineas (£10,500) to be made.¹²¹ The ambassador to the Austrian court, Sir Hamilton Seymour, wrote to the Earl of Clarendon on 9 July 1856 to announce that he had consulted Count Thun, minister for foreign affairs, and had ascertained that ‘no objections would be raised on the part of the Imperial Government to the exportation of the picture by Paul Veronese’. Seymour had earlier written that he felt ‘tolerably certain to receive none but a very unsatisfactory answer. The fact is that any demand for authority to purchase and export a well known picture places the Government in the dilemma either of acquiescing in the loss to the country of a work of art to which a national interest is attached or of making application to the Emperor to purchase the picture for his own gallery.’¹²² Conscious of the likely fate of the Veronese, and of the first sales of the Manfrin paintings, the Austrians authorised the purchase of twenty‐one major works from the Manfrin collection for the Accademia Galleries at the close of 1856. The emperor also issued in February 1857 a decree making it harder for works of major artistic importance to leave the Veneto, delaying any export licence until the state had decided whether or not to exercise its right to make a pre‐emptive purchase.¹²³

The British offer of 10,000 guineas (£10,500) was made in the first days of August 1856 by Otto Mündler, the National Gallery’s travelling agent, in concert with George Harris, consul general in Venice, through the bankers Carlo and Enrico Dubois (du Bois de Dunilac), the latter being Count Vettore Pisani’s son‐in‐law.¹²⁴ On 4 August it was rejected. Eastlake cannot have been surprised, since he had informed the Trustees that he believed £12,000 would be required. In October he was with Mündler in Venice. They visited the painting together and doubtless resolved to continue the effort to secure its purchase. At the close of the month the painter, copyist and restorer Professor Paolo Fabris (1810–1888), whose professional eminence in Venice is indicated by the fact that he was chosen to restore Titian’s Death of Saint Peter Martyr in 1853, explained to Mündler that Caterin Zen, the count’s first agent, had been in his service for twenty‐seven years.¹²⁵ A clear implication of this was that Zen had the ability to stop any offer made through another channel – notably Dubois – and that access to Zen would have to be [page 373]obtained through Fabris. At the very end of the year Harris obtained permission to offer £12,000. There followed a series of difficult meetings between Harris, Mündler, Fabris, Zen and Dubois. On 7 January 1857 Zen introduced to these discussions the hitherto mysterious Avvocato Monterumici, the count’s lawyer.¹²⁶ Harris seems to have made two mistakes during these weeks. He proposed to pay Zen a higher commission in exchange for a reduction in the price, a proposal that was ‘peremptorily’ rejected by Zen as ‘wounding his feelings and derogatory to his honour’. Harris also gained direct access to the count, who was then residing in Padua, and put the offer to him directly, only to receive a decisive refusal.¹²⁷

In a dispatch of 31 January 1857, Harris explained to Lord Clarendon what he had learnt. ‘Count Pisani is easy of access, but invariably consults advisers on questions of money’, notably Dubois, Monterumici and Zen, but also ‘other dependents all of whom conceive themselves to have a claim on this painting.’ Although the count had renounced his intention of selling, all his advisers had an interest in achieving a sale, and there were also domestic incentives for his parting with the picture.

A frustrating aspect of the negotiations for Mündler and Harris must have been their ignorance of the three daughters’ positions. Clearly Dubois represented the interest of one daughter, Zen perhaps protected another and Monterumici a third, but that is probably too simple a picture. Mündler also received anonymous approaches from agents, which he ignored. A comic dimension to the proceedings was added by the fact that all four of the Venetian advisers were eager to do some private business with Mündler, selling him their own paintings or those of their friends.¹²⁹ On 8 February the count was still opposed to accepting the offer but by the end of the month the situation had changed. Monterumici spoke with one of the daughters, the Countess Lazzara in Padua, and then with the other two in Venice. On 1 March the count finally accepted an offer of 360,000 Austrian francs (approximately £12,280).¹³⁰ The exact terms were laid down by Dubois on 4 March: payment was to be made within the month, in silver coins.¹³¹

If we wonder what had finally driven the negotiations to a conclusion, the answer may be that the other contenders had begun to fall away. Tsar Nicholas I was not someone who easily changed his mind, and in any case he had died in 1855. The young artist Charles Maréchal wrote to the French Minister of the Interior on 5 May 1856, offering to approach Count Pisani on behalf of Emperor Napoleon III,¹³² but although Maréchal was still known to be interested in negotiating in November,¹³³ there is no reason to believe that he was given encouragement, perhaps because the Louvre already owned great works by Veronese. The British would not wait forever, and the recent support for the Accademia Galleries and, more importantly, the decree of February 1857 reflected the Austrians’ concern for retaining major works of art in Venice and might prove fatal to the sale (the British had not, of course, revealed that they had already obtained permission to export the picture).

The count’s agreement was by no means the last hurdle. He refused to negotiate on behalf of his advisers and dependants. He was willing to allow them to benefit from the sale but adamant that their share must come from the purchaser – ‘for his part he would not give them a glass of water on the occasion’. Indeed, he professed to be amused by the rapacity of his advisers and actually ‘repeated without disapprobation Signor Zen’s expression that the picture should not leave the Palace unless he [Zen] made a small Estate by it’.¹³⁴ These extra payments were the subject of intense discussion and on 18 March Harris was informed by the Treasury that the purchase could proceed, provided that the total cost did not exceed £13,650. Count Pisani was reported soon afterwards to have bitterly regretted his decision: his friends were reproaching him and he was even receiving anonymous letters.¹³⁵

On 27 March Harris obtained authority to draw the money and on the following day Harris and Mündler discussed with the count the preparation of receipts and so on. At 11 am on 31 March the silver was counted out and at midday the Venetian dealer and packer Antonio Zen (no relation to Caterin Zen) began to take down the painting.¹³⁶ On the following day the Delegazione (the representatives of the Austrian Empire) ordered the count to stop the transaction, but at noon a case containing the picture was transported across the Grand Canal to Palazzo Mocenigo, Harris’s official residence. On the next day commissions were paid to Dubois, Fabris, Monterumici and Zen and, through them, compensation to palace domestics and others. There was so much indignation in the city and on the part of both ‘Podestà’ (the mayor) and ‘Delegato’ (Imperial representative) that the count was taking seriously the rumour that he would be fined a sum greater than that which he had received for the painting. Mündler at this point restored calm by revealing Count Thun’s prior agreement.¹³⁷

At around this date the count gave a dinner at which it was reported that the coins were placed in three basins in front of his daughters,¹³⁸ an almost biblical gesture whereby he perhaps demonstrated successfully to the higher ranks of Venetian society that he himself had gained nothing by the sale. The sale was nevertheless widely regarded as unpatriotic [page 374]and seems to have disqualified him from reparations made in the following decade to those who had given loans to the provisional government in 1848–9.

It took six of Antonio Zen’s men several hours to remove all the little nails and carefully roll the canvas over a cylinder approximately two feet in diameter. But the exacting and inquisitorial officials at the Accademia insisted on seeing the picture unrolled once again, not only to verify its identity but to ascertain that nothing else had been rolled up with it. ‘These were the conditions,’ Zen informed Eastlake, ‘and you shouldn’t be surprised because you can’t expect civil behaviour from a savage’ (‘Non le serva ciò di stupore perchè non avra inteso che sia cortese un selvatico’ – Selvatico, the name of the president of the Accademia, literally means wild or uncouth). The export licence had still not been authorised on 7 June, to Mündler’s frustration. It was granted on 3 July, and Zen was able to place the painting on the English steamship Euphrates, which sailed from Trieste on 14 July 1857.¹³⁹

Even before the painting had left Venice its acquisition was debated in Parliament. On 2 July Lord Elcho, an important collector, informed the House that ‘an enormous sum’ had been squandered on a ‘second‐rate specimen… of a second‐rate artist’.¹⁴⁰ His motion of censure was not successful, however, and in the correspondence in The Times which ensued Ruskin, among others, strongly defended the purchase.¹⁴¹

The Euphrates docked at Liverpool on 7 August and Wornum recorded the safe arrival of the painting, under seal, in London on 10 August.¹⁴² On 22 August it was removed from the cylinder and placed on a new stretcher by ‘Leedham’.¹⁴³ On 16 September it was hung in the Gallery. It was varnished, presumably in situ, on 19 October.¹⁴⁴ The response of both the press and the public was favourable. Even ‘Eyewitness’ in Charles Dickens’s All the Year Round, who was generally much opposed to Eastlake’s acquisitions, heartily approved.¹⁴⁵ Queen Victoria, together with the Princess Royal and the Princess of Prussia, made a special visit to inspect the painting on 22 January 1858.¹⁴⁶

Eastlake fully deserved to be congratulated on this acquisition. His tactic of removing the business from his fellow Trustees to the Treasury was adroit and his taking the precaution of obtaining a diplomatic concession from Austria before serious negotiations began was shrewd. Wornum in his private diary recorded, for the benefit of a distant posterity, that the ‘Pisani Paul Veronese’ was purchased ‘thanks to the public spirit of the secretary to the treasury James Wilson Esq.’¹⁴⁷ This civil servant, not otherwise noticed in accounts of the acquisition, may have had an understanding with Eastlake and must have played a decisive part either in urging his superiors to accept the escalating price or, more likely, in not allowing them to worry about it. Wornum must also be suspected of wishing to divert credit from Mündler. And yet it is hard to believe that the negotiations could have succeeded without such an intelligent and zealous agent on the spot. However, instead of receiving official thanks, Mündler was dismissed from his post by parliamentary vote on 13 July 1858.

The debate in Parliament was occasioned by the annual report of the Committee of Supply. The defence of the National Gallery’s interests had probably been relaxed after the defeat of Lord Elcho’s motion in the previous year. On this occasion, however, his motion, seconded by William Conyngham, that the office of travelling agent be discontinued, was actually passed. Elcho was an old enemy of German scholarship and of what he conceived to be the Gallery’s cleaning policy; so too was Conyngham.¹⁴⁸ Although they doubtless rejoiced in harming Mündler, their real purpose was to hurt Eastlake. Mündler had in fact occasionally acted with greater independence than was originally envisaged, but most of the allegations made against him, especially in connection with the price of the Veronese and the way it was paid for, were entirely false and were refuted in a closely argued letter sent to the Treasury by Eastlake with the agreement of the other Trustees on 2 August 1858.¹⁴⁹ In consequence of this Mündler was compensated for unfair dismissal and Eastlake felt able to employ him in numerous matters during the coming years.

No doubt it was true, as Mündler claimed, that the painting’s beauty suddenly became more apparent when it lay upon the floor of Palazzo Pisani, waiting to be rolled. Antonio Zen indeed claimed for it ‘twice the merit, and thus twice the value, that it had when in a position where valances falling over the windows and an obtrusive curtain prevented the appreciation it deserved’ (‘doppio merito, e quindi valore che non mostrava sul luogo dove i valanghini soppressi alle finestre, ed una indiscreta cortina non permettevano che si gustasse come meritava’).¹⁵⁰ But moving a great painting into another light is always an exciting revelation. It was cruel to extract this painting from a historic palace built for munificent hospitality, courteous ceremony and noble retinues such as we see in the painting itself, separating it from the company of a Tiepolo fresco and the sparkle of light on Murano glass chandeliers and the waters of the Grand Canal.

A quarter of a century after the Veronese arrived in London, Henry James described how ‘you may walk out of the noon‐day dusk of Trafalgar Square in November, and in one of the chambers of the National Gallery see the Family of Darius rustling and pleading and weeping at the feet of Alexander … the picture sends a glow into the cold London twilight. You may sit before it for an hour and dream you are floating to the water‐gate of the Ducal palace.’ Then, thinking, perhaps unconsciously, of the vicissitudes of empire which the painting itself illustrates, he added the detail that we will be greeted at the water‐gate by a beggar – albeit one resembling a doge.¹⁵¹

The painting was much copied in the National Gallery and was no doubt carefully studied by artists, but it is curious to note that the place in Europe where the influence of Veronese, and of this painting in particular, was most strong was Vienna in the decades after 1866, when Austria reluctantly yielded Venice to the new kingdom of Italy. This is best exemplified by Hans Makart’s Homage to Queen Caterina Cornoro of 1873, which is similar in its setting and subject, its compositional rhythms and its ceremonial rhetoric to The Family of Darius, but darker in shadows, even richer in palette and nearly twice as large.¹⁵²

Provenance

See above. Probably painted for Francesco Pisani of Montagnana and bequeathed by him to his cousin Zan Mattio. By descent in the Pisani family from whom purchased in 1857.

Drawing

There is a preparatory study in black chalk heightened with white on grey‐blue paper in the Louvre (fig. 15). It came from an album assembled in the second half of the eighteenth century, probably in Venice. The sheet contains a series of five schematic nude studies, the first three (from the left) for Alexander and the next for Hephaestion; the fifth figure, on the right, cannot be identified with any in the painting. Roseline Bacou observed that the second figure from the left also resembles in pose a figure in the foreground of Veronese’s Feast in the House of Levi of 1573 in the Accademia. This need not suggest that The Family of Darius is of a similar date, since Veronese could easily have reused a pose invented many years before.¹⁵³

Prints

A fold‐out etching of The Family of Darius measuring 29.8 × 48.3 cm, signed by N.R. Cochin ‘del et fe’, was included in Carla Caterina Patina’s anthology Pitture Scelte, made in Padua in 1691. The print extends the composition somewhat at the upper and lower edges and emphasises the projections in the entablature above the paired columns. It is, however, not accurate in its representation of Veronese’s architecture, since it shows a pulvinated frieze and one without ornament other than in these projecting sections. The title given to the painting is ‘Alexander, Victor of Darius, Merciful and Restrained’ (‘clemens et continens’). Patina’s anthology included many notable old masters, most of them Venetian (Titian and Veronese being most favoured), mingled with some in Patina’s possession, probably for sale.¹⁵⁴ Cicogna in 1834 records an engraving which had been made by Dal Pian that was then available for sale in Giuseppe Battagia’s shop (‘intaglio già eseguito dal Dal Pian si riproduce oggidi in vendita dal negoziante sig. Giuseppe Battagia’). This is presumably a reference to the Bellunese engraver Giovanni Maria de Pian (1764–1800), who left Venice for Vienna in 1797. The print was said to have been published around 1789.¹⁵⁵

Copies

As noted above (under Condition) the Pisani had a reputation in the mid‐nineteenth century for not permitting copies of The Family of Darius. However, some were certainly made before the picture was sold. The earliest may be that by Minorello, which was moved, under the supervision of Paolo Fabris, to Palazzo Pisani Moretta at the end of July 1860 to take the place of the original (and is still there‐see fig. 13).¹⁵⁶ As noted above, this full‐size copy seems to have been painted for the family’s villa at Este and had hung there for two centuries. It must have been made with direct reference to [page 376]the original but probably without the use of a tracing because there are small but significant differences.¹⁵⁷

A full‐size copy that looks as if it might date from the seventeenth century is in a private collection in Paris. It was acquired at auction in Paris on 22 April 1872 for 5,000 francs by Ernest Gariel, a building contractor employed by Haussmann, who died in 1884. The picture has remained ever since in the possession of his descendants.¹⁵⁸ There are some differences in the architecture – the obelisk is taller and more tapered, for instance – and in the placement of the figures, probably because the artist was required to alter the format a little, and one major change in colour – the bearded man presenting the royal family wears brown rather than blue. In 1860 a claim was made in Venice, in the Official Gazette, that Veronese’s original version of The Family of Darius was in the museum at Versailles and had been there since 1660. This was certainly a misapprehension but may reflect some knowledge of an old copy that had long been in France.¹⁵⁹ In the previous year the Gazette published the claim that an old copy by Luca Giordano had been found which was in the possession of the dealer Toffoli.¹⁶⁰

There are smaller copies of the painting in the museums in Kassel¹⁶¹ and Parma.¹⁶² Smaller copies also appeared in the following London sales: Sotheby’s, 8 December 1950, lot 169, property of Sir Allan Adair; Christie’s, 18 February 1953, lot 104 (as by F. Guardi); 16 July 1954, lot 101; Phillips, 16 April 1996, lot 1. Copies of the painting are known to have been made after it was bought by the National Gallery and some of those listed above probably fell into this category. A copy in a Philadelphia collection in 1926 was said to be old. Another in a private collection in Oak Park, Illinois, about half the size of the original, may be older: the red of Hephaestion’s costume suggests that it was made when the original rose had been altered by a yellowed varnish.¹⁶³

Freer copies, some with minor variations and others left unfinished, are liable to be mistaken for an original sketch by the artist. Charles de Brosses, when in Venice in August 1739, observed that he had ‘l’esquisse de ce tableau faite par le Véronèse pour l’exécution de son grand ouvrage’, with one or two heads finished by the master and much of the rest by his pupils, some only roughed out (‘en ébauche’).¹⁶⁴ A painting acquired by Giuseppe de Scolari in 1840 attracted some [page 377]notice in Venice around the date that the original was sold. Its owner, then president of the Venetian Commercial Court (Tribunale di Commercio), published a booklet about it in 1875, claiming it as the artist’s ‘modelletto’ and tracing it back to the collection of Bishop Coccalin, who died in 1661. He cited many variations in colour and composition, but since the general form of the architecture does not seem to have been different from that in the original we can, even with no knowledge of the painting itself, dismiss its claim, for we know from the pentimenti described above (under the section Evolution of the Composition) that Veronese only settled on the scheme we see during the course of his work on the large painting. The variations were more likely the liberties taken by an eighteenth‐century artist.¹⁶⁵ Another ‘original sketch’ was said to be in the collection of Charles du Bois, brother of Enrico du Bois de Dunilac, one of Count Pisani’s sons‐in‐law, but no trace of this can be found in the family collection or in its records.¹⁶⁶

Frames

NG 294 is likely to have been reframed four or five times. It was probably given a new frame when it was moved from the Pisani palace to the procuracy of S. Marco around the mid‐seventeenth century and perhaps also when it was moved from there to Palazzo Pisani Moretta, and almost certainly when it was re‐installed there in about 1772, as mentioned above. The frames currently on the copy of the painting by Minorello and on his painting of Alexander bestowing Campaspe upon Apelles must originally have been made for the Veronese and for the Piazzetta. They are precocious examples of neo‐classical design, about 27 cm broad and consisting of a wide guilloche frieze bordered by ogee mouldings with finely carved acanthus ornament. The guilloche embraces rosettes of unusual design. The frames have outset corners, reviving a feature of many late sixteenth‐century so‐called ‘Sansovino frames’ which were also favoured earlier in the eighteenth century by British Palladian architects. The prominent [page 378]guilloche is highly reminiscent of fashionable décor in Paris during the 1770s¹⁶⁷ and this may be explained by a payment of 100 lire on 6 February 1772 (1773 in the modern calendar) to a ‘Monsu Anto Rigotie disegnador’ for ‘Disegno di Fornimento d’appartamento nobile’ for ‘Rigotie’ sounds like a Venetianised French name.¹⁶⁸

The crisp, curling acanthus on the ogee moulding near the sight edge was obviously carved by craftsmen trained to work in the refined rococo style that was still the norm in Venice in the 1770s. The ‘intagliador’ may have been Zuane Gai, a member of a prominent clan of carvers, Marco Garbato or Giovan Battista Frattin, all of whom appear in the accounts at this period.¹⁶⁹ The gilder was perhaps Nicolò Zaccalura, who was paid for gilding furniture and frames in the palace during these years.¹⁷⁰

The frames for the Veronese and the Piazzetta are matched by smaller ones on portraits of Pisani ancestors placed over the yellow Verona marble door‐frames, although these have crests composed of masks and shells (fig. 13). They were probably the only other paintings in the room and perhaps encouraged, subliminally, the notion that portraits of the Pisani were present in Veronese’s painting as well.

Mündler evidently hoped to find a suitable old frame for the painting in Venice. On 3 April 1857 he noted in his diary, ‘the question of the P. Veronese frame is not yet decided. Went to Anto Zen to consult him. He offers to go to Vicenza, where a lady has a frame likely to fit.’ On 8 April, Zen reported that he found it excellent but ‘too much asked for it’. Count Pisani’s intention to replace the painting with Minorello’s copy may be the reason why he did not include the frame in the sale to the National Gallery.¹⁷¹

On its arrival in the National Gallery the painting was given a frame carved by Messrs Wright, similar to the one they had made for Veronese’s S. Silvestro Adoration, which still remains on that painting (fig. 6, p. 406). The Gallery’s keeper, Ralph Nicholson Wornum, recorded ‘294 carved frame by Messrs Wright of Wardour St £45 an improvement on the Toffoli frame’ under the date 22 August 1857.¹⁷² This was twelve days after the painting had been unpacked, when it was put on a new stretcher. Therefore it probably indicates the date that work on the frame was commissioned, with the agreement that the pattern for the Adoration (supplied by Toffoli) would be followed but the execution improved. The frame was presumably complete by 16 September, when Wornum noted, ‘Pisani Paul Veronese hung on the wall of Flemish room.’ The painting certainly still had this frame in 1923.¹⁷³

It has not been possible to ascertain exactly when Wright’s frame was removed. It may have been adapted to fit another painting. Van Dyck’s Equestrian Portrait of Charles I (NG 1172), which is now in a frame of this pattern, is not likely to have been given such a frame when it was acquired for the Gallery in 1885 and there must have been other cases of reuse.

The Veronese is now in a carved and gilt frame of uncertain date but late sixteenth or early seventeenth century in style, and perhaps incorporating elements from that period (fig. 18). It consists of a wreath of leaves, vegetables and fruit (pomegranates, figs, pears) with a strap wound within it and acanthus at the corner. Inside the wreath the painting is bordered by stylised fleshy leaves, and larger leaves, also somewhat abstract, are carved on an ogee moulding outside the wreath. This frame is described in the typescript recollections made by Cecil Gould of National Gallery frames as ‘Philip Hendy’s masterpiece among frames. He found three sides outside in a yard in Venice and had the fourth made specially.’ It is likely to have been put on the painting after the restoration in the winter of 1958.

Old frames of a similar character are found around Veronese’s Belle Nani in the Louvre¹⁷⁴ and Bronzino’s Madonna and Child with Saint John the Baptist (NG 5280), the last‐mentioned retaining its original gilding. The pattern was popular in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, for example in some [page 379]works by Leighton,¹⁷⁵ and throughout the twentieth century richly foliate frames involving both a wreath and leaves on an ogee moulding have been considered as especially well suited to Venetian sixteenth‐century pictures.

Appendix 1
‘The Family of Darius’ before and after Veronese

In common with other subjects drawn from ancient history and poetry that came to be favoured as mural decorations for palaces and villas in the sixteenth century, that of the Family of Darius before Alexander had been painted on at least one wedding chest in fifteenth‐century Florence.¹⁷⁶ The first known painting of the subject on a large scale is the fresco made by Sodoma in the 1510s for the principal bedchamber of the villa beside the Tiber, later called the Farnesina, that had been built for the immensely rich banker Agostino Chigi.¹⁷⁷ Then, in the 1520s, Polidoro da Caravaggio chose it as a subject for the fictive reliefs he painted on the façade of Palazzo Milesi, also in Rome.¹⁷⁸ Two decades later Perino del Vaga and Pellegrino Tibaldi chose the subject for one of the fictive bronze reliefs they painted in the Sala Paolina, in Castel Sant’Angelo, Rome, for Pope Paul III (whose baptismal name was Alexander).¹⁷⁹ Taddeo Zuccaro also painted the subject, perhaps as a façade decoration and certainly on the vault of Castello Orsini (now Odescalchi) at Bracciano around 1560.¹⁸⁰

It seems likely that the Venetian patrician Girolamo Soranzo, or his advisers, knew of the Farnesina frescoes and perhaps those of the Sala Paolina when he commissioned the decoration of the Villa Soranzo, which Michele Sanmichele had rebuilt for him in the 1540s. This was the first major work in fresco by Veronese and must have done much to establish his reputation (see p. 331). Only fragments survive, two of them bearing the date 1551,¹⁸¹ but Ridolfi describes how the walls of one room were painted with narratives of Alexander cutting the Gordian knot and ‘the women of Darius before the same Alexander who ordered that they be treated as befitted queens’ (‘le donne di Dario dinanzi al medesimo Alessandro che ordina che sieno come regine servite’).¹⁸² Battista Zelotti, who worked with Veronese (his compatriot) on the Soranzo frescoes, painted episodes from the history of Alexander a decade or so later, when, together with Battista del Moro, he was commissioned to fresco some of the interior of Villa Godi (now Villa Malinverni) at Lonedo di Lugo near Vicenza. In the great Salone we see two battles between Darius and Alexander (‘due fatti d’armi tra Dario ed Alessandro’), one certainly showing Alexander ordering the corpse of Darius to be respectfully covered (the other scene has not been identified)¹⁸³ and, opposite the chimney wall in the Sala del Venere, The Family of Darius.¹⁸⁴ Veronese himself returned to the subject in the painting catalogued here, probably a little later in the same decade.

Not only was Veronese’s painting unusual because it is on canvas, but also because it has no companion painting that we know of, although of course something of the kind may have been intended. All the other paintings mentioned so far have been part of a series or cycle. And this remains the case with the notable paintings of the Family of Darius made in other parts of Italy later in the sixteenth century – for instance, that by Bernardo Castello in the frescoes of Palazzo Spinola, Genoa, made in the early 1590s¹⁸⁵ – or in the seventeenth century – notably the lunette by Pietro da Cortona in Palazzo Pitti, Florence, in the early 1640s.¹⁸⁶ It is also worth noting that Veronese was unusual in depending only on the minimal text of Valerius Maximus, for all the other surviving representations of the story reveal some knowledge of Quintus Curtius Rufus (at least) by showing the tent of Darius, the eunuch’s alarm, Alexander’s gesture of personally raising the queen mother, or his gesture of embracing the little prince.

Other large paintings on canvas of the Family of Darius began to be popular soon after the mid‐seventeenth century, perhaps not coincidentally when Veronese’s painting had begun to be specially commended by connoisseurs and coveted by collectors. The picture by Mattia Preti now in the National Museum of Romania, Bucharest, probably dating from the early 1650s,¹⁸⁷ and the painting in the Ashmolean Museum by Antonio Bellucci (fig. 19)¹⁸⁸ are among the first. Measuring 213 × 564 cm, Bellucci’s canvas is even larger than Veronese’s, which it resembles in some of the poses and gestures and in the choice of secondary figures (halberdier, dwarf, groom). Although we do not know the settings for which these paintings were originally made, they were surely palace decorations intended for a particular space. And in Venice in the last decades of the seventeenth century this was just the sort of subject that was favoured for the great paintings on the wall of the portego. Antonio Zanchi, indeed, painted The Family of Darius for Ca’ Fini in the 1690s.¹⁸⁹ The pair of paintings by Bellucci now in the Museo Civico, Verona, provide another example of this genre: one has always been recognised as depicting the Continence of Scipio, the other has often been published as ‘The Family of Darius’ but must actually represent Coriolanus yielding to his mother’s supplications.¹⁹⁰

There are smaller gallery pictures of the Family of Darius by Venetian artists but these may well have originated as sketches for larger paintings of this kind. The young Piazzetta, for instance, painted the subject, together with one of Alexander ordering the corpse of Darius to be covered¹⁹¹ and, as noted above, much later in his career he painted the latter subject on a large scale for Palazzo Pisani Moretta as some sort of companion for Veronese’s own canvas.

The subject did begin to be favoured for smaller canvases that might be classified as gallery pictures. Antonio Pellegrini, for example, who had supplied four large episodes from the life of Alexander for the portego of Casino Correr in Murano in 1696, painted a pair of canvases with half‐length figures around 1700 – that is, at about the same date as the paintings by Piazzetta mentioned above, and representing the same subjects.¹⁹²

In Venice and the Veneto throughout the first half of the eighteenth century the subject of the Family of Darius enjoyed great popularity not only for palace decorations of all kinds (including shaped canvas overdoors¹⁹³) and gallery [page 380]pictures,¹⁹⁴ but also, once again, for frescoes in villas.¹⁹⁵ Patrons may have had a preference for the familiar, but artists may also have wished to claim Veronese as an ancestor, and to make variations on a theme that was especially associated with him was a way of doing so. Above all, this must be true of Tiepolo’s fresco of 1743–4 in Villa Cordellina, Montecchio Maggiore near Vicenza (fig. 20).¹⁹⁶ And such homage may also have represented a defence of a tradition in painting that was under some attack from academic art theory. To understand this we need to consider a painting of the Family of Darius made in seventeenth‐century France.

Charles Le Brun owed his position as first painter to the French crown to his painting of this subject – generally known as La tente de Darius (fig. 21) – which he painted between 1660 and 1661, partly under the admiring eyes of the young King Louis XIV.¹⁹⁷ The fame of this painting was increased by the tapestry made after it at the Gobelins factory,¹⁹⁸ and still more by Edelinck’s fine engraving of it¹⁹⁹ and by André Félibien’s polemical essay praising its decorum, expressive power, historical accuracy and deliberate reduction of the splendour and excitement – the ‘éclat’ and ‘vivacité’‐ of colour.²⁰⁰ Félibien thus defined a type of heroic narrative painting akin to tragic drama, beside which Veronese, with his mixture of fancy dress and high fashion, his large chorus, the captivating splendour of his setting, and the beauty of his colours, suggested the ‘excesses’ of romance, epic or opera. This exemplary status accorded to Le Brun’s painting prompted pictorial responses of which the most famous in France was The Family of Darius by Le Brun’s great rival, Pierre Mignard, in 1689, now in the Hermitage.²⁰¹

Le Brun is unlikely to have known Veronese’s Family of Darius but no artist or art lover of any education in the eighteenth century was unaware of Le Brun’s composition and it had some influence on Italian artists.²⁰² Patina, who was a member of the French academy, when publishing the earliest print of Veronese’s painting in 1691 noted that the ‘famosissimo’ Le Brun, ‘Pittore del Re Christianissimo’, had painted the same subject in a different way ‘and I dare say with as much more beauty as well as with more truth’ (‘e ardisco dir con tanto piû vaghezza, quanto con piû verità’).²⁰³ However, Venetians pointedly preferred their local classic.

Echoes of the theoretical position articulated by Félibien may still be heard in reactions to Veronese’s painting in the mid‐nineteenth century, when Eastlake felt obliged to qualify his very great admiration with the observation that Veronese is ‘confessedly inferior in the qualities that appeal to the mind’²⁰⁴ and Triqueti considered the picture to be disfigured by all sorts of ‘redundant extras absurdly rigged out in exotic and tawdry finery’ (‘des figures de comparses ridiculement affublées des plus étranges oripeaux’).²⁰⁵ It also helps us to understand what Baron von Rumohr meant when he marvelled at how the artist’s use of colour was such that one overlooked the fact that the action was managed as it might be in a Spanish play.²⁰⁶

Appendix 2
Goethe and The Family of Darius

The first part of the Italienische Reise of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) (first published in German in 1815²⁰⁷) includes a famous account of his stay in Venice between 28 September and 14 October 1786, which is remarkable, given the priorities of other cultured visitors to the city, in that it describes – indeed names – only one painting. That this painting is Veronese’s The Family of Darius is certainly testimony to the fame this painting then enjoyed – it was perhaps the most celebrated picture in a private collection in Venice – but it is clear too that it epitomised much of Goethe’s experience of the city. Although Goethe did try his hand at painting, the art that interested him most was the theatre. In addition to staged performances of every kind – opera, tragedy, masked comedy, comedy – he comments on oratorio, dialect storytellers, the singing of gondolieri, the performances of star lawyers and popular preachers, and of course the ceremonial procession of the doge in gold and ermine and his escort of nobility in robes and wigs. After theatre, the art that appealed most to Goethe in Venice was architecture, the classical architecture of the sixteenth century, for he had discovered Palladio on his way there and had been converted from his earlier attraction to the gothic.

The Family of Darius, as a highly theatrical performance with a magnificent architectural setting, was certain to command his attention when he saw it on 8 October, and indeed he describes it as a drama. Much has been made of the fact that he evidently supposed that the figure in rose was Hephaestion, but since he observes that ‘he turns away and points to the person on the right’ (‘er lehnt es ab und deutet auf den rechten’), he was clearly writing imprecisely from memory (neither figure turns away). He found ‘the gradation in the expression from the mother through the wife to the daughters’ (‘Die Abstufung von der Mutter durch Gemahlin und Töchter’) to be a felicitous touch and remarkable for its truth to nature. ‘The youngest princess, kneeling last of all, is a pretty little mouse and has a very attractive, but somewhat independent and haughty, countenance. Her position does not seem to please her in the least’ (‘die jüngste Prinzess; ganz am Ende knieend, ist ein hübsches Mäuschen, und hat ein gar artiges, eigensinniges, trotziges Gesichtchen, ihre Lage scheint ihr gar nicht zu gefallen’).

Goethe must have been affected by the experience of seeing the picture in the palace of one of the most powerful and wealthy old families in the city. Pietro Vettore Pisani, elected procurator of S. Marco in 1776, would almost certainly have been among the nobility whose bearing had so impressed Goethe two days earlier at S. Giustina. Two years previously, after a long and spectacular legal battle – courtroom theatre that had engrossed the whole city – his nephew, also named Pietro Vettore, had been awarded patrician status, [page 382][page 383]despite the low birth of his mother and the annulment (engineered by his grandmother and uncle) of his father’s first marriage. Under an agreement made the year before Goethe’s visit, the palace – and the Veronese – were now legally in his possession.²⁰⁸

Goethe commented on the painting’s excellent state of preservation – it struck him as having just been painted, and in fact it had, we may recall, recently been cleaned. The observations he makes on the skilful distribution of light and shade and the ingenious contrast of local colours are not especially original, but on the following day floating on the sunny lagoon and observing the brilliance of the costumes of the gondoliers, luminous even in their shade, contrasted with green water and blue sky – a scene painted ‘chiaro nel chiaro’ – he speculated on the formative influence of such scenery on local artists and the advantage they enjoyed over those of us ‘whose eye when out of doors, falls on dingy soil, which, when not muddy, is dusty’. He refers here in general to Titian and ‘Paul’, but it is evidently the latter (that is, Veronese), and in particular The Family of Darius, of which he is thinking in this, the first of numerous such meditations on ‘Venetian colour’. The passage owes something perhaps to Winckelmann’s reflections on the influence of climate and circumstances on ancient Greek art but also looks forward to Ruskin’s evocation of the boyhood of Turner and (by comparison) Titian.

It has, as it happens, a special interest for the historian of the National Gallery because it seems to have had a considerable influence on Charles Locke Eastlake, the Gallery’s first director, whose familiarity with German thought may be traced back to his cosmopolitan acquaintance in Rome in the second decade of the century, and whose translation of Goethe’s Theory of Colour was published in 1840. Among Eastlake’s most remarkable speculative writings is an account of the influence of the gondola, made in 1830, in which he dwelt on the advantage (‘to be met with nowhere else’) of viewing the world ‘without the trouble of walking about’, and expanded on the effect of seeing the sunburnt limbs and faces of gondoliers, fiery against ‘cool, neutral architecture’, and ‘the greenish water’ – this vivid effect he considered to be ‘undoubtedly the truest idea of a colour, whatever the colour may be, because it is that which the memory most retains’.²⁰⁹

Appendix 3
John Ruskin and the ‘Pisani Veronese’

In his early writings on painting Ruskin gave little attention to Veronese. Even after his enthusiasm for Tintoretto had forced him to abandon his general aversion to Venetian sixteenth‐century art he had little to say about Tintoretto’s great rival. In the ‘Venetian Index’ that he appended to the third volume of The Stones of Venice in 1853 he observes that Veronese’s Europa is ‘one of very few pictures which both possess, and deserve, a high reputation’, and has other brisk words of praise for the artist’s work in the Doge’s Palace.²¹⁰ He observes casually that Veronese’s works in S. Sebastiano ‘seemed destroyed by repainting’, although he admits that he ‘had no time to examine them justly’. Of The Family of Darius he notes simply that he believes it is ‘not likely to remain in Venice’.²¹¹ None of this prepares us for his letter to The Times on 7 July 1857 defending the price paid for The Family of Darius and declaring that it is ‘simply the best Veronese in Italy’ and that, ‘for my own part, I should think no price too large for it’.²¹² Three days later he was lecturing in Manchester and again defending the expenditure: ‘I wonder what the nation meanwhile has given for its ball‐dresses!’ Such finery lasted little longer than ‘last year’s snow’ but the ‘Paul Veronese will last for centuries’.²¹³

Veronese’s painting was hung in the National Gallery on 16 September 1857 and Ruskin must have seen a great deal of it, because he was employed there throughout the autumn and winter months of that year in sorting and cataloguing more than 19,000 ‘pieces of paper, drawn upon by Turner in one way or another’. In his Notes on the Turner Gallery he twice illustrates points about Turner by reference to small details of the Veronese – the black of the ermine tails and the shadows in the violets of the princess’s robe.²¹⁴ Another such observation, surely made at this date, found its way into the fifth volume of Modern Painters, which appeared in 1860. It concerned the pearls on the breast of the elder princess:The lowest is about the size of a small hazel‐nut, and falls on her rose‐red dress. Any other but a Venetian would have put a complete piece of white paint over the dress, for the whole pearl, and painted into that the colours of the stone. But Veronese knows beforehand that all the dark side of the pearl will reflect the red of the dress. He will not put white over the red, only to put red over the white again. He leaves the actual dress for the dark side of the pearl, and with two small separate touches, one white, another brown, places its highlight and shadow. This he does with perfect care and calm; but in two decisive seconds. There is no dash, nor [page 384]display, nor hurry, nor error. The exactly right thing is done in the exactly right place, and not one atom of colour, nor moment of time spent vainly. Look close at the two touches, – you wonder what they mean. Retire six feet from the picture – the pearl is there.²¹⁵

Ruskin had not previously been much inclined to praise the artist who skilfully judged an effect rather than earnestly pursued the truth, and he was more associated with commending the effortful than the deft. The Pre‐Raphaelite painters, whose painstaking realism he had championed, began to relax their handling during the same period.

In May 1858, when he had completed his labours on the Turner drawings, Ruskin set off for the Continent. His intention had been to explore the Swiss mountains and examine the character of Protestant shepherds, but he ‘unexpectedly found some good Paul Veroneses at Turin’.²¹⁶ Oddly, the picture that most impressed him there in July was not the great Feast in the House of Simon but Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, which is at least partly a studio work.²¹⁷ In his autobiography, Praeterita, he described how the splendour of the painting and the sound of military music on a sunny day opened his eyes to the narrow puritanism exemplified by the preaching he had felt obliged to listen to in a gloomy Waldensian chapel²¹⁸ – a narrowness rather well illustrated by his own recent tirade against ball‐dresses. The life‐changing impact of the Veronese in Turin was perhaps exaggerated here, but the painting did make a great impression on him – one, however, for which he had been prepared less than a year before in Trafalgar Square. Indeed, it is striking that he was most captivated by a kneeling maid of honour in a golden and white robe.²¹⁹ This is the portion of the painting which is very similar to The Family of Darius, but in this case Ruskin could feel that he was making a discovery.

Notes