Veronese - Magnificence in renaissance Venice - National gallery, London

This is an exhibition about an artist I think is one of the greatest artists who ever lived. It's an exhibition about the splendour of life, the splendour of Venice in the Renaissance. If you love Venice, if you love opulent outfits and theatrical views, if you love opera, this is your exhibition. It has taken up to five years to organise this exhibition and it's been a great collaboration with other institutions and private collectors in the United Kingdom, in Europe, in America. We have loans coming from as far as Florida and California, from Austria, from France, from Spain. And, really, this was to pick Veronese at his best. We decided to focus on his greatest masterpieces, and we were lucky to have collaborators and other institutions that responded to this very generously. And this is really an unprecedented situation to have such great pictures all together. Veronese's work is all about magnificence. It's about the spectacular feasts and scenes and events happening in front of your eyes, where everyone is beautifully dressed, everyone is handsome, and you really look at the world through the lens of this artist, who multiplies and makes everything look so extraordinary and wonderful. Colour is fundamental to Veronese's art. Whenever you look at one of his paintings, it's all about these bright, rich colours; reds, blues, greens, gold; the complexion of the figures, the gold shimmering on the jewels, the white pearls. It's about emotions. He's an artist who can be incredibly sad and, at the same time, incredibly festive and happy. But they're also about the trappings of society in 16th Century Venice. So whenever you look at his paintings, you find these extraordinary details of monkeys and jesters and people and servants, and it's all about the scenario, the theatre that happens around the aristocratic life of Italy in that period. Venice in the Renaissance, with its canals, with its architecture, with its courtesans, was one of the most famous cities in the world. It was a centre of culture, of pleasure, of fun and Veronese really represents this at the best. And you can really see everything about life in Venice in these pictures. Veronese has always been an artist's artist. In the 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th Century, artists have loved him, copied him, studied him. We would not have Carracci, we would not have Rubens, we would not have Watteau, we would not have Van *** without Veronese. And, really, he is one of the cornerstones of Western art history as we know it.