19 Facts About Venetian painting

Venetian painting was a major force in Italian Renaissance painting and beyond.

The Venetian style exerted great influence upon the subsequent development of Western painting.

The glories of the 16th century were followed by a great fall-off in the 17th, but an unexpected revival in the 18th, when Venetian painters enjoyed great success around Europe, as Baroque painting turned to Rococo.

At the top, princely, level, Venetian painting artists tended to be the most sought-after for commissions abroad, from Titian onwards, and in the 18th century most of the best painters spent significant periods abroad, generally with great success.

Probably partly for this reason, until the 18th century Venetian painting churches were never given a coherent scheme of decoration, but feature a "rich profusion of different objects in a picturesque confusion", often with much wall space taken up by grandiose wall-tombs.

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Venetian painting seems to have introduced the "composite altarpiece" of many small scenes within an elaborate gilded wooden frame, which remained dominant in churches for two centuries.

Venetian painting was rather conservative, and ignored the High Renaissance style developing in the later part of his career, indeed retaining a Late Gothic poetry in many works.

Venetian painting was one of the first painters to mostly use canvas rather than panels.

Venetian painting painted religious subjects and portraits in a highly individual and sometimes eccentric style, which despite their rich colouring have a restlessness that is at odds with the Venetian mainstream.

Venetian painting's style combined Venetian colour and Roman classical grandeur, and did something to spread Venetian style to the new centre of Italian painting.

Paolo Veronese, from Verona in the Venetian painting terraferma, came to Venice in 1553, once he was established, commissioned to paint huge fresco schemes for the Doge's Palace, and stayed for the rest of his career.

Venetian painting's sons continued to work in it long after his death; Baroque painting was very slow to appeal to the Venetian market.

Bravo, an example of a Venetian painting often attributed to Titian or Giorgione, but to Palma Vecchio.

Venetian painting returned for a decade in 1698, and then again at the end of his life, after time in England, France and elsewhere.

Venetian painting's career was mostly spent away from the city, working in several countries north of the Alps, where the new Venetian style was greatly in demand for decorating houses.

Rosalba Carriera, the most significant Venetian painting woman artist, was purely a portraitist, mostly in pastel, where she was an important technical innovator, preparing the way for this important 18th-century form.

Venetian painting's achieved great international success, in particular in London, Paris and Vienna.

Venetian painting was one of the first Italian painters to mine this vein, and was an early painter of conversation piece portraits.

Specifically through the presence of Titians in Spain, the Venetian painting style influenced later Spanish art, especially in portraits, including that of Velazquez, and through Rubens was more broadly transmitted through the rest of Europe.