Veronese Suite:
Poems for Paolo Caliari il Veronese

Veronese is my favourite painter. He came to Venice young, to become a painter. He was pragmatic, friendly, deeply aware of the gay subtext of his network while remaining outside it, and ferociously loyal to his friends. He was also a theological radical, but not in the way he was often accused of.

Veronese thought the world itself was sacred. He did not think it diminished the Last Supper, to note that most people would have watched a dog-fight instead, and it might have been very beautiful. Veronese, even more than the other Venetian masters, had no doubts about physicality and reality itself, none at all. He adored it. This got him in trouble with the Inquisition, for a while.

I went to Italy in 2022. I went to many museums. My best reward, when I found one, was a Veronese.

The Last Supper

The Lord God, born to walk a human life
and feel the things that have eluded him
like time and pleasure, doubt and pain, distress
and comfort, sits and tells a parable
to John, who cannot get enough them.
Andrew, to whom stories are like bread,
is listening, while Peter carves a bird
and everything is fine, here in the world.

A waiter polishes a banister.
He isn’t looking. A rich cardinal,
right there at God’s own table, becomes bored
and watched a young servant chase a dwarf.
The German merchant, recently arrived,
seeks the finest conversation, but
ignores the living avatar of God,
because he isn’t dressed quite well enough.

His guards, released from listening to him talk,
embrace the moment as a chance to eat
and have glass of wine. They are not quite
invited, and do not go up the stairs.
Why would they want to? Everywhere they go,
they find a lavish party to which they
are not invited. They do not perceive
their Maker. Why? It’s just another feast.

The Kingdom, Jesus says, is just a seed,
the smallest seed. It can grow anywhere.
You’d never notice it, but if you let
it grow, then you will know that it is there.
It will devour your garden. Is that good?
John asks. He is the mystic in their set.
Jesus smiles and then explains it all again.
The Kingdom is the seed, the soil, the rain.

It is the table. It is all the chairs.
It is the chicken Peter tries to carve,
despite the fact that he is bad at that
and always ends up hacking it to bits.
It is the sky. It is the witnesses
who probably will not remember this,
the evening when, half satisfied, half bored,
they shared a table and an hour with God.

A New World

Paolo from Verona, 34
and happy with his work and with his wife,
his children, and his hope of great success,
flags down a gondola and rides across
the Grand Canal. He loves it there. He knows
that Venice is the centre of the world.
He hopes that he was called there, that his art
is what God wants, that he can play his part.

The year before the year that he was born,
a bunch of foreign soldiers savaged Rome.
Nobody’s over it. The world has changed.
There’s a New World. The Germans have rebelled
and founded a new Church. Nobody knows
how any of these changes will work out.
The elders are depressed about it. They
are always pining for their former days.

Paolo isn’t sure about that part.
Did God make people, just to be depressed
at what they do? He reasons, he suspects,
he knows, that God does not live in the past.
He sees the grandees in their fancy silks,
their reds and purples, and does not agree
that everything is meaningless and sad.
He can’t, he won’t, agree to hate the world.

Monks have boring dinners, They get bored
at listening to old men read old words
that they already know. They sit in rooms
the size of major churches, eating meals
that very few of God’s sons can afford,
and feel such boredom. That is why pay
for giant paintings full of incidents.
They seek escape. They seek irreverence.

But is the world irreverent? Is God
not reachable except in ancient words?
It seems unlikely. If the world is sad,
then why is light so beautiful, why do
the flowers choose to bloom, the birds to sing?
Variety, he thinks, is Godly too.
The boat is godly, and the gondolier
(Francesco? Marco?) is a sunlit king.

An African is waiting at the dock.
He works for someone. Paolo feels the thrill
of the unknown, of lands he cannot see,
of strangeness, which is God’s most potent gift,
the one least understood. Where is this place,
the one that has such graceful, different men?
Paolo hopes he sees the man again.
He wants to know him, wants to draw his face.

Annunciation

Paolo from Verona has been called
to paint the moment Gabriel revealed
that Mary was to have a wondrous child.
He seeks examples, so he walks across
the campo by the Frari, to seek out
Old Tintoretto’s version, which is said
to be the best in Venice by the men
whose good opinion he is trying to earn.

The Scuole of San Rocco is, he thinks,
a bit too grand for what it claims to be.
The men who built it might do humble things,
but he can find no trace of poverty.
The men who work there claim to be above
most earthly things, and yet they clearly love
white marble. They embrace all suffering,
or say they do, while buying pretty things.

The painting, which is in the lower hall,
shows Mary living in a broken shack.
The foreground is a clutter of cheap things,
all broken. Angels come to flood the space
with revelation, wonder, force, and grace,
but why is Mary living in a shack?
Her husband had a job. He brought home cash.
Was all the past as ruinous as that?

Old Tintoretto, not an easy man
to understand or follow, sometimes went
too far into despair, he thinks. The tale
that starts with the Annunciation ends
in death, but it is death itself that dies,
not Jesus, not salvation, not the Word.
Old Tintoretto, Paolo thinks, was wrong.
We are not living in a broken world.

Back out among the sunlit things of Earth,
Paolo reflects on sorrow, and on how
it finds the ones who seek it. Why is pain
a virtue? Is the world as bad as that?
He doesn’t think so. Can it really be
that grace is far from joy? He can’t agree.
His Mary, he resolves, will have nice things,
and when she hears the news, she will be pleased.

Looking for Saint Matthew

Paolo from Verona, 25
and eager to begin his first real job
as a Venetian painter, walks along
the Zattare, and looks for rugged men
with interesting faces. He intends
to show experience, not innocence.
To do this he needs living souls to paint.
He needs real people who don’t look like saints.

He thinks about Saint Matthew, always shown
with his attendant angel. Why, of all
the four Evangelists, did Matthew get
an angel for a minder? Was he blessed
with special grace, or was he difficult?
He always had an angel in his reach.
But was he given this as a reward,
or was he just the hardest one to teach?

The Zattare is where the logs come in.
It’s always crowded with the rudest men
in all of Venice, men with big thick necks
and heavy shoulders. These are fervent men
who pray to God in hope He may prevent
their real big problem, which is accidents.
Their greatest wish is to remain alive.
Their heaven is a day when they don’t die.

My Matthew, Paolo thinks, is one of those.
He’ll have a thick brow and a heavy nose
and massive, solid hands. He will recline
uncomfortably on a block of stone,
and will not understand what he is told
the first time that he hears it. He will balk
at most of it. His angel will press on
but think, Oh God, I’m talking to a rock.

Paolo knows he has to get it right.
This is his first real job, his chance to set
his mark upon the city and on time.
The dockworkers are stopping for a break.
He sees one with a stern, unthinking face.
He's perfect in a far from perfect way,
an ox in human form. A paragon.
Hey you, he says, you want to be a saint?

The Rest of the World

Paolo from Verona stands outside
the door of Marco Polo’s house, and thinks
about Cathay, the Empire of the East.
He wonders what they look like. Every day
he searches Venice for an unknown face,
a new clue to Creation, which is big,
much bigger than they thought it was before
they learned the Ocean had another shore.

He knows that many people are upset
now that Creation has a larger map.
He knows they are discomforted, that God
did not provide salvation for those lands.
Or did He? Can the whole New World be damned,
or are they missing something, something vast
and beautiful? It can’t be a mistake.
God doesn’t make mistakes as big as that.

He thinks about they faces he has seen,
the Germans with their shocking yellow hair
(so fashionable lately) and the red-
haired Scotsman he once met down at the docks.
And then there are the Africans, so dark
as to be hard to paint, but handsome too.
He wonders why there are so many kinds
of people, and what God means them to do.

He wonders what a person from Cathay
would think of Venice. Would he be impressed?
Or would he scorn it? Marco Polo said
that Cathay was as big and prosperous
as all of Europe. People say he lied,
but Paolo thinks it’s true. God gave us more,
he thinks. We don’t know what He meant it for,
but it is beautiful, and it exists.

Paolo from Verona wonders what
the people from the New World look like. None
has yet been seen in Venice. He has heard
that they are strong and elegant, with fierce
proud faces, but he hasn’t seen a sketch.
He wants to make a sketch, to be the first
to capture that appearance, but it’s far,
and also he has children, and a job.