Included with Titian, a generation older, and Tintoretto, a decade senior, Veronese is one of the "great trio that dominated Venetian painting of the cinquecento" and the Late Renaissance in the 16th century.

[2] His most famous works are elaborate narrative cycles, executed in a dramatic and colorful style, full of majestic architectural settings and glittering pageantry.

In the same year he worked on the decoration of the Villa Soranzo near Treviso, with his fellow Veronese Giovanni Battista Zelotti and Anselmo Canneri; only fragments of the frescos remain, but they seem to have been important in establishing his reputation.

[14] In the late 1550s, during a break in his work for San Sebastiano, Veronese decorated the Villa Barbaro in Maser, a newly finished building by the architect Andrea Palladio.

The frescoes were designed to unite humanistic culture with Christian spirituality; wall paintings included portraits of the Barbaro family,[15] and the ceilings opened to blue skies and mythological figures.

The scene, taken from the New Testament Book of John, II, 1–11, represents the first miracle performed by Jesus, the making of wine from water, at a marriage in Cana, Galilee.

The foreground celebration, a frieze of figures painted in the most shimmering finery, is flanked by two sets of stairs leading back to a terrace, Roman colonnades, and a brilliant sky.

[16] In the refectory paintings, as in The Family of Darius before Alexander (1565–1570),[19] Veronese arranged the architecture to run mostly parallel to the picture plane, accentuating the processional character of the composition.

The artist's decorative genius was to recognize that dramatic perspectival effects would have been tiresome in a living room or chapel, and that the narrative of the picture could best be absorbed as a colorful diversion.

In 1573 Veronese completed the commission for The Feast in the House of Levi, a last-supper painting for the rear wall of the refectory at the Basilica di Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Castello, Venice.

[22] Artistically, The Feast in the House of Levi indicates Veronese's technical development in using intense and luminous colors for texture, attention to narrative coherence, the acute representation of human emotion, and the psychologically subtle interplay occurring among the characters who crowd the scene.

A decade earlier, the Benedictine monks who commissioned The Wedding at Cana (1563) had directed Veronese to freely include as many human figures as would fit in the banquet scene.

Although the Inquisition's tribunal ordered Veronese to repaint the last-supper scene, he opposed their remedy to his theological offences, yet was compelled to re-title the painting from the sacramental The Last Supper to The Feast in the House of Levi.

[27] In 2014, the art historian Charles Hope wrote of Veronese's strengths and weaknesses: "He is notable above all as a colorist who used a range of bright hues with a boldness unmatched in his time and scarcely equaled since", but because his use of color "was often calculated to create a harmonious overall effect rather than to single out the main protagonists", his paintings convey little narrative drama.

Delacroix wrote that Veronese made light without violent contrasts, "which we are always told is impossible, and maintained the strength of hue in shadow".This innovation could not be better described.

He headed a family workshop, including his younger brother Benedetto (1538–1598) as well as his sons Carlo and Gabriele, and his nephew Luigi Benfatto (also called dal Friso; 1559–1611), that remained active for a decade or so after his death in Venice in 1588, signing their work "Haeredes Pauli" ("Heirs of Paolo"), and continuing to use his drawings.