Veronese, the playwright of the world's great theater

It makes sense to enter the Prado exhibition with the same sensorial ingenuity that predisposes us to the hall of mirrors at a fair. We know we're not going to find the world, but rather its enhanced reflection . An ideal version. Or rather: a lie so beautiful it ends up seeming true.

And that's where the trap—and the greatness—of the Venetian master begins. Paolo Caliari, known as Veronese (1528–1588), was not the most profound of the Renaissance painters, nor the most tormented, nor the most moralistic. Veronese was something else: a stage designer of splendor, a choreographer of bodies, an art director before cinema even existed.

The Prado exhibition —the first monographic exhibition on the painter in Spain and one of the most ambitious in Europe in decades —doesn't aim to dismantle the myth, but rather to recreate it. And therein lies the intelligence of the event: it's not about denouncing the trompe l'oeil, but rather inhabiting it. The visitor is not a spectator, but a figurehead in the grand masquerade of painting.

There are, of course, the grand biblical compositions disguised as Venetian soirees. The wedding at Cana , resembling a cocktail party at the Dandolo palace ; Christ's suppers, transformed into Baroque operas where the Messiah appears with the petulance of just another guest . Because Veronese doesn't paint transcendence, he embroiders it. He dissolves it into brocades, Corinthian columns, and yawning dogs in the foreground of the canvas.

The Prado has brought together impossible borrowings— Paris, Vienna, London —to articulate a narrative that is neither chronological nor thematic, but theatrical. And theatricality is not superficiality, as the apostles of gray academicism believe. It is truth by other means. A truth that is better expressed in the gesture of a courtesan than in the martyrdom of a saint. Or in the distracted gaze of a servant than in the anointing of the chosen.

Veronese doesn't lie. He embellishes. He doesn't deceive. He seduces. And that is his heresy and his redemption . The Inquisition summoned him to chapter in 1573 for disguising The Last Supper with German soldiers, jesters, and exotic animals. He replied that if it bothered the Church , he could change the title. That instead of The Last Supper it would be called A Dinner at Levi's House. The doctrine trembled, but the painting remained. And with it, a way of understanding art was homologated: not as fidelity to dogma , but as an exaltation of artifice.

Veronese doesn't lie. He embellishes. He doesn't deceive. He seduces. And that is his heresy and his redemption.

When you leave, you don't know if you've visited an exhibition or attended a masked ball . But you leave the Prado different and intoxicated . Not wiser, but more willing to believe in beauty as a form of resistance.

It is no coincidence that the exhibition is organized as a stage production . Nor that the curators— Miguel Falomir , director of the Prado, and Enrico Maria dal Pozzolo (University of Verona)—have chosen to treat the painter as if he were a playwright. Veronese was a stage designer of the Baroque soul before the Baroque itself was born. His painting does not imitate life . It stylizes it. It elevates it. It transforms it into a simulacrum so perfect that it transcends it.

Just watch The Family of Darius Before Alexander , whose historical account is represented with as much marble as emotion. The drama is brought to the viewer at the very threshold of the theater. Veronese's painting doesn't impose an interpretation. It suggests it. And in that margin— in that freedom of looking —lies his most contemporary legacy. That of an art that doesn't tell us what to think, but rather invites us to look, like someone leaning out of a Florentine balcony to spy on a party to which they haven't been invited.

The exhibition—the milestone—will remain open until September 29. A whole summer to be fooled by the complicity of the Prado, which is not organizing a traditional retrospective here, but rather a sort of Baroque courtship to the greater glory of Veronese , who was neither Baroque nor a courter, but understood the art of seduction better than anyone.

On display —from the verb to exhibit— are more than a hundred works, from such illustrious collections as the Uffizi Gallery, the Louvre , the National Gallery in London, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the British Royal Collection and, of course, the Prado itself, whose halls have for centuries housed some of the Veronese painter's most sensual paintings —such as Venus and Adonis or the Emperor Constantine from the True Cross cycle—, although out of modesty or snobbery no tribute had ever been paid to him on the level of his theatricality.

There is no guilt in his painting. No modesty. No tragedy . There is theatricality, there is luxury, there is courtesy, there is eroticism disguised as decorum. If Titian painted with blood of bodies, Veronese did it with his perfume . And that is what we smell in the rooms of the Prado: an aroma of pagan incense, of wet silk, of ripe fruits in the promiscuity of summer.