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Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Veronese (Paolo Caliari)

Portrait of a Woman with a Dog

ca. 1560 - 1570
Oil on canvas.
105 x 79 cm
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Inv. no.
423
(
1930.121
)
ROOM 6
Level 2
Permanent Collection
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 14 13 15 16 17 18 22 19 20 21 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 Recommended start of the visitClassical rooms
1 14th Century. Early Italian Painting 2 15th Century. German and Spanish Painting 3 15th Century. Early Netherlandish Painting 4 15th Century. Italian Painting 5 15th and 16th Centuries. Renaissance Portraiture 6 16th Century. Villahermosa Gallery 7 16th Century. Italian Painting 8 15th and 16th Centuries. German Painting 9 15th and 16th Centuries. German Painting 10 16th Century. Netherlandish Painting 11 Tiziano, Tintoretto, Bassano and  El Greco 12 17th Century. Caravaggio and Baroque Painting 13 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 14 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 15 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 16 18th Century. Italian Painting 17 18th Century. Italian Painting 18 18th Century. Italian Painting 19 Classical rooms 20 Classical rooms 21 Classical rooms 22 18th Century. Italian Painting 23 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 24 18th Century. French and English Painting 25 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Scenes of Daily Life and Interiors 26 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 27 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Portrait 28 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 29 19th Century. European Painting. Goya and Romanticism  

Along with Titian and Tintoretto, Paolo Caliari — known as Veronese — was one of the great names of Venetian Renaissance art. Veronese trained in his native city of Verona, from where he derived the name by which he was known. The influence of his masters Antonio Badile and Giovanni Caroto is evident in his early output. Among his first works, dating from the 1540s, are religious compositions such as The Lamentation over the dead Christ (Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona), The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine (Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven), and the Pala Giustiniani, one of his first commissions in Venice, for the church of San Francesco della Vigna. Veronese achieved renown, however, through his large-scale compositions based on biblical narratives and historical and allegorical episodes. In 1553 the artist moved to Venice to work on the decoration of the Hall of the Council of Ten in the Doge’s Palace, alongside Giovanni Battista Ponchino and Giambattista Zelotti. This project was followed by other important commissions in Venice as well as in Maser and Verona.

Although narrative compositions comprise the most important part of his oeuvre, Veronese also painted portraits, although in fewer numbers. He used the full-length, bust-length and three-quarter formats, depicting his sitters alone or with children, as in the early portrait in the Musée du Louvre in which a woman holds a young boy by the hand, and the two images of Iseppo and Livia da Porto with their children (Palazzo Pitti, Florence, and Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore). All these elegant images use deliberately elongated proportions for the figures and simple backgrounds.

The attribution of the present canvas to Veronese has been debated. While some authors have considered it to be autograph, dating it to a late phase in his career, other have considered it to involve workshop intervention, specifically that of Benedetto, the artist’s brother who worked with him in his studio, and that of Carletto, Veronese’s son.

The canvas depicts a young woman who stands out against a dark background that includes a curtain painted with bright highlights. The figure, on which the light focuses, looks fixedly to her right, richly dressed in tones of blue, white and gold. The details of the materials are painted with great care and attention, particularly the striped pattern on the dress and the combinations of different colours. Anecdotal detail is added by the presence of the lapdog, seated on a small ledge on the left. The Musée du Louvre has a drawing in which Veronese depicts a woman in the same dress and with the same position of the hands, but the head is turned at a different angle. The drawing may have provided the basis for this composition.

It has been suggested that Portrait of a Woman with a Dog was in the collection of Cristoforo and Francesco Muselli in Verona, mentioned by Ridolfi, while it is certainly recorded in an inventory of that collection of 1662. The canvas was in the Thyssen- Bornemisza collection by 1928.

Mar Borobia

16th Century16th Century - Italian paintingPaintingOilcanvas
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Tours to find it

The Prints. Las estampas, 1905
Tours
Woman and Books: A Reflection through Western Painting

Images of women reading or holding a book are very common in European painting from the Renaissance onwards. Books have symbolic connotations of status, knowledge and refinement.

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Poster Richard Estes. Nedick's, 1970

Poster Richard Estes. Nedick's, 1970

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Catalogue Hyperreal. The art of trompe l'oeil (Spanish)

Catalogue Hyperreal. The art of trompe l'oeil (Spanish)

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Poster Vincent van Gogh: Les Vessenots in Auvers

Poster Vincent van Gogh: Les Vessenots in Auvers

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Portrait of a Woman with a Dog. Retrato de una mujer con un perro, c. 1560-1570
Portrait of a Woman with a Dog
Veronese (Paolo Caliari)

©

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

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The exploitation rights of the images correspond to the Fundación Coleccion Thyssen-Bornemisza, F.S.P. The Fundación authorizes the downloading of high-resolution images from its website for private use, use for educational and research purposes, and other non-commercial uses.

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Portrait of a Woman with a Dog. Retrato de una mujer con un perro, c. 1560-1570
Portrait of a Woman with a Dog
Veronese (Paolo Caliari)

©

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Terms of Use

The Photographic Archive of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza offers sale and rental service of photographic material of all the works on its Permanent Collection.

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