The Frick Collection presented Veronese in Murano: Two Venetian Renaissance Masterpieces Restored, a focused exhibition on two recently conserved and rarely seen paintings by the celebrated artist Paolo Veronese (1528–1588), St. Jerome in the Wilderness and St. Agatha Visited in Prison by St. Peter. While the paintings are known to scholars, their remote location in a church in Murano, an island in the lagoon of Venice, has made them difficult to study. St. Jerome in the Wilderness has been exhibited outside the church only once — in 1939, in the Paolo Veronese exhibition at Ca’ Giustinian, in Venice — while St. Agatha Visited in Prison by St. Peter has not left since being installed there in the early nineteenth century. The exhibition provided a unique opportunity for an international audience to discover these two masterpieces in New York. Following its presentation at the Frick, the exhibition traveled to the New Orleans Museum of Art.
The paintings were fully restored by Venetian Heritage, thanks to the sponsorship of Bulgari, and their conservation was accompanied by thorough research into their history. The canvases were shown in the Frick’s Oval Room, which was transformed into a chapel-like space in order to recreate the feeling of Francesco Degli Arbori’s chapel in Murano. The paintings date from the same time as the Frick’s two allegorical paintings by Veronese, The Choice between Virtue and Vice and Wisdom and Strength. Hung in the Oval Room, the religious works created a fascinating dialogue with the allegories displayed in the adjacent West Gallery.
Veronese in Murano: Two Venetian Renaissance Masterpieces Restored was organized by the Frick’s Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator Xavier F. Salomon, an eminent Veronese scholar (who wrote the accompanying catalogue), and Venetian Heritage.
