His output in Venice though covered every genre from portraiture and altarpieces to allegories and mythologies, and he worked in palaces, churches, private villas and public buildings, including collaborations with the architects Palladio and Sansovino.

If Titian had an unrivalled emotional depth and breadth of technique and Tintoretto looked to transmit feeling through a dark and brooding atmosphere, Veronese sought his effects through pomp, colour and sheer facility. It was a manner he had established on the Veneto and which developed little afterwards. It didn't need to: he had a large and professional studio, necessary for the large-scale commissions at which he excelled and which remained in great demand by the Church in particular.

His mastery of scale was extraordinary and his ability to marshal his mises-en-scène unrivalled. His Wedding at Cana of 1662-63 in the Louvre, for example, covers 66 sq canvas and contains more than 100 separate figures, each one dressed in a different costume and each engaged in a different activity. Perhaps looking for spiritual insight in such an overwhelming display is to look for the wrong thing. His conception of biblical or mythological set-pieces as opulent visual events is in itself an original imaginative leap.

Veronese's real interest was in filling the painting surface with life. He did this even with a traditionally calm subject such as The Rest on the Flight into Egypt (1570-72) where rather than a static group of Jesus, Joseph and Mary in the desert Veronese includes a retinue of angels preparing their campsite: one climbs a date palm and, while holding on with one hand like a monkey, tosses the fruit down to another who catches it in a cloth, a third angel meanwhile drapes a shirt to air on the branches of a tree. The donkey looks on approvingly (Veronese was a great one for animals). In the painter's mind reverence and delight are not mutually exclusive — the great crime was to be dull.

In 1909 Henry James described visiting Veronese's The Family of Darius before Alexander (1565-67) at the National Gallery. It was, he said, a painting that "sends a glow into the cold London twilight" and he advised his readers "to sit before it for an hour and dream you are floating to the water-gate of the Ducal Palace". It seems good advice for this exhibition as a whole.