Veronese, Isler

 As I sat in front of this painting in the National Gallery – The Family of Darius Before Alexander – it began to seem to me that Veronese was surely the most visually ravishing painter who ever took up a brush. Of course you have to see it in the original rather than dingy reproduction, but his use of colour, his textures, his handling of sumptuous surfaces is, even by Venetian standards, astonishing. Along with his mastery of large figure compositions, this surely puts him somewhere near the top in the all-time rankings (my all-time rankings, that is), but there's no denying that he lacks a certain depth, an extra dimension, that (it seems to me) lifts at least Titian, Rembrandt and Velazquez, Tintoretto and Vermeer above him. You could call it a spiritual dimension, a numinous sense that is particularly present in the treatment of light (and of course dark). Veronese's light is typically even, infusing his pictures, however dramatic in subject matter and figurative movement, with an essential calmness that can be, in his less successful paintings, almost bland. But Lord, I enjoyed sitting long in front of The Family of Darius (this link explains what is going on in the picture) – and Lord, I enjoyed being back in the National Gallery, crowded though it was with summer tourists. It's one of the few things I really miss about London. 
   In the course of the day, and my travels to and fro, I also enjoyed finishing a superb comic novel, which I had read before but more than 20 years ago (as a taxi receipt used as a bookmark informs me) – Clerical Errors by the English-American novelist Alan Isler, who found fame with his first published novel, The Prince of West End Avenue, at the age of 60. Clerical Errors tells the first-person story of Edmond Music, an ageing Catholic priest who is director of a research institute based in an English country mansion, Beale Hall. Like many a priest in a comic novel, he has lost his faith and is no stranger to the pleasures of the flesh, but there is a lot more to him that that – most notably the fact that he was born a Jew, and devotes much of his time to kabbalistic studies. The plot that develops revolves around what might be a lost masterpiece of Shakespeare, the only known copy of which has somehow gone missing from the Beale Hall library, and the machinations of an old enemy from Edmond's seminary days. As well as being a witty, erudite, well paced comedy that keeps the laughs coming, Clerical Errors is also at times genuinely moving, and has real depth, even tenderness. It is, in short, a terrific read (or even reread). And it has a great opening sentence: 'Sipping a Calvados in a bar in the Rue de Malengin and reading an English newspaper left on the seat by its previous occupant, I discovered to my surprise that I had just died.' Hard not to read on after that...