The painter Paolo Veronese was born in Verona in 1528, son of a stone cutter, but after 1553 lived and worked for the greater part of his career in Venice, where he had a very successful workshop. An early commission in Venice was for the ceiling of the Sala del Consiglio dei Dieci in the Palazzo Ducale. In 1561 he decorated the villa designed by Palladio - an architect and a style deplored by Ruskin - for the Villa Barbaro at Maser. Other prestigious commissions were the Marriage at Cana for the refectory of San Giorgio Maggiore also designed by Palladio, and the Last Supper, retitled Feast in the House of Levi, commissioned for the refectory of SS Giovanni e Paolo in Venice. The relationship between Veronese's large theatrical tableaux, the ways in which they differ from those of Tintoretto, and the influence on Rubens are discussed by Rosand, 'Theater and Structure in the Art of Paul Veronese', pp. 107 - 133.
Veronese's reputation in the eighteenth century was low. He lacked the historic sense required by eighteenth century critics, and his costumes were often anachronistic (see Pignatti, and Pedrocco, Veronese, and Zanetti's 1771 Della Pittura Veneziana). For Reynolds he represented the worst faults of the Venetian painters (see Reynolds on Veronese). However the removal of major works by Veronese to Paris in 1797 made them, and their influence, accessible to painters (and to Ruskin) in the Louvre, and in his 1854 diary Delacroix remarked that he owed everything to Veronese.
Berenson, Venetian Painters of the Renaissance, Section XX, notes the contradictions in Veronese's work. It is perhaps the fact of these contradictions, like the contradictions in the experience of Venice itself, which made Veronese such a significant painter for Ruskin.
Ruskin's appreciation of Veronese began, according to his account in Praeterita, in a conversation with George Richmond (1809-1896) ( Works, 35.337) who challenged Ruskin 's notion that Rubens was the greater painter. He associates the work of Veronese with decisive turning points in his approach to art and to religion. At Works, 35.156 he claims that Tintoretto, Veronese, and Carpaccio, had been unseen, unfelt and unnamed in England until he drew people's attention to them.
See Ruskin and the Italian School.