Ruskin dates his first appreciation of Veronese 's use of colour to a conversation with George Richmond (1809-1896) in 1842 ( Works, 35.337).
In his Notes on the Louvre 17 August 1844 ( Works, 12.451, and see his diary entry for the same day) Ruskin describes the change made in him by his visit to the Louvre. There Veronese's Feast in the House of Simon and Marriage at Cana are described as 'manly, fearless, fresco-like attainments of vast effect'; Ruskin felt that this visit to the Louvre would influence him 'chiefly in my full understanding of Titian, John Bellini and Perugino, and my being able to abandon everything for them, or rather being unable to look at anything else'.
Veronese is associated with another change in his ways of looking at painting in Ruskin's diary entry of 8 September 1849. He refers again to the Marriage at Cana in the Louvre: 'I felt that painting had never yet been understood as it is, an Interpretation of Humanity'.
In The Stones of Venice, Ruskin cites Veronese as evidence that 'the fifteenth century had taken away the religious heart of Venice'; 'vital religion' had been replaced with the 'forms of religion', and 'rhetoric' replaced truth ( Works, 9.32). However in 1858, it is the truth of Veronese, and Tintoretto, which is stressed by Ruskin. They were 'the only painters who ever sought entirely to master, and who did entirely master, the truths of light and shade as associated with colour, in the noblest of all physical created things, the human form' ( Works, 16.198). At Works, 5.57 the work of Veronese and Angelico is contrasted with 'barber-like admiration of handsome faces' in less truthful painters.
At Works, 7.293 and Works, 16.186 Ruskin gives a detailed description of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (in the Galleria Sabauda in Turin, and perhaps a workshop painting; there is a plate on the page facing Works, 16.186). Ruskin came to associate this picture with his unconversion away from the evangelical beliefs in which he was brought up. Thus at Works, 29.89 Ruskin contrasts the God-given power of Veronese with the feeble evangelical Waldensian service he attended in Turin.