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Veronese
Italian painter. Son of a stonecutter from Verona (the source of his nickname), he was apprenticed at 13 to a painter. After 1553, when he received the first of many commissions in Venice, he became a major painter of the 16th-cent. Venetian school, known for his splendid use of color and pageantlike compositions. His first works in Venice, ceiling paintings for the Doges' Palace, employ skillful foreshortenings that make figures appear to be floating in space. He decorated the villas and palaces of the Venetian nobility and received many commissions for frescoes, altarpieces, and devotional paintings, incl. numerous "suppers" (e.g., The Pilgrims of Emmaus and Feast in the House of the Pharisees) that allowed him to compose large groups of figures in architectural settings. In decorating a villa built by Palladio at Maser (c.1561), he brilliantly interpreted its architectural structure, breaking through the walls with illusionistic landscapes and opening the ceilings to blue skies with figures from classical mythology. Whimsical details in his Last Supper (commissioned 1573) caused him to be summoned before the Inquisition. Painters from the 16th cent. on were inspired by his use of color to express exuberance as well as to model form.


-->Xerxes I

Persian king (486-465 BC) of the Achaemenid dynasty. The son of Darius I, he had been governor of Babylon before his succession. He ferociously suppressed rebellions in Egypt (484) and Babylonia (482). To avenge Darius' defeat by the Greeks at the Battle of Marathon, he spent three years raising a massive army and navy. When a storm destroyed the bridges he had built to cross the Hellespont, he had them rebuilt and for seven days oversaw the crossing of his army, numbering 360,000 troops by modern estimates, supported by over 700 ships. The Persians broke through at the Battle of Thermopylae and pillaged Athens, but then lost its navy at Battle of Salamis (480). Xerxes returned to Asia, leaving the army behind; it withdrew after its defeat at the Battle of Plataea (479). In Persia he began an extensive building campaign at Persepolis. Drawn unwittingly into palace intrigues, he killed his brother's family at the queen's demand. He was murdered by members of his court. His setback in Greece was regarded as the beginning of the decline of the Achaemenid dynasty.

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