PUBLIC FAVORITES (II)

Sarasota, Fla. is the winter training ground of "The Greatest Show on Earth." It can also boast an elegant sideshow: one of the nation's greatest collections of Baroque art, housed in Sarasota's salmon-pink John and Mable Ringling Museum. The public favorite at the museum is Paolo Veronese's Rest on the Flight into Egypt.

The late circus king, John Ringling, cleared a snake-&-alligator-infested swamp to build the museum, which resembles an Italian palazzo. The wealthy collectors of his day were attracted mainly by early Renaissance and Impressionist paintings. Ringling instinctively preferred the flamboyance of 16th and 17th century Baroque art. By following his own nose and ignoring the sniffs of rival connoisseurs, he was able to stuff his museum with king-size treasures at bargain prices. He bequeathed it to the state of Florida when he died in 1936, and the collection remains a monument to his sometimes shaky but always lordly taste.

Veronese's Flight into Egypt is a fitting capstone to the monument. Nearly 8 ft. high, the painting reflects the opulent grandeur of 16th century Venice rather than the hardship of the Holy Family's flight. The Inquisition once accused Veronese of making his religious pictures too worldly and "modern." "We painters," he replied, "take, the same liberties as poets and madmen."

Veronese got his name from his birthplace, Verona, but Venice was home to him. His art is a somewhat overblown flowering of the great tradition of Venetian painting --a tradition which Giovanni Bellini, the teacher of Titian and Giorgione, founded. For the chill, narrow intensity of earlier Venetian art, these men substituted warmth, breadth and grace. Critic Antoine Orliac once summed up Veronese in a scholarly line: "He is the expression of hieratic constraint relaxing into luminous activity."

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