Renaissance_ A Short History, The - Johnson, Paul [69]
No such improper ridicule is possible with Giorgione (Giorgio da Castelfranco, c. 1475–1510), though his most famous painting, the oil on canvas known as The Tempest (Accademia, Venice), showing an almost naked beauty suckling a babe and watched by a soldier, is peculiar, even bizarre. It was Byron’s favorite painting, and it has invited endless speculation as to what it means or is—to no effect, since the problem is now insoluble. In fact, Giorgione is one of the least documented of all the great masters, and this work is one of only four that we can be sure are his. The others are a grimly pensive portrait of a girl, Laura (Vienna), a wonderfully supercilious Portrait of a Young Man (San Diego) and another work in Vienna, Boy with an Arrow. Half a dozen other pictures are usually credited to him. They include what is perhaps the finest of all female nudes, the Sleeping Venus (Dresden); The Three Philosophers (Vienna), another mysterious work; and the delightful Fête Champêtre (Louvre), a joyful congress of two luscious nudes with two clothed musicians in a bosky setting, which however is also attributed to Titian, or both. Giorgione died suddenly of the plague, aged thirty-three, and his work in progress was finished by Titian or by Sebastiano del Piombo, who probably worked in his shop.
The fact that we know so little about Giorgione, and that of the sixty-six works once attributed to him only a handful survive modern critical scrutiny, makes it difficult to evaluate his contribution to the history of art. But he was clearly important, for various early authorities call him the founder of the “modern” (that is, post-Bellini) Venetian school. His unusual range of subject matter, his originality, his fine sense of color, the striking way in which he composed a picture, his rendering of human, especially female, flesh, so totally different from the muscularity of his contemporary Michelangelo, all these qualities—and others—mark him out as a pioneer. He seems to have worked under Giovanni Bellini, as did his partner, Vincenzo Catena (c. 1475–1531), and Bellini gave him the passion for landscape that infuses The Tempest and almost dominates The Three Philosophers, so that the trees and rocks, painted from nature with wondrous skill, are an integral part of the composition. Even when Giorgione takes on a straightforward subject, he creates enigmas. His altarpiece in Castelfranco, done in tempera on panel, is of the Virgin Enthroned with St. George and St. Francis. Why is she thrust onto an enormous stone-and-wood edifice, twenty feet high, so that she is pushed to the top rear of the picture, leaving the two saints to dominate the foreground, which is set on an al fresco marble floor? The lady and her attendant landscape, rendered beautifully, are almost a separate picture. And there is a sinister male figure in the background, casting a huge shadow. But there is no end to the puzzles that this painter sets. He fills us with delightful speculation.
Without Giorgione, certainly, there could have been no Titian (Tiziano Vecellio, c. 1485–1576) as we have him. He built industriously on his Venetian heritage, worked hard all his long life, performed well in all its various departments— history, sacred art, portraits, mythology and allegory—and came to dominate not just Italian but European