Giorgione’s Ambiguity (Renaissance Lives) [New ed.] 9781789142976, 1789142970

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g i o r g i o n e ’s a m b i g u i t y

 Books in the renaissance

lives series explore and illustrate the life histories and achievements of significant artists, intellectuals and scientists in the early modern world. They delve into literature, philosophy, the history of art, science and natural history and cover narratives of exploration, statecraft and technology. Series Editor: François Quiviger Already published Artemisia Gentileschi and Feminism in Early Modern Europe Mary D. Garrard Blaise Pascal: Miracles and Reason ‚Mary Ann Caws Caravaggio and the Creation of Modernity ‚Troy Thomas Giorgione’s Ambiguity ‚Tom Nichols Donatello and the Dawn of Renaissance Art ‚A. Victor Coonin Hans Holbein: The Artist in a Changing World ‚Jeanne Nuechterlein Hieronymus Bosch: Visions and Nightmares ‚Nils Büttner Isaac Newton and Natural Philosophy ‚Niccolò Guicciardini John Evelyn: A Life of Domesticity ‚John Dixon Hunt Leonardo da Vinci: Self, Art and Nature ‚François Quiviger Michelangelo and the Viewer in His Time ‚Bernadine Barnes Paracelsus: An Alchemical Life ‚Bruce T. Moran Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer ‚Christopher S. Celenza Piero della Francesca and the Invention of the Artist Machtelt Brüggen Israëls Pieter Bruegel and the Idea of Human Nature ‚Elizabeth Alice Honig Raphael and the Antique ‚Claudia La Malfa Rembrandt’s Holland ‚Larry Silver Titian’s Touch: Art, Magic and Philosophy ‚Maria H. Loh Tycho Brahe and the Measure of the Heavens ‚John Robert Christianson

G IOR G ION E ’S A M B IG U I T Y to m n i c h o l s

R E A K T ION B O OK S

For my father Geoffrey Robert Nichols (1932–2019)

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd Unit 32, Waterside 44–48 Wharf Road London n1 7ux, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2020 Copyright © Tom Nichols 2020 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers Printed and bound in China by 1010 Printing International Ltd A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn 978 1 78914 297 6

cover: Giorgione, Young Man with an Arrow, c. 1506–7, oil on poplar.

contents

Introduction 7 1 Who Was Giorgione? 18 2 Artistic Context and Early Religious Paintings 45 3 Portraits and Portrait-types 76 4 Landscape and Figure 123 5 Nudes 166 Conclusion 197 References 215 bibliography 235 Acknowledgements 243 photo acknowledgements 245 Index 247

Introduction

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any questions surround Giorgione, the painter who died of the plague in Venice in 1510 in his mid-thirties, probably having completed no more than thirty or so works. Little is known about his artistic training, about how his short career developed, or about what, exactly, he painted. The original extent of his artistic output has increasingly been put in doubt over the past century or so, with a number of once canonical ‘Giorgiones’ being reattributed to other artists. This has inevitably raised questions about the painter’s wider importance, suggesting that he may be one of art history’s great chimeras, always more of a myth than a reality. To this extent Giorgione might appear to be an old master in decline. Yet among those paintings that can still be confidently attributed to him today are some of the most original and fascinating of the entire Renaissance period. And the present ambiguity surrounding this elusive master might point up something more essential about his artistic identity and his wider approach to painting. The meaning of certain of the paintings for which Giorgione is now best known, such as the Three Philosophers (illus. 38) and the Tempest (illus. 41), remains obscure. Such works certainly give the impression that they have a subject matter, 1 Lucas Vorsterman, print after a copy by David Teniers the Younger, Giorgione’s lost Self-portrait as Orpheus, 1673, engraving.

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like most other Renaissance paintings. But Giorgione then withholds the kind of fuller visual information needed to establish what this might be. Does the Three Philosophers feature the three biblical Magi waiting for a sign? Or is it a secular work showing learned philosophers from different periods of human history? Is the Tempest a scene from classical mythology, a sacred painting, a moral or political allegory, or a genre scene of everyday life? These images seem to invite us to make an interpretation but do not provide sufficient visual clues to confirm a precise or authoritative meaning. Such ambiguous paintings are like visual traps set to capture the viewer’s curiosity and speculation while at the same time excluding the possibility of a comforting release into a final conclusion.1 Perhaps, the paintings seem to suggest, the world itself is a bit like that: an obscure outward reality that can never be fully known or understood from our inevitably partial or subjective standpoints. It is the process of ‘coming to know’, rather than ‘knowing’ itself, that they point to. Many have fallen into Giorgione’s clutches in their audacious attempts to explain his paintings, taking the bait of the apparent clues that are given before being reeled in by their own ingenious theories. No one of these has succeeded in becoming authoritative, however, each proving vulnerable to the next attempt at a concluding explanation. For all the suggestiveness of these efforts, Giorgione’s paintings themselves remain somehow impervious, their power to stimulate fresh attempts to interpret them undiminished. Given this situation, this book will concentrate on Giorgione’s ambiguous picture-making itself rather than hatching further supposedly conclusive theories about the

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Introduction

‘true’ subject matter or iconography of his works. Rather than assuming that Giorgione’s paintings were once clearly understood, and originally had a singular meaning that has since been lost, it will be argued that such works were intended to encourage overlapping interpretations. Many artworks are, of course, open to differing interpretations and to this extent are ‘ambiguous’. Perhaps ambiguity is even an innate quality or property of the visual image, particularly when seen against the apparent clarity of bounded or structured language, or of the written word.2 Yet in Giorgione’s case, it appears that this aspect is more pressingly to the fore, highlighted and made explicit, or even performed to the viewer in an especially insistent way. Ambiguity, it can be said, became Giorgione’s hallmark, and is common to all his works, not just to famous examples such as the Three Philosophers and the Tempest. And Giorgione’s ambiguity is apparent as much in his blurring pictorial technique, his casual treatment of human form and pictorial space, as it is in his approach to subject matter. To this extent, it becomes central to his mode of picture making. The presence of ambiguity in all these aspects can help us determine whether or not a given painting is by Giorgione, especially as the ‘Giorgionesque’ works of even his most immediate followers in Venice, such as Sebastiano del Piombo (1485–1547) or the young Titian (c. 1488/90–1576), beat a retreat from his approach towards great pictorial clarity in one aspect or another. It would have been possible to write a book about Giorgione almost entirely devoted to questions of attribution, given that so many arguments about what he painted, and in what order, continue to rage among art historians. In the chapters that follow, I have instead focused on

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those paintings which I consider to be by him, discussing them in broadly (but not strictly) chronological fashion. There is little explicit discussion of my underlying reasons for making this selection, though I hope that this will become apparent enough from what I have written. The works discussed have in common an underlying effect of visual and semantic ambiguity, indicating that this quality was key to Giorgione’s approach as an artist, distinguishing him even from those who sought to closely emulate his work. If Giorgione was to this extent a great champion of the ambiguousness of painting, then this also ran against the mainstream tradition of Renaissance painting, which became increasingly concerned to achieve greater illusionistic and narrative clarity. Why, we must ask, did Giorgione move in this obscuring direction when so many other painters of his time were concerned with making their works more explicit via new pictorial discoveries such as linear perspective, or the quasi-scientific study of human proportion, anatomy and expression? Asking this kind of question will allow us to understand Giorgione’s ambiguity in its own time. Rather than suggesting that his works can simply mean anything that the viewer wants, it must be allowed that Giorgione’s specific cultural milieu played a key role in shaping his works, with the result that some interpretations of them will be more valid than others. The limits or control of history in this way provide an important boundary to our consideration of Giorgione’s ambiguity, even if it remains true that he created works that deliberately generate a plethora of significations.3 Giorgione’s ambiguity is certainly not just (or even primarily) a matter of cerebral play. Too ready an attempt to

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Introduction

interpret Giorgione’s paintings from a purely intellectual point of view could lead to an underestimation of their wider sensuous invitation, especially as these works seem always to insist on establishing an intimate or even physical connection with their viewers. To some extent, this was to further develop an important strand in Italian Renaissance art, in which the more naturalistic presentation engaged the spectator, anticipating his or her active involvement with the image.4 In Giorgione’s case this is particularly apparent from his employment of a fluid and unfinished technique that requires the viewer to ‘read in’ beyond what is actually given in order to complete the work. This beholder, whether understood as a given patron or in much less specific terms, as a responsive individual, is imagined by Giorgione as intensely subjective and sensual, as well as eagerly projective: as one who experiences the world in a way that goes beyond the merely rational. The painted image appears as an extension of the spectator’s own body rather than as something extraneous to it, or that controls its capacities or desires. And to this extent too, Giorgione abandons rigorous sharp definition or ‘seeing through’, exploring instead what can be described as the occlusions of corporeality: that is, the obscuring primacy of the receptive body, which never quite understands from a stable or abstracted mental viewpoint. Seeing in Giorgione’s unfixed way might also overlap with touching or hearing, for example: one form, surface or texture alluding to, or transposing itself onto, another. The synaesthetic aspects of Giorgione’s approach do not mean that what he shows us is any less real. Modern optical science tells us that the kind of peripheral seeing that Giorgione

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suggests is, in fact, truer to human experience than focused vision.5 And there is good evidence that leading theorists of optics in the painter’s own period had already begun to understand the natural ‘inaccuracy’ or partiality of human vision. It is an increasingly significant theme in the writings of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), for example, whose penchant for showing natural forms shrouded in obscuring sfumato (‘smokiness’) has long been understood to have had a direct impact on Giorgione’s paintings.6 Seen in the longer perspective, Giorgione’s new acknowledgement of an ambiguously multi-sensual human reality may represent his greatest contribution to the development of Western painting. His blurring approach offered a pictorial or painterly alternative to the ideal models of seeing that emerged in the illusionistic art of the Renaissance. Giorgione’s suggestion of the intimate and interrupted sensuality of vision offered a turning aside from the intellectualized, didactic and ocularcentric idea of painting that took root in the period and that was destined to dominate in the art academies of Europe for more than three hundred years.7 Giorgione’s career apparently opened with his completion of a small number of religious paintings of a conventional type, in which he already showed signs of his originality, particularly regarding his free approach to perspective space and figural definition (see illus. 13, 15 and 18). He soon became especially attracted to portraiture and landscape, picture types that offered an opportunity to explore non-narrative visual possibilities and did not have a subject matter as such. He only rarely completed commissioned portraits, but even in these more formal works he focused on the elusive inward

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Introduction

psychologies of his sitters rather than using his imagery to confirm their place within the outward social order (see illus. 20 and 22). In a number of other paintings, which take on the appearance of portraits but are unlikely to have been commissioned by their sitters or families, Giorgione depicted social types with a more marginal role in society. He depicted an alluring and beautiful young man who may or may not be a real individual, but who nonetheless makes an intimate sensual address to the viewer, challenging or transgressing conventional gender roles and moral codes (see illus. 25). In two further works of this kind Giorgione offered visually powerful depictions of women that had little precedent in the patriarchal visual art of Venice. A sensual semi-naked young beauty opens her coat to reveal her breast; and an impoverished but disturbingly authoritative old woman speaks out in admonishment (see illus. 27 and 28). In subsequent works such as the Three Philosophers (see illus. 38) and the Tempest (see illus. 41) Giorgione greatly expanded the role of landscape, challenging his viewer to identify the human protagonists who remain. In these works the kind of precise quasi-mathematical linear perspective advocated by leading Renaissance theorists of painting, such as Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), is nowhere to be seen.8 Instead of following Alberti’s recommendation that the painter should concentrate on moralizing narrative paintings known as istorie (‘histories’), Giorgione typically focused on smaller scaled and privately commissioned pictures that allowed him more freedom for creative manoeuvre. In these works, the depiction of events is avoided altogether, the consequent stillness of the scene allowing the painter and also the viewer

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to wander imaginatively beyond the control of the precise externally derived meanings required in public subject-based art. When Giorgione did work on a larger scale, as in the fresco cycle he completed in 1508 on the facade of the German Warehouse (Fondaco dei Tedeschi) in the heart of Venice, he did not readily adapt his imagery to the open and public environment, such that visitors to the city were confused about what his imagery might mean (see illus. 45–8). The freely painted figures that he depicted on the Fondaco facade do, however, suggest his engagement with the nude, one of the great themes of Renaissance art. In a further ground-breaking depiction of the goddess Venus, which was perhaps his final work, Giorgione depicted a reclining nude figure that was destined to be of fundamental significance for many European painters for centuries to come (see illus. 51). But despite its apparent tone of reserved classical idealism, this late work also includes a disturbing ambiguous detail that radically sexualizes the imagery. Giorgione has long been recognized as an early proponent of the sixteenth-century tradition of oil painting in Renaissance Venice that prioritized colour over form.9 An increasingly wide range of intensely coloured pigments were on sale in early sixteenth-century Venice, and Giorgione sometimes used examples that had only recently become available (see illus. 13 and 38). Giorgione did not work exclusively with oil paint: the sources tell us that he often worked in fresco (the facade paintings on the Fondaco were not the only works of this type that he completed in Venice), while he mixed oil with egg tempera in the Tempest, La vecchia and in several other works. To some extent independently of the

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Introduction

precise medium he used, his works seem to be characterized by the complex combination of pigments together, rather than the use of a wide range of different colours. The adverb colorito or colouring, with its suggestion of mixing or active manipulation, better describes Giorgione’s technique than the more static or passive noun colore.10 Giorgione often, and perhaps increasingly, used a narrow range of pigments close to one another on the colour scale, and this tonal approach distinguished his work from many paintings made elsewhere in Renaissance Italy, in which powerfully contrasting areas of local colour were juxtaposed in support of the threedimensionality of the given figure or object. Technical analyses – x-rays and infrared reflectography – have shown that Giorgione typically composed his paintings as he went along, mixing colours at the painting stage to achieve infinite gradations, and changing his mind about the placement of this or that form or figure.11 Although Giorgione might have made drawings, these were not typically preparatory in kind. When he used oils, he seems to have particularly exploited the opportunity for improvisation or composition at the painting stage that this slow-drying medium allowed. This approach was very different to that taken in Renaissance Florence and Rome known as disegno, in which the application of paint was understood only as the final stage in a wider rational process that began with the defining idea in the mind of the artist and was then worked out using preparatory drawings before finally being realized on the picture surface. In contrast Giorgione’s more fluid and simultaneous approach allowed the idea for his work to evolve during the course of his pictorial execution.

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Giorgione’s approach was certainly founded on the examples of the older generation of painters active in Venice in the later Quattrocento, especially, as we shall see, that of Giovanni Bellini (c. 1431/5–1516). But in other ways Giorgione’s particularly sensual approach offered a clear departure from the local conventions of painting. He was an innovator in Venetian art, whose explorations of a newly intimate and bodily engaged kind of painting involved a retreat from the long-established civic and sacred traditions that had long dominated in the city. His short career was very probably dependent on the special support of a small group of wealthy and socially progressive noble patrons who had withdrawn to some extent from the usual humdrum duties of public life in Venice.12 The support of these high-ranking patrons for a young immigrant painter, essentially non-patriotic and non-pious in his inclinations, suggests that they shared Giorgione’s concern to explore a newly independent, personalized and ‘embodied’ cultural identity that offered an alternative to the time-honoured communal and self-sacrificing ideal of public service to the Republic. It may be significant in this regard that Giorgione was from the small town of Castelfranco in the countryside of the Veneto and was thus an outsider to the tightly organized society of the lagoon city itself, which had traditionally considered its painters as artisans or (at very best) civil servants.13 Giorgione’s ambiguous approach to painting, which took liberties with precise or received meanings while laying new emphasis on his own creative originality, indicates the extent of his ambition from a professional point of view. This might remind us of the negative but acute comment on Giorgione

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Introduction

made in the amended account of the painter that Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) published in the second edition of his Lives of the Artists of 1568. This painter, Vasari tells us, ‘thought only of demonstrating his technique . . . by representing various figures according to his own fancy’.14 Vasari recognized that this more subjective approach was very different from the rational and moral restraint of the central Italian ideal of disegno that he so admired. But he also seems to have understood that Giorgione’s paintings highlighted the independent authority of their maker with a new kind of insistence. Following ‘his own fancy’ rather than the established patterns, models or iconographies laid down by tradition, Giorgione’s painting became difficult to understand, its ambiguity contradicting Vasari’s concern to promote the comprehensibility of Renaissance art.

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Who Was Giorgione?

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iorgione received few large-scale public commissions for State or Church during his short career, and died in relative poverty in the terrible plague of 1510, almost before his career had properly begun. A recently discovered inventory of his possessions taken after his death tells us that their total value was less than 90 ducats: a sum rather lower than that commanded for a single work by a leading painter of the day. Yet there is good evidence that Giorgione’s laconic and sensuous approach to painting had an immediate and transformative impact on the artistic culture of Venice. Even within the short span of his lifetime many of the city’s leading painters, sculptors and printmakers responded deeply to his innovations. And in the decades immediately following his death, Giorgione’s influence quickly spread further across the Venetian territories on the mainland and into other parts of northern Italy. It seems that even within his brief lifetime he was known as ‘Giorgione’ or ‘Big George’: an epithet that at once suggested his large physical stature and his great artistic significance.1 Giorgione’s importance was, as we have seen, also acknowledged by the Tuscan writer Giorgio Vasari, the leading authority on Italian Renaissance art of this period.2 Vasari’s

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account, first published in 1550, supplies some suggestive details about the specifics of Giorgione’s life and character. He was, we hear, born ‘at Castelfranco near Treviso’, and although ‘of humble origin’ was ‘gentle and courteous throughout his life’. He was ‘always a very amorous man’ and ‘extremely fond of the lute which he played beautifully to accompany his own singing’. Giorgione’s origin in the small town of Castelfranco Veneto, some 40 kilometres (25 mi.) northwest of Venice, is confirmed by certain other documents discussed below; but Vasari’s other comments on Giorgione’s character are more difficult to verify. Some of them seem to be borrowed from his ‘Life of Leonardo da Vinci’, in which, for example, we hear of the artist’s fine musicianship. The patriotic Vasari seems always to have understood Giorgione as a kind of Venetian Leonardo, who was largely dependent on the Tuscan master’s ideas about painting. This certainly does not do justice to Giorgione’s independent kind of achievement in painting. But certain of Vasari’s comments might feasibly have been based on conversations the author had in Venice with people who knew more about the painter than he did. If Giorgione was, indeed, an accomplished musician, then this might be plausibly reflected in a number of his surviving paintings (including his self-portrait) in which music or musicianship is an important theme (see illus. 2 and illus. 32).3 Some recent discoveries supply a little more information about Giorgione’s short life. An inscription on a previously unknown drawing, perhaps by Giorgione, appended to the final page of an edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy published in Venice in 1497, gives precise dates for the painter’s birth and death, telling us that he died on 17 September 1510, at the

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age of 36.4 This would mean that Giorgione was born at some point between 18 September 1473 and 17 September 1474, a few years earlier than had previous been thought (Vasari’s dates of 1476 and 1478 in the two editions of his Lives had previously been followed). The discovery of this inscription follows the publication in 2011 of two new documents inventorying the goods in Giorgione’s house after his death.5 These inventories, dating from 1511, confirm that the painter had died of the plague, and list the items that remained in his quarantined house. Reading between the lines, it seems very likely that after falling sick, Giorgione was sent to the so-called Lazzaretto Nuovo, the plague station near the mouth of the Venetian lagoon reserved for those who had had contact with carriers of the disease. He presumably died there, like many others, and was most likely buried in a common grave. The inventories also appeared to indicate that Giorgione was not from the Barbarella family of Castelfranco, as had long been assumed.6 But as was quickly pointed out, the idea that Giorgione’s father was called ‘Giovanni Gasparini’ was probably owed to a small scribal error; the inventory in fact meant merely to identify Giorgione as the ‘son of Giovanni, son of Gasparini’.7 Despite this the recurrence of certain names between the new inventories and another series of documents referring to ‘Georgius’ or ‘Zorzi’ held in the Castelfranco archives, first published more than a century ago, lends new credence to the possibility that these do indeed relate to the painter.8 Dating between 1485 and 1500, the Castelfranco documents name the widowed mother of ‘Georgius’ as Altadona, while the inventories of 1511 were drawn up at the behest of a second woman, ‘Alessandra’, who is also named as

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Giovanni’s widow. This difference in names does not wholly undermine the theory that the earlier documents also relate to the painter and his family. It may be that Alessandra was an earlier divorced wife of Giovanni who now, with the death of Giorgione (and presumably of Altadona some years before), revived her claim to his worldly possessions. Another apparently contemporary inscription on the back of Giorgione’s painting known as Laura (see illus. 27) gives a date: 1 June 1506. The inscription, which may or may not have been added by the painter himself, identifies Giorgione as a ‘colleague’ (‘Cholego’) of the painter Vincenzo Catena (1470/80–1531), appearing to contradict Vasari’s indication that he was a pupil of the leading painter in Venice, Giovanni Bellini. But the phrasing of the inscription is odd and does not quite make it clear that Giorgione was in a master/pupil relationship with Catena.9 Given that Giorgione’s surviving paintings certainly owe much more to Bellini than to Catena, it may be that we should not read too much into the writing on the back of the Laura. Another long-known Giorgione document in the Venetian state archives dating from 1507 tells us that Giorgione received a commission to paint a canvas (‘teler’) for a room in the Ducal Palace (the Sala dell’ Udienza) for which he received the substantial sum of 75 ducats.10 The identity of this work remains unknown. But it is notable that the given Sala also contained sculptures by the city’s leading sculptors Tullio (c. 1455–1532) and Antonio Lombardo (c. 1458–c. 1516), some of whose surviving works bear comparison with those of Giorgione.11 A further document notes the formation of a commission of painters, nominated by Giovanni Bellini, to evaluate Giorgione’s cycle

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on the facade of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, mentioned in the Introduction.12 These frescoes were Giorgione’s most prominent public works in Venice, adorning a newly built official building at the mercantile heart of Venice. Bellini’s commission allotted a fee of 150 ducats, although this was subsequently reduced to 130 by his patrons. A further indication of Giorgione’s fast-growing reputation is provided by two letters written shortly after his death that reveal the interest of a leading north Italian court patron in his work. Isabella d’Este, the Marchioness of Mantua, wrote to her agent in Venice, Taddeo Albano, in late October 1510 asking him to enquire about the possibility of buying a Giorgione for her studiolo in the Mantuan Ducal Palace.13 Isabella was especially interested in purchasing a depiction of ‘Night’ (nocte) that she had evidently heard about. Albano then replied confirming that Giorgione had recently died of the plague, and that there were two versions of the ‘Night’: one ‘not so perfect’ in the house of the Venetian patrician Taddeo Contarini; and a much more impressive painting, ‘better designed and better finished’, in the collection of Vittorio Beccario.14 Neither of the paintings was for sale, given the special liking that their owners had for them. Given that the epithet ‘Night’ or ‘Holy Night’ was often used to describe the subject of the Adoration of the Shepherds, it may be that the two works that Albani mentions are identifiable with the paintings attributed to Giorgione now in Washington (see illus. 35) and Vienna. The exchange of letters between Isabella and her agent tells us that Giorgione’s name had already spread beyond the Venetian Republic, and also that his works were very much prized by private collectors in the

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Who Was Giorgione?

city itself, who were not willing to part with them. Taddeo Contarini, in particular, was an extremely rich and wellconnected Venetian nobleman, who (as we will see) owned other important works by Giorgione. All this suggests that Giorgione was already an artist of some repute both in Venice and beyond, and that his upward trajectory would only have continued had he not succumbed to the plague in September 1510. But we nonetheless know relatively little about his precise movements and wider artistic and cultural associations. If we take it that the Castelfranco documents mentioned earlier do indeed refer to Giorgione, then it would appear that he did not leave his home town to settle in Venice before 30 September 1500. And this, taken in tandem with the slightly earlier birth date now established, might suggest a more lasting and formative engagement with the distinct cultural world of Castelfranco and its surroundings than has previously been allowed. Perhaps Giorgione’s refined and delicate approach to painting owed more to the sophisticated and courtly culture that had grown up in the so-called Marca Trevigiana region near Castelfranco, stimulated in the 1490s by the presence of Caterina Cornaro, the famous Venetian noblewoman and exiled queen of Cyprus.15 It is tempting to see Giorgione’s sensual and sophisticated art as reflecting the refined tastes of the circle of humanist philosophers and poets who gathered at Caterina’s so-called ‘Barco Cornaro’ on her estate near Asolo. Caterina’s circle included prominent intellectuals such as the astrologer Giovan Battista Abioso, haunted by signs of the coming end of the world, and the poet Pietro Bembo, whose sensuous all’antica pastoral poem Gli Asolani (Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1505) was set on

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the estate. This hypothesis of Giorgione’s close connection with the courtly culture of the Castelfranco region gains a little more credence from Vasari’s record of a now lost Giorgione portrait of Caterina, as also from the report that Bembo owned a painting by him. The Sicilian soldier Tuzio Costanzo, a loyal follower of Caterina in both Cyprus and at Asolo, is very likely to have commissioned an altarpiece from Giorgione for the church of Santi Maria Assunta e Liberale in nearby Castelfranco, which perhaps dates from the early years of his career (see illus. 18). Some doubts must remain about the exact nature of the impact that Giorgione’s early association with the Cornaro circle had on the young painter. The documents held in the Castelfranco archives may or may not refer to Giorgione, and in any case say nothing about his association with the circle. And the attribution of the painted allegorical frieze now displayed in the so-called ‘Casa Giorgione’ at Castelfranco to Giorgione is very questionable.16 More significant still, it is almost impossible to ascribe any works by the painter to the period before his move to Venice around the age of 26. However, it remains likely enough that the young painter did know about the cultural activities of Cornaro and her circle so near to his home town. And it is not too far-fetched to suggest that Giorgione’s background on the fringes of this elite coterie influenced his subsequent attachment to a similarly select group of art patrons and collectors in Venice itself. The main sources of information about Giorgione’s supporters in the metropolis are the lists of paintings in Venetian collections compiled by the patrician Marcantonio Michiel.17 The learned Michiel, who is said to

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Who Was Giorgione?

have owned a Giorgione himself, recorded the presence of as many as fourteen paintings by the master in Venetian art collections between 1525 and 1543; and it is very likely that some, at least, of these owners were also Giorgione’s original patrons. Gabriele Vendramin then owned La vecchia (see illus. 28), the Tempest (see illus. 41), and probably the Concert/Three Ages of Man (see illus. 32).18 Taddeo Contarini, Vendramin’s brother-in-law who lived in a building adjacent to his palazzo at Santa Fosca, could boast the Three Philosophers (see illus. 38); possibly the Vienna version of the Adoration of the Shepherds mentioned earlier; and the paintings, now lost, of the Finding of the Infant Paris (known only through a seventeenth-century copy by David Teniers the Younger) and Hell with Aeneas and Anchises. Another very wealthy patrician merchant, Girolamo Marcello, owned the Venus (see illus. 51) in addition to a portrait of himself and a St Jerome Reading (both lost). Vendramin’s palace, with its expansive art collection of as many as forty paintings, was apparently a place of lavish entertainments and musical gatherings.19 The extremely wealthy Contarini, on the other hand, who may have focused more exclusively on collecting paintings, was also an intellectual who borrowed classical texts from the library at San Marco in 1524.20 The brothers-in-law were also part of the circle of Aldus Manutius, the great humanist publisher whose books may have helped to inspire Giorgione’s Tempest for Vendramin and, more certainly, Marcello’s Venus. It is true that non-noble Venetians such as Vittorio Beccario (Adoration of the Shepherds, see illus. 35) and non-Venetians, such as the Catalan merchant Giovanni Ram (Young Man with an Arrow, see illus. 25), also owned Giorgione paintings. But it

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nonetheless remains likely that a relatively narrow circle of interconnected wealthy and erudite Venetian patricians did much to support Giorgione’s nascent career, sharing a special taste for his original and exquisitely wrought paintings. The evidence of an inventory recording the contents of Marino Grimani’s collection from 1528 only reconfirms Michiel’s evidence in this regard. It reveals that two works by Giorgione, the Self-portrait as David (see illus. 2) and probably the Benson Holy Family (see illus. 15), were then in his possession. A third, the so-called Tramonto (see illus. 36), might also have been in the collection. Marino had almost certainly inherited these works from his uncle, Domenico, the leading Venetian cardinal and art collector, who may have originally commissioned them.21 Giorgione’s continuing association with the more private world of such sophisticated art-loving clients also suggests his distance from the wider culture of metropolitan Venice. His focus on the creation of self-consciously original, bespoke paintings differentiated him from many other painters in the city, whose major concern was with the production of largescale patriotic or pious public works for State and Church. The references to outsider culture that often surface in Giorgione’s paintings may also have been a result of his distance from the artistic mainstream in Venice. Paradoxically, Giorgione’s withdrawal into a more elite cultural domain may also have made him especially sympathetic to other outsiders who had fallen away from social normality in the opposite direction. In his paintings, promiscuous courtesans and old women, alluring young men and impoverished shepherds, exiled hermit saints and unidentifiable individuals wandering in lonely or threatening landscapes are allowed a new kind of

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significance. Such works are interesting not only because of their unusual subject matter, but because they offer a youthful provocation to the more settled values and expectations of the normative host society of Venice. Intriguingly, in one of the Castelfranco documents dated from 1489, ‘Georgium’ appears as a difficult teenage delinquent who had, on a visit to Venice, fallen foul of the law for bad behaviour and spent time in the city’s prison.22 The boy’s widowed mother Altadona had to sell a small piece of land in Castelfranco in order to secure her son’s release. Giorgione might have been only fifteen or sixteen at the time, but the unruly and rebellious figure that this misbehaviour suggests contradicts the image of anodyne compliance supplied by Vasari, who presented the painter as a harmonious poetic being devoted only to ‘the things of love’. Such early law-breaking might seem to take Giorgione further away from the idea of delicate poetic sophistication that has long attached itself to his name. But delinquency or even violent criminality was not so alien to the highly wrought aristocratic culture of Venice and elsewhere in Italy in the period.23 About a century later, it is evident enough in the troubled career of Caravaggio (1571– 1610) in Rome: another low-born, rule-breaking and shortlived painter who attached himself to the highest-ranking circles of noble patrons in his adopted city. An undertow of violence haunts Giorgione’s self-portrait, to which we will now turn: a work that was to stand as an important model for Caravaggio’s own disturbing combination of self-portraiture and decapitation.24

2 Giorgione, Self-portrait as David, c. 1503–4, oil on canvas.

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the self-portr ait as david and the judith We might reasonably have expected the question posed by the title of this chapter to be answered, at least in part, by Giorgione’s Self-portrait as David (illus. 2). But this damaged fragment provokes more questions than it answers about who Giorgione was, stubbornly refusing to yield the facts. Rather than taking the opportunity to reveal himself, Giorgione used his self-portrait to veil or obscure his identity, presenting an image that is, for all its suggestiveness, deeply ambiguous. Giorgione was young and it is possible that he might not have known quite who he was when he made the picture. After all, ambiguous identity can stand as one well-known manifestation of youth. And yet there is nonetheless an element of wilful determination, or perhaps even of aggressive confrontation, in the backward tilt of the head in this painting, as also in the way that the troubled eyes of the sitter readily meet our own. Indeed, Giorgione expresses an extraordinary measure of self-confidence in a work that appears as if intended to stimulate his own myth as an all-powerful creative artist. It may be that in this work he anticipates the interest of the most forward-thinking art patrons in Venice: independently minded nobles who harboured a new interest in the personalities or identities of the visual artists whom their immediate ancestors had considered mere craftsmen. Giorgione’s self-portrait was to this extent a work of audacious contemporaneity and suggests the extent of his professional ambition. As mentioned above, it is likely to have been commissioned by a leading member of the powerful Grimani family in Venice, perhaps even by Cardinal

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Domenico himself.25 Vasari probably saw the work at the Palazzo Grimani on a research visit to Venice in 1566, and there is good evidence to suggest that it became the painter’s most famous and influential painting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when it was often copied or reproduced in painted or printed variants.26 Despite its fame, the suitability of Giorgione’s self-image as a commemorative image of a famous Venetian old master was apparently questioned, and this may have led to its subsequent mutilation. A woodcut by Wenceslaus Hollar tells us that the work originally included a parapet with the severed head of Goliath (illus. 3). It is not known when the painting was cut down, but this happened at some point after the publication of Hollar’s print in 1650. Perhaps it was cut in order to create two separate works; or perhaps the alteration was inspired by the desire to establish an image of Giorgione for posterity that was more respectable. At issue was the perturbing detail of the severed and bloody head: the sitter’s unpleasant attribute that suggests that we must see him not only as the sixteenth-century painter Giorgione, but as the Old Testament biblical hero David. It was only by the violent mutilation of a painting of violent mutilation that the unknown owner of the post-1650 period could effectively secure Giorgione’s self-portrait as an acceptable kind of secular image of a revered artist of the past. It is true that the Braunschweig fragment still looks much less respectable than the smartly dressed, bearded and thoroughly grown-up gentlemanly figure of ‘Giorgio Barbarelli’ featured in eighteenth-century prints.27 But the emphasis on reforming Giorgione’s original strange and ambiguous youthful

self-image towards greater conventionality or orthodoxy in these later re-castings is clear enough. The concern to improve Giorgione’s self-portrait may have emerged much earlier. In a woodcut appended to the ‘Life of Giorgione’ in the 1568 edition of Vasari’s Lives, the painter’s self-portrait has already been radically truncated (illus. 4). Vasari was certainly at pains to recall something of the power 3 Wenceslaus Hollar, print after Giorgione’s Self-portrait, 1650, etching on paper.

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of the original painting in this print. But the gruesome and bloody head has been conveniently removed in the transfer. This initial excision undoubtedly accommodated the wider schema of portrait heads used to illustrate Vasari’s new edition. But it may also indicate that the more troubling aspects of Giorgione’s painting were deemed unsuitable for the gallery of artist portraits, many of which confirmed the social respectability and elevation of their sitters. Vasari recognized that there was something off-putting or unseemly about such a close association between an artist and a severed head; or about the implied connection between creativity and violence. Perhaps he particularly objected to the way in which Giorgione made the blood of the artist’s mutilated victim ooze down the viewer’s side of the parapet. To the founder of the prototype of the European art academy, the Accademia del Disegno established in Florence in 1563, Giorgione’s self-portrait may have appeared too odd: as an affront to the aspirational culture of social integration and improvement for visual artists that he was so keen on promoting. Judging from the evidence of both the painted fragment and Hollar’s print, Giorgione made a display of his skill as a naturalistic painter in his self-portrait, carefully contrasting the hard metal of the armour glimpsed at the shoulder with the diffuse treatment of the soft flesh and hair. We can take it that the image makes an accurate enough portrayal of Giorgione’s appearance, with widely set eyes, a long and slightly hooked nose, broad fleshy lips and thickly layered brown hair worn loosely to the neck or shoulders. Many other aspects of the work remain obscure or uncertain. On the evidence of Hollar’s print, we can say that

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Giorgione’s original work was presented as a portrait, especially given the inclusion of the kind of foreground parapet so commonly used in fifteenth-century Venetian works of this type. But this apparent suggestion of a picture type is immediately undermined by the presence of the gory head, 4 Woodcut illustration of ‘Giorgione da Castelfranco’, from Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists (1568).

5 Giorgione, Judith, c. 1500–1501, oil on canvas transferred from panel.

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which indicates that the work is, rather, a quasi-historical or allegorical image. It may be that Giorgione’s painting reflects a growing penchant for showing the ‘representation of someone in the guise of someone else’ in Renaissance portraiture.28 But in his work, the various visual clues presented do not finally clarify the precise picture type, let alone how we are meant to take the work: is this Giorgione that we see before us; an imaginary figure from the biblical past; or Giorgione dressed up as that figure? Thinking of the sitter as the Old Testament boy hero David, we might take it that the great physical effort of the recent battle against Goliath is reflected in the exhaustion or sadness expressed in his face: one young in years, but already heavy with experience. But it is difficult to keep this historical or narrative reading separate from one that refers back to the painter Giorgione. If the young man’s mood is sad or reflective, then this might equally be an allusion to Giorgione’s profession, given that painters were commonly associated with the melancholic humour or temperament in the Renaissance.29 The identification with David was in any case a suggestive one that offered elevating possibilities for an aspirant young painter. David was a figure more usually associated with Florence, where the young Michelangelo (1475–1564) appears to have made a comparable self-identification with this biblical hero in the process of work on the great marble David from the very years when Giorgione made his selfportrait: both lay emphasis on the anxious knitted brows of their protagonist.30 And depictions of David in Florentine sculpture were apparently already in Giorgione’s mind just a few years earlier, when he painted another deceptively

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weak young Jewish hero of the Old Testament: Judith, who overturned all expectations by decapitating an enormously more powerful older foe, Holofernes (illus. 5). Features in this somewhat earlier work, such as Judith’s downward glance to the left; the positioning of her arms with the right hand delicately clasping an enormous sword pointing towards her 6 Titian, Self-portrait, c. 1550, oil on canvas.

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victim’s head; and the left leg bent by its accommodation of the body part beneath it, pointedly recall the bronze David by Donatello (1386–1466) of the mid-fifteenth century. The sculptures of Donatello and Michelangelo reflected the political values of the Florentine Republic insofar as they showed the weak overcoming the strong. Giorgione’s Judith and Self-portrait as David had a similar potential to suggest the republican values of Venice. Yet his more private and sensual presentation characteristically shuts off this kind of public and moral resonance. In the Self-portrait as David, Giorgione makes the biblical association solely a matter of his professional and personal identity, using it to meditate on his role as a modern creative artist. As a direct antecedent of Christ himself, the young David’s violent action was divinely inspired and sanctioned. Merging his identity with such a sacred figure allowed Giorgione to engage the well-known Renaissance topos of the divino artista, and to suggest that his works are also inspired by

7 Camelio (Vittore di Antonio Gambello), Portrait Medal of Giovanni Bellini, c. 1506, cast bronze (obverse).

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the divine will. This point was probably reconfirmed by the focus on the right hand (dexter manus) in the original painting, as confirmed by Hollar’s print: an important locus of godly righteousness in Renaissance art.31 Giorgione’s self-portrait is imaginatively bolder, but also characteristically more obscuring, than the near-contemporary portrait medal that Giovanni Bellini had cast: a visually restrictive profile image that seems to confirm the painter’s role as a proud servant of the Venetian Republic (illus. 7). It differs, too, from Titian’s much later self-portrait as a courtly aristocrat of about 1550 with its indications of worldly wealth and position (illus. 6). The self-portraits of these other great Venetian painters mark, albeit in very different ways, their sitters’ exalted position in the outward social order in later life.32 The more inflated but also more inward and notional suggestion of equivalence between an unknown young incomer and an exalted Judaeo-Christian biblical hero may have been encouraged by Giorgione’s comparative lack of an established professional position in gerontocratic Venice. He could not, after all, show himself as a highly ranked citizen (cittadino originario) painter like Bellini, given that he had no formal status within the carefully defined Venetian social hierarchy as an outsider from Castelfranco. Nor was he, like Titian in his later career, the most famous and sought-after painter in Europe, who had been knighted by the Holy Roman Emperor himself, alluded to in the painting illustrated here by the double-chain awarded by Charles v in 1533. On the other hand, the victory of youthful obscurity over an older and more powerful rival offered in the story of David made Giorgione’s identification particularly apt. We are probably

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intended to equate David’s victory with the painter’s own over the ‘Goliath’ of nature, and perhaps also to see it as a symbol of his defeat of older rivals in Venetian painting. Vasari mentioned that the painter was an acclaimed singer and musician, and Giorgione’s musicality became a favoured theme in later appreciations, especially in the nineteenth century when the aesthete Walter Pater commented in a famous essay, ‘On the School of Giorgione’, that ‘all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.’33 Although the self-portrait makes no overt reference to musicality, it may be that the young David’s skill in consoling the aged king Saul by his masterful playing of the lyre encouraged Giorgione’s identification. In a surviving drawing ‘after zorzon’ that was once displayed in the Vendramin collection alongside the Tempest, a self-portrait as David appears with Saul and Jonathan. An x-ray of another painting once attributed to Giorgione has revealed that David was originally shown playing a lute.34 In yet another lost self-portrait, known through several painted and printed copies from the seventeenth century (see illus. 1), Giorgione presented himself in the guise of Orpheus, whose beautiful playing prevailed over the infernal powers to release his wife, Eurydice, from Hades.35 Sound, whether music, a haunting broken voice or a sudden thunderclap, came to be an important theme in Giorgione’s paintings, its mysterious non-visual power allowing a new kind of expressive centrality. Perhaps most characteristic of Giorgione’s self-portrait, reflected in these other works too, is the way in which selfdisclosure is made the same thing as self-fashioning. The visual self-image is seen as an opportunity for release into

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other cultural identities and roles, rather than as the means to fix a deciding one. Unpicking the possible associations of the work in question does not lead us much closer to Giorgione himself but suggests his readiness to assume a knowingly fictive persona. Despite the positive or self-aggrandizing aspects of identifying himself with David, this habit of deflection might just as easily be understood as a result of professional anxiety. The work that he offered was, after all, a new kind of artistic production in Venice: perhaps the very first independent painted self-portrait ever made in the city. It valorized its young sitter quite separately from any established position granted to him from without or above. Whether we take this as an indication of Giorgione’s insecurity or ambition – or both – the kind of folding of one 8 Detail from Giorgione, Judith (illus. 5).

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possible identity into another that it introduced was typical of his approach to painting more widely. A portrait need not necessarily tell an objective or singular truth about its sitter. There is something inward, psychologically penetrating, and yet finally more ambiguous in Giorgione’s self-portrait than in many other such works from the Italian Renaissance. Rather than assuming that the appearance of a human face accurately reflects set or knowable character traits, drawing on the moralizing late medieval tradition of physiognomics, Giorgione gives himself a subtle and transient expression somewhere between wilfulness and regret. The particular allure of his self-image is reliant on its suggestion of the un certain or changing psychological make-up of the GiorgioneDavid composite presented. Alertness to the play of fleeting

9 Wenceslaus Hollar, detail from print after Giorgione’s Self-portrait (illus. 3).

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emotions across the face was key to Giorgione’s approach as he developed a new art of ‘pathognomics’, which challenges the usual kind of clarity or authority secured by the fixed image of painting.36 In both the Self-portrait and the Judith, Giorgione characteristically includes sensual details that seem almost inappropriate. Delicate fingers and toes nestle among the still-soft hair of the recently murdered victims, who seem, in their turn, and despite their closed eyes, to smile up at those who have recently dismembered them (illus. 8 and 9). In the Judith a fleshy thigh is casually revealed by a young woman who might otherwise be taken as a purified late medieval image of the virtue of Justice. The Bible tells us that Judith took pains to make herself alluring in order to tempt Holofernes into her tent (Judith 10:4), and Giorgione’s concern to make her appear physically attractive must (in part) be a response to this text.37 Yet the suspicion arises that this painting, probably made to adorn a piece of furniture in a private bedroom, and thus with a knowing and elite patron in mind, is not as morally edifying as it might have been. Judith is shown in a softly painted atmospheric landscape that contributes to our sense of her bodily charms, as do other details of her appearance, such as the fashionable jewellery adorning her head and chest. Delicate strands of hair have alluringly escaped to either side of her head, hanging loose across her bare neck and upper chest, repeating the tactile combination of hair and flesh at the bottom of the painting. Giorgione’s formal sources for her figure also suggest its secularity: beyond Donatello’s libidinal David, these might include an antique sculptural type of the pagan goddess of love, Aphrodite Ourania, typically shown in a

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similar contrapposto pose although with her raised left foot on a tortoise.38 All this suggests that the conquered male head serves more as a trophy of sexual conquest than as a symbol of the victory of Good over Evil. Giorgione’s self-portrait, with its fleshly, half-regretful protagonist, plays between sacred and secular meanings in a similar fashion, the androgynous sitter offering a provocation to the tradition of masculinized patriotic portraiture that had developed in later fifteenth-century Venice.39 David is somewhat older and his victim somewhat younger than we might have expected, and their two heads are turned inwards towards one another, as if to suggest knowing intimacy rather than moral opposition. In his terrifying response to Giorgione’s painting, Caravaggio apparently showed himself as the decapitated victim of the young boy, the defeated villain rather than the triumphant hero. It has even been argued that in doing so he followed Giorgione’s example.40 But while there is little reason to believe that Giorgione’s self-portrait is contained in the head of Goliath, the possibility of a concealed homoerotic meaning cannot so easily be set aside. The painter’s selfidentification with Orpheus in the lost self-portrait mentioned above might already hint at Giorgione’s sexual ambivalence, given that this classical hero of music had rejected women in favour of young boys after losing Eurydice (illus. 1). The later homosexuality of Orpheus had recently been emphasized in Poliziano’s play Orfeo, performed at the Mantuan court in the 1480s, as also in a related drawing by Giovanni Bellini’s brotherin-law Andrea Mantegna (c. 1431–1506) that was copied by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) and supplied with an inscription identifying the hero as ‘the first pederast’.41

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In a famous essay of 1922 Freud suggested that decapitation symbolizes castration, and it is tempting to think that Giorgione’s troubling self-portrait also refers to a sublimated sexual relationship with his victim, who is decapitated/castrated by his unrequited passion.42 So much must remain as supposition. What is more certain is that in both the Self-portrait and the Judith, Giorgione’s caressing brushwork foregrounds ‘lower’ somatic qualities, an approach that visually obscures our ready identification of the given religious theme, and undermines the usual kind of hierarchical moral freighting of such sacred subjects. Whether touching is imagined as physical interaction within the image, or as a projection of the viewer’s own responsive sensate body onto what is seen, haptic sensation intervenes against the distancing objectivity of the eye, thwarting its abstracting quest for intellectual clarification and rational completion.

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G

iorgione’s Self-portrait and Judith are complexly innovative works that undoubtedly break new ground in Venetian art in the first years of the sixteenth century. But it would nonetheless be a mistake to imagine that the painter’s play between identities and meanings came wholly out of the blue in the local context. A certain visual ambiguity, at least insofar as this is understood as lack of narrative clarity or deliberate slippage between discrete meanings or iconographies, had long been familiar in Venetian painting. For example, in the narrative paintings known as ‘histories’ (istorie) the main event was frequently hidden away within crowded multi-figure compositions that seem to lay more stress on the detailed description of the surrounding cityscape than on clear visual articulation of the given narrative event. In the painting by Gentile Bellini (c. 1429–1507) illustrated here, commissioned by a leading lay confraternity (Scuola) in 1496, a man called Jacopo de’Salis kneels before an ancient relic carried through St Mark’s Square, and his pious action secures the miraculous healing of his sick son in faraway Brescia (illus. 10). But the viewer would be forgiven for missing this event, given the almost obsessively detailed elaboration of the immediate context. This ‘eye-witness’ approach, as it

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has been aptly described, relies on the visual dexterity and curiosity of the viewer, who has to search out the precise narrative, rather than being immediately presented with it in the centre foreground of the composition.1 Toleration of inventive iconographic combinations or hybrids, or of an associational approach that allowed figures to possess more than one meaning or identity simultaneously, is also apparent in many paintings and sculptures with overlapping patriotic and sacred meanings commissioned to adorn

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public state buildings in Venice.2 In a work of this kind by Jacobello del Fiore (1370–1439), for example, an allegorical image of the virtue of Justice with two archangels seems to masquerade as an image of the Virgin enthroned between two saints, without this iconographic doubling or slippage being understood as in any way anachronistic (illus. 11). To this extent, a certain latitude regarding precise clarity of meaning was already a feature of Venetian painting, and may be legitimately contrasted with the more tightly defined and 10 Gentile Bellini, Procession in St Mark’s Square, 1496, tempera on canvas.

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intellectually bounded art of fifteenth-century Florence. In the istorie made in that city, under the impact of new classicizing or all’antica theories of painting expounded by humanist writers such as Alberti, the key event was typically placed at the front, with a greatly reduced supporting cast.3 The local tradition of painting in Venice was, to this extent, fundamental to Giorgione’s development. The towering example of Giovanni Bellini was of particular importance. Given the stylistic similarities of their works, and the more precise history of formal interchanges between them, there seems every reason to believe Vasari’s indication that Giorgione became Bellini’s pupil for a short time following his arrival in the city around 1500. In his smaller-scaled devotional paintings showing the Madonna and Child, the Man of Sorrows or the Pietà, Bellini had already developed a subtly allusive approach in works that were primarily intended to hang in the private homes of his wealthy patrons. In these works, Bellini generated associative meanings rather than explicitly stated ones, using simple, natural objects to stimulate interlinked ideas and emotions in the viewer’s mind. In his many half-length depictions of the Madonna and Child, 11 Jacobello del Fiore, Justice Enthroned Between Michael and Gabriel, 1421, tempera with gilded plaster on panel.

12 Giovanni Bellini, Virgin and Child, c. 1460–65, tempera on panel.

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Bellini implied that we may be viewing a true likeness of the sacred protagonists by the inclusion of a foreground parapet, a feature often used in contemporary portraiture (illus. 12). In such works, Bellini may also have implied that his paintings were like the fabled portraits of the Virgin ‘taken from the life’ by St Luke in biblical times. 4 But the appearance of the parapet might equally suggest to the meditative viewer a connection with Christ’s future tomb, or with the altar on which his sacrifice was commemorated. Bellini anticipates and actively encourages the projective imagination of the pious beholder, suggesting a looping mental movement forwards along the temporal path towards Christ’s future death and resurrection, and then back again to the present moment of everyday intimacy between the young mother and infant depicted. It is Bellini’s avoidance of explicit symbolism or narrative action in stimulating these associative meanderings that is most striking, and that appears most like a predecessor to Giorgione’s pictorial mode. Bellini’s devotional works are understated in visual terms, typically laying the burden of response on the rich store of associative meanings already present in the mind of his viewer. In a small number of ambiguous allegories featuring predominant landscapes and human figures on a much reduced scale that have been described as meditative poesie or ‘poetries’, Bellini went even further.5 The most famous example is the St Francis in the Desert (see illus. 34), a work which had a powerful impact on Giorgione’s Three Philosophers (see illus. 38) and that has stimulated a wide range of differing interpretations much in the way that the younger master’s paintings have. In the St Francis, the extensiveness of the landscape is unusual,

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its features given a new visual significance so that the precise subject matter becomes harder to determine. In his Three Philosophers, on the other hand, Giorgione made uncertainty the main theme of his painting. And while we should remain very suspicious of Vasari’s attempt to clearly distinguish Bellini’s supposedly ‘crude, dry and forced’ Quattrocento manner from Giorgione’s ‘blending of tones’ and general adherence to ‘the modern style’ of the Cinquecento, it remains true that the young painter’s ambiguous approach took him in a direction that was not wholly anticipated in Bellini’s established mode. ear ly r eligious paintings While Bellini might remain as the presiding influence over Giorgione’s earliest works such as the Adoration of the Magi and the Benson Holy Family (illus. 13–15), these already indicate the young painter’s different approach. Giorgione readily adopted Bellini’s preferred tawny palette, as also his softened oil-based approach to formal contours; and the warm sandy browns and yellows of the buildings, earth and rocks also suggest his influence. Giorgione’s tendency to avoid clear narrative action or to reduce interaction between protagonists to a minimum is also a continuation of his master’s approach. Even the isolation of Giorgione’s figures, shown as if wrapped in their own consciousness, ‘encased in separate thought’ as Adrian Stokes put it, suggests a close affinity with Bellini’s example, certainly when contrasted with the dynamic classicizing art of the Cinquecento.6 To this extent Giorgione’s paintings appear to be an extension of Bellini’s mode, in which dramatic action is deferred and the passing of time is

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measured only by slight gestures: an approach that lends an allegorical air to paintings that might not, in fact, be allegorical. But this effect of stillness and expressional reticence has become more insistent, such that a rather un-Bellini-like visual and thematic ambiguity emerges. If Bellini’s paintings always seem consummately composed, robustly tailored to deliver their given message, then in Giorgione’s the various elements of the given composition are less closely or explicitly combined, while the exact subject matter of the work is thrown into question. In these early works Giorgione can appear as a somewhat tentative artist, although it would be easy to mistake this effect

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of visual withholding for self-doubt. The famous Italian art historian Roberto Longhi was surely mistaken when he characterized Giorgione as the ‘grande timido’.7 Giorgione’s lack of interest in details of human anatomy or in the creation of a convincing illusion of three-dimensional space is evident enough. Yet such apparent technical shortcomings also serve to generate the powerful introspective mood of these paintings: the characteristic Giorgione atmosphere of isolated inwardness that was to become the hallmark of his style. In a small horizontally shaped painting on panel that, like the near-contemporary Judith, might once have decorated a piece of furniture or the predella of an altarpiece, there is little 13 Giorgione, Adoration of the Magi, c. 1500, oil on wood.

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doubt about the subject represented. We recognize the scene as the Adoration of the Magi without too much difficulty, noting the Holy Family in a stable to the left, with the usual ox and ass, and the kneeling potentates with their train of followers and horses to the right. But there are nonetheless some noticeable oddities in Giorgione’s presentation of this familiar theme. At first, there seem to be only two kings, until one notices that the third is almost completely hidden behind one of the others. But this foremost kneeling figure has no gift, having already given it to the figure of Joseph rather than to Christ himself, as was more usual in depictions of this subject. Joseph is, in this way, allowed an unusually prominent role, serving as intercessor between the sacred figures to the left and the worldly entourage to the right. Joseph’s special significance is emphasized by his outsized form, the exaggerated complexity of the fall of his robes and their intense and unworldly golden-orange colouration. In this striking passage of drapery painting, utilizing the realgar pigment that had become newly available in Venice, colour is loosened from its merely descriptive function. Giorgione’s use of this rich pigment might have been encouraged by the fact that Joseph already holds the king’s gift of gold in his hand. Joseph’s rapidly rising status as an important intercessor between man and God had recently been acknowledged by the papacy, who had adopted his feast day into the Roman calendar.8 And it may be that in thus colouring this figure, Giorgione offered a sophisticated visual archaism, invoking the age-old visual tradition of VenetoByzantine icon painting in which the sacred identity of a figure was often marked out by the application of gold leaf.

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But if Joseph’s depiction seems to establish a firm contrast between the sacred world to the left and the secular one to the right, then the rich colour of his robe is nonetheless picked up again in the patterned breeches of the figure with a staff at the far right, where it makes a similar kind of contrast with the rich blue of his doublet, and that of his companion (illus. 14). These two young horsemen, whose appearance is closer to the painting of Vittore Carpaccio than to Bellini, seem especially calculated to capture our attention and interest. Joseph’s remoteness is only intensified again in the depiction of the Virgin and Child behind him, who appear wholly unaware of the arrival of the kings and their followers, removed from their outward show of worldly reality, and secluded within their own intensely private space.9 Yet the viewer’s eye is also encouraged by the repetition of colours to move restlessly between the left and right corners of the horizontal picture space so that the sacred protagonists appear in an odd juxtaposition with the corresponding secular figures of the kings’ attendants. The special care Giorgione takes with these marginal figures to the right is striking, their postures contrasting with one another in a casually presented dance-like contrapposto rhythm that reveals their mobile and sensuous forms simultaneously from front and back. The provocative dandified appearance of these two, richly attired with gold-edged doublets, ornately decorated belts and coloured stockings or breeches, and soft hair worn loose to the shoulders, might suggest that Giorgione took his models from the Venetian societies of young patricians known as the Compagnie della Calza (Companies of the Hose) famed for the lavishness of their dress and sensual

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habits of socializing, eating and drinking.10 It is hard to ignore the enlarged codpiece of the rightmost figure, emphasized as it is by his skin-tight golden hose, or the homoerotic visual joke of the knife pointing towards the buttocks of his companion. And yet Giorgione is characteristically coy about allowing the contrast these flamboyant figures make with the reserved figures of the Virgin and Child into a moral one, between worldly show and rarefied spirit, for example. The relationship between the secular figures at the right and the sacred ones to the left remains ambiguous: Giorgione withdraws from the hierarchical implications that his visual contrast might so easily have suggested. With its prioritization of colour as an expressive medium, and its odd juxtaposition of abstracted sacred figures with sensuous worldly elements drawn from contemporary life, the little Adoration already bears certain of the underlying traits of the painter’s approach familiar from his later works. Another

14 Giorgione, detail from Adoration of the Magi.

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small-scale painting from Giorgione’s earliest period, the Holy Family (‘The Benson Madonna’), features a very similar palette to the Adoration but is still more restrained and undemonstrative (illus. 15). Yet the very reticence in the statement of the theme in this private work immediately places the burden of interpretation onto the viewer with a new kind of insistence. The Holy Family might immediately remind us of small-scale devotional paintings by Giovanni Bellini. But despite his completion of many works of this kind showing the Madonna and Child, sometimes with accompanying saints or donors to each side, the older master never painted a Holy Family as such. In this work, the young Giorgione very characteristically poses an iconographic question. Are we shown the Nativity, set in 15 Giorgione, Holy Family (‘The Benson Madonna’), c. 1500, oil on panel.

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the stable at Bethlehem; the later moment of the Rest on the Flight into Egypt; or a more non-narrative kind of painting altogether, abstracted from any given moment in the narrative of Christ’s infancy? The setting might just about be taken as a stable, but there is no supporting cast of animals, kings or shepherds to firmly establish the place as Bethlehem. If the panel depicts the Rest on the Flight, we would also expect to see more in the way of apparatus: a donkey, some angels and perhaps, as in a Bellinesque work by Cima da Conegliano (1459–1517), some supportive saints (illus. 16).11 If, on the other hand, Giorgione’s work is understood as an icon-like presentation of the Holy Family – an iconography more familiar in Northern prints than in Venetian painting – then why, we might legitimately ask, are the protagonists so small, set back from the picture plane? Their authority seems always to be challenged by the emptiness of the physical setting that they occupy and around which our eye is encouraged to wander. While Giorgione and Cima were both deeply influenced by Giovanni Bellini, they responded to the older master’s works in rather different ways. A little later, Cima himself fell under Giorgione’s sway: but in his Rest on the Flight into Egypt of about 1496–8 he presented assertively solid and rounded human figures, carefully grouped together in overlapping fashion at the centre foreground to provide compositional stability. The geometrical symmetry of the arrangement, with saints and angels surrounding the Virgin and Child, who are raised on a throne-like rock platform, pointedly recalls the upright sacra conversazione type championed by Bellini in his monumental public works such as the San Giobbe altarpiece (illus. 17). And the formal clarity and explicitness of the composition is

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secured by Cima’s trademark handling of light: preternaturally sharp, crystalline and hard-edged, illuminating each surface in turn as if to cancel any possibility of visual doubt or confusion about what is shown. By comparison, Giorgione’s slightly indicated figures appear delicate and fragile, barely achieving the base-line effect of three-dimensionality so competently realized in Cima’s painting. In Giorgione’s Holy Family the drapery is more arbitrary, yet also more extensive and expressively significant. These fabrics spread out along the ground beyond the figure group as if to compensate for the very slight indication given of the exact position of their bodies in space. Giorgione’s draperies appear to develop an independent life of their own, beyond their more functional aspect as 16 Cima da Conegliano, Rest on the Flight into Egypt, c. 1496–8, tempera on panel.

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a covering for physical forms. It has been suggested that Giorgione followed the Florentine drapery style of Leonardo in this painting.12 But the complexly looping and overlapping fabrics that are partially independent from the body do little to create relief or to indicate the figure’s underlying anatomy, as they typically do in the Leonardesque tradition. With their sharp edges and arbitrary folds they are closer to the Gothic approach commonly found in the woodcuts and engravings by north European printmakers that were already very well known in Venice. By 1500 the city had become a veritable crossroads of mutual influence between north European and more local approaches to art.13 And yet it is characteristic of Giorgione’s approach that he responded less to the naturalistic aspects of the northern European example than to its other suggestion of a painterly, subjective and expressional visual language: one responsive both to the internal demands of the picture and to the beholder’s presence beyond the frame. The visual freedom of northern drapery styles offered the young master an escape from the muscular inductive naturalism of Cima’s kind of Bellinesque painting. Giorgione’s complexly extended drapes also served as the locus for a pictorial display of audacious non-naturalistic colour combinations that reflect the availability of a widening array of pigments in the shops of the so-called colour-sellers or vendecolori in Venice.14 In the Holy Family, carmine is boldly contrasted with cobalt blue, with a supporting cast of violet and grey, offset by the resonance of the dark olive green of Joseph’s robe: a colour that was to become something of a Giorgione favourite, recurring shortly afterwards, for example, in the Virgin’s un-canonically toned garment in the Castelfranco altarpiece (illus. 18).

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The visual tour de force in this little painting is, however, the cangiantismo effect of the Virgin’s robe as it illogically turns outwards to reveal its otherwise hidden inner side.15 If the sacred protagonists appear to retreat from the viewer, then this curving strip of fabric, with its rationally unexplained but striking juxtaposition of lime and orange pigments to indicate, respectively, shadow and light, offers a possible reconnection. Giorgione’s expressive piece of drapery prefigures what was to come in his subsequent paintings, in which form and colour suddenly combine to move beyond the utilitarian demands of naturalistic description, connecting spatially disparate parts of the composition, while also seeming to respond to the presence of the viewer beyond the picture. In the Holy Family, the pungent colour combination on the obverse side of the Virgin’s robe can hardly be explained in naturalistic terms, given the soft light falling elsewhere in the painting. And the stripe appears arbitrary in terms of symbolic conventions, too, given that its unusual tones contrast with the more expected combination of red and blue used for the Virgin’s outer garments. First indicated in a barely noticeable way encircling the Virgin’s shoulder, it then reappears in front of her, suddenly expanding forwards towards the picture surface to form a shape that seems quite literally to point out the spectator standing before the work. This carefully worked detail does not finally clarify what we see in the Holy Family. Looking with a more critical eye, we might note that the complexities of the drapery and the liberties taken with its colouration cannot conceal the shortcomings of the underlying drawing. The problems of articulation around the knees of Mary and Joseph are evident enough,

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while the position of their forms in space vis-à-vis the low wall remains wholly unclear. If Joseph is imagined as sitting behind Mary, then perhaps he sits on this structure, while she is placed further forward on the rocky outcrop to her left. Clear spatial definition is not achieved and the entire work might easily appear as the faulty or timid effort of a beginner in painting, at least when considered alongside the illusionistic competence of a work by a more established master such as Cima. And yet Giorgione’s very tentativeness in the realization of figure and space is arguably the source of the unusual atmospheric power and expressivity of the work. By avoiding the more usual Renaissance emphasis on clear figural definition, with the forms firmly located within a fully articulated and highly lit three-dimensional space, Giorgione opened up his image to a different range of imaginative or projective possibilities, encouraging the viewer’s eye to rove at will around the shadowy surrounding ambient. Using thinly applied wash-like browns and yellows, Giorgione makes his strange setting a newly expressive element within the image, even as he undermines its possible function as a carrier of clearly defined symbolic meanings. A thin twig grows out of a rock; ivy spreads over a wall surface; and a tattered wicket fence appears at the margin of the picture: all potentially refer to the sacred significance of the holy group and the coming of Christ. The arch to the right more certainly does so, echoing the shape of the foreground figures. But other non-figural features appear open-ended or even obscurely non-meaning, stimulating vague associations or feelings. The low ledge seems particularly significant, even if its position vis-à-vis the figures remains unclear. And the

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same is true of the oddly satisfying forward projection of masonry from it to the left, which seems to indicate a protective armature for the delicate figure group. But how does the wall relate to the obscure angled structure behind it? And is that building articulated in any way with the arch at the right? If all this painted architecture is meant to be understood as representing the stable at Bethlehem, then why does this place, conventionally depicted as a warm and homely setting for the birth of Christ, appear like a wilderness, lonely and isolated from the world? the rise of illusionistic clarity in venetian painting around 1500 As the brief comparison with Cima has already indicated, the ambiguities in Giorgione’s early paintings ran against the grain of more recent developments in Venetian painting, even in smaller-scaled devotional works. In the domain of large-scale public painting, the move towards a crystal-clear and apparently objective representation of reality is still more apparent. Responding to the example of their painterdraughtsman father Jacopo (illus. 40), both Gentile and Giovanni Bellini emerged as renowned masters of accurate pictorial perspective, which they practised with particular authority in their large-scale paintings for the city’s public institutions. Gentile’s Procession (see illus. 10) may not be fully ‘Renaissance’ insofar as the narrative event remains buried among the crowds in St Mark’s Square. Yet even this work is a masterpiece of linear perspective, in which the meticulous detailing of costumes and building facades lends an air of

17 Giovanni Bellini, San Giobbe Altarpiece, c. 1478–80, oil on panel.

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close illusionistic veracity, making the work appear like a form of painted cartography. A few years later, Jacopo de’Barbari (c. 1460/70–before 1516) published his enormous woodcut map of Venice, in which the minute details of the physical appearances of the city were portrayed in an organizing bird’seye perspective view to give an accurate street-by-street, or even house-by-house, description of the city.16 This new Venetian taste for visual precision is evident again in certain prominent sacred works made for Venetian churches. In a sacra conversazione for the Franciscan church of San Giobbe of about 1478–80, for example, Giovanni Bellini had set exacting standards of illusionistic clarity in the field of painted altarpiece design, using the medium of oil paint to create a work that gave an almost tangible sense of reality to the sacred figures gathered around the enthroned Virgin and Child (illus. 17). Bellini deployed an impressive armoury of Renaissance pictorial devices, carefully varying the appearances and anatomies of his six saints (including contrasting old and young male nudes), and placing them in a brilliantly achieved naturalistic setting to demonstrate his mastery of linear perspective. The entire scene is imagined as taking place in an illusionary side chapel that opens directly off the nave of the church of San Giobbe, with the receding lines of the painted architectural mouldings appearing as painted extensions of the stone frame. Such works won Giovanni high renown as a master of pictorial illusionism in Venice, whose achievement was seen as comparable with those of other leading Renaissance masters across Italy. The two Bellinis even met with the leading mathematician Luca Pacioli, to share their common expertise in the matter of perspective.17

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This was not just a matter of visual effect in painting. In Giovanni’s hands, in particular, the tightly controlled perspective served to make the sacred subject matter more comprehensible. It is true that he mitigated the strictly linear aspects of his compositions through his careful attention to the softening effects of light, using admixtures of oil paint to give a more subtle illusion of visual reality. But such adaptations did not disrupt the underlying internal coherence of the linear composition, serving rather to further enhance its effect of illusionistic clarity. Such pictorial innovations worked to intensify the symbolic meaning, so that everything depicted can be understood as an expression of the sacred subject matter. Thus in the San Giobbe altarpiece the low viewpoint effectively fixes the position of a devout spectator before the work, ascribing her/him a fittingly lowly place near to the feet of the saints. The perspectival arrangement means that we must look up into the picture space through these intermediaries towards the still more elevated figures of the Virgin and Child. For all its apparent optical accuracy, Bellini’s composition also articulates a symbolic sacred hierarchy between the worldly viewer, the intercessory saints and the representatives of the supernatural. In his famous treatise, Alberti had argued that the cultural and moral value of painting depended precisely on this kind of close alliance between pictorial form and subject, making the content of the image perfectly comprehensible to the spectator. In De pictura he systematically explains how this can be secured by the use of mathematically derived linear perspective space into which anatomically correct and proportionate figures are placed so as to best express the given

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narrative or istoria. Despite what was said above about the residual elements of visual and thematic ambiguity evident in Quattrocento painting in Venice, by the end of the century, and especially under the impact of the dominant example of Giovanni Bellini, this new expectation of clarity in painting had intensified. Within the given work, it was understood, each form or object should conform to the underlying spatial schema in terms of its scale and appearance, reflecting the optical continuum established between the viewer’s eye, the picture surface and the vanishing point. This demand for pictorial clarity diminished the independent power of individual forms in favour of their meaningful position within a carefully prearranged and objectivizing perspective composition. As Pomponius Gauricus advised in a treatise published in nearby Padua in 1504, ‘the place exists prior to the bodies brought to that place, and therefore must be defined linearly’.18 And it was through conformity to this kind of precise visual articulation that painting could properly deliver its all-important didactic message. the castelfr anco altarpiece Seen against the background of the wider Renaissance achievement of a muscular illusionistic competence in painting, Giorgione’s Castelfranco altarpiece must appear as something of a failure (illus. 18). Following its completion, he was not asked to paint any further large-scale sacred works of this kind, and the painting was apparently little known beyond its immediate context. Sixteenth-century writers on Giorgione such as Michiel and Vasari were unaware of its

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existence (it was first mentioned in the literature by Carlo Ridolfi in 1648), and the work appears to have had little or no impact on contemporary painting in Venice. Admittedly, the altarpiece was located in a little-known church away from the metropolis. But it may be that its visual strangeness, or failure to conform to the newly fashionable illusionistic conventions for the altarpiece type, also played a role in its early obscurity. Superficially, at least, Giorgione appears to follow Bellini’s already canonical example in the San Giobbe altarpiece. His painting is also an upright single-field altarpiece, and it too features the Virgin and Child on a centrally placed raised throne. The presence of the standing saints to either side of this structure makes it appear to conform to the familiar fifteenth-century altarpiece iconography of the sacra conversazione. And as if to make his fundamental point of reference clear, Giorgione even went so far as to include a direct visual quotation from the San Giobbe altarpiece, adopting Bellini’s gesturing figure of St Francis in what was to be his most overt figural quotation from a work by his master. Giorgione also appears to closely emulate the perspectival structure of the San Giobbe painting, laying emphasis on receding linear features such as the tiled pavement and the edges of the throne to suggest three-dimensionality. Such features combine to establish a single vanishing point, in apparently Albertian fashion. But this is improbably high (in the area of the Virgin’s legs) and the horizontal intervals between the foreground tiles appear stretched.19 These linear indicators do not quite establish a consistent effect of spatiality, while the upper part of the painting, featuring a softly painted landscape, dispenses with receding lines altogether

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(illus. 19). Giorgione’s figures are larger than in his other early religious paintings, but his two saints are oddly boneless and extenuated by comparison with Bellini’s muscular anatomical figures, while his Virgin and Child appear as isolated towards the top of the painting and shrink in size, further undermining the shaky authority of the perspective scheme below. Giorgione’s colours escape their apparent function as supportive indicators of specific forms or of spatial recession, linking up with one another to form new relationships along the picture surface. Thus the uncanonical greens of the Virgin’s garment resonate with the richly ornamental cloths on the throne beneath her, but also with the smudgy colours of the copses of trees in the far distance. And the soft greyish reds of the flag pennant combine with the luscious colour of the partition wall. Why might Giorgione have taken this approach? Setting aside the possibility of the young painter’s technical incompetence – that he did not yet have sufficient tools to manage the basics of perspectival or illusionistic painting – we might turn for an answer to questions of context: to picture type and patronage. To what extent, we can ask, was Giorgione’s withdrawal from the monumental articulated clarity of Bellini’s San Giobbe altarpiece a response to the very different circumstances in which he created his painting? The work was very probably commissioned by Tuzio Costanzo, a non-Venetian condottiere who had once loyally served the Venetian state in Cyprus, but now lived in a kind of permanent exile near Castelfranco (he was prohibited from returning to the island, probably for fear that he might foment trouble for the Republic).20 Despite his service, Tuzio, originally from Sicily,

18 Giorgione, Castelfranco Altarpiece, c. 1501, oil on panel.

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was an outsider to Venice, and was potentially perceived as a threat to the Republic’s political ambitions. He had served as a loyal knight to Caterina Cornaro, but she too was increasingly removed from Venice itself, her ‘court’ at Asolo tolerated by the state authorities, but nonetheless distinct in its cultural assumptions and values. It seems likely that the commission to Giorgione was a result of the painter’s early association with Caterina’s circle. The painting he produced might be seen as reflecting, to some extent, its more exclusive or courtly 19 Detail from Giorgione, Castelfranco Altarpiece (illus. 18).

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values. Just as he was subsequently to do in his paintings on the facade of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, Giorgione subjected a public painting type to a more private and personal kind of treatment, using it as a vehicle to extend the bespoke ambiguous approach he had already developed in small-scale private commissions. Giorgione’s painting was originally placed in the Costanzo family chapel in the now destroyed church of Santa Maria Assunta e San Liberale in Castelfranco. Although Tuzio himself was not represented, Giorgione’s imagery constantly acknowledges his subjective viewing presence. Thus the family coat of arms, set on a fictive stone roundel, is placed in a very prominent position at the lower centre foreground. The receding perspective of the pavement tiles is at its firmest here, leading the viewer directly to this all-significant object, at the expense of both the saints to either side and of the figures of Virgin and Child towards the top of the painting. The sacred figures seem to stare fixedly down at this badge of the Costanzo family honour, as if to acknowledge its special significance. Bellini had been careful not to include any such promotion of specific families in his San Giobbe altarpiece, a work probably commissioned by a religious confraternity, in which the Virgin and Child stare out of the painting, as if towards the high altar of the church away to their left. There was much more scope to personalize altarpiece imagery in a cultural backwater such as Castelfranco, where the Republic’s control over individualism was less powerful. Making the family coat of arms such a significant feature allowed Giorgione’s patron to identify with the image in a more intimate way. And perhaps the particular depiction

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of this heraldic device made this connection more immediate still: it is presented as a circular object that might remind us of the human eye, seeming to mirror those of Tuzio and his family as they stood or knelt before the painting in the privacy of their little chapel. If the grand but abstracted perspective arrangement of Bellini’s San Giobbe altarpiece acknowledges the shared gaze of the entire devotional community kneeling before it at prayer, then Giorgione’s appears as an intimate extension of the Costanzo family’s more exclusive concerns and associations. The exact date of the painting has been much disputed, with many arguing for about 1504, suggesting that the work was commissioned by the grieving father Tuzio following the death of his son Matteo in that year.21 Matteo’s tomb, dated August 1504, was originally placed in the chapel, and the intense melancholy of the scene is seen as reflecting Giorgione’s sensitivity to his patron’s recent bereavement. The strange rectangular stone object, apparently made of porphyry, to which the coat of arms is attached, has been seen as a representation of Matteo’s sarcophagus.22 But there is little reason to identify the lower part of the fantastical architecture of the throne in this literal way. And on the question of dating, the style of the entire altarpiece, featuring physically slight and elongated figures, supported by a rich palette of reds and greens, is close to works such as the Benson Holy Family and the Adoration of the Magi, which probably date to about 1500– 1501. Nonetheless, the biographical reading of the painting is fruitful enough. Giorgione was at pains to incorporate Tuzio Costanzo’s own inner world of associations into the imagery. The repeated references to military life tell us as much. In

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addition to the elegant armoured saint in the foreground, we glimpse two loafing soldiers in the landscape beyond, near to what may be a ruined fort. It seems clear enough that this sunlit landscape was intended to recall the region of the Marca Trevigiana, near Castelfranco, where Tuzio currently lived. Perhaps Giorgione deployed his developing open-ended approach to standard iconographies by allowing that the foreground soldier-saint could be taken as either St Nicasius, a Sicilian saint with a special meaning for Tuzio and his family, St George, to whom the Costanzo chapel was dedicated, or St Liberalis, a patron saint of the church itself.23 However this may be, the delicate contrapposto of the saint, achieved through the inclusion of a playfully unlikely slight step on the pavement, expresses an abstracted ideal of chivalric and aristocratic knighthood rather than anything more robustly martial, again in keeping with the elevated courtly identity of the patron. In many ways the Castelfranco altarpiece continues the mode of expression that Giorgione had developed in his early private devotional paintings. Certain of its features reveal that the more ambiguous small-scale picture type was still uppermost in his thinking when approaching this larger-scale commission. The velvet-clad partition, for example, recalls a pictorial device often used in domestic devotional paintings to divide an architectural and figural foreground from a landscape background. And landscapes themselves, while certainly not unprecedented in Venetian altarpieces of the late fifteenth century, were a still more familiar feature in such small-scale private works. The inclusion of the ocular coat of arms, around which the entire composition seems to revolve, makes further reference to privately commissioned religious works,

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more especially to the kind of family votive paintings made to hang in aristocratic palaces, in which kneeling patricians adore the Virgin and Child, with heraldic devices prominently displayed nearby. Giorgione’s altarpiece also conforms to his wider approach insofar as it reveals his tendency to make the active projection of a personalized viewer necessary to the imaginative completion of the work. This may have encouraged his development of a more bespoke kind of altarpiece: one that made his imagery less generally comprehensible than Bellini’s abstracted and rationalized approach allowed. Whether or not Giorgione imagined Tuzio Costanzo, in particular, praying before his painting, the doubtful pictorial structures that he presented – the curving pavement, the illogically vertical throne or the unlikely dividing wall – introduced a new kind of subjectivity into the domain of the Venetian altarpiece, seeming to allow the beholder to make his or her own mind up about what precisely is depicted, and what it might finally mean. Giorgione’s unstable forms, coexisting or coalescing with one another in a shifting alliance within the painting, necessarily had a more circumscribed social reach than the institutionalized communal clarity proposed in Bellini’s prototype. But they might nonetheless appear much closer to the ever-changing and always ambiguous inner world of an individualized beholder.

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further aspect of the developing pictorial armoury of illusionistic painting in the Renaissance was the careful attention given to facial expression. In constructing the ideal history or istoria, Alberti affirmed in De pictura, the painter should make sure that faces clearly express inner emotions in accordance with the figure’s role in the given narrative.1 But in the religious paintings by Giorgione discussed in the previous chapter, wash-like smoky smudges of brownish paint tend to stand in for the precise details of eyes, noses and mouths, so that the inner thoughts or feelings of the figures remain obscure. It may be that later overpainting, particularly in the Castelfranco altarpiece, has exacerbated this ambiguous effect, but it nonetheless seems that Giorgione deliberately made the exact expressions of the actors in his early sacred works very difficult to read. Faces, like the slightly defined bodies to which they belong, play a secondary role in these works, in which Giorgione laid much greater emphasis on the surrounding atmosphere or environment. But Vasari noted in his ‘Life’ that Giorgione was particularly interested in portraiture in his early career: and it would appear that the painter was best known for his works of this type for much of the sixteenth century.

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portr ait of a young man An example of an early work of this kind is the Portrait of a Young Man now in Berlin, a painting sometimes attributed to Titian, but which bears all the hallmarks of the early style of Giorgione (illus. 20).2 Giorgione’s interest in this picture type need not surprise us, given that it offered an escape from the demands of large-scale multi-figural subject or narrative painting. In the late fifteenth century portraiture had rapidly developed in Venice, particularly in the hands of Gentile and Giovanni Bellini. The brothers were powerfully influenced by Netherlandish examples, especially as transmitted through Antonello da Messina (1430–1479), who worked in Venice in 1475–6 using a meticulously detailed oil technique derived from the northern paintings he had previously seen in Naples. Despite occasional depictions of contemporary sitters dressed up as saints or as humanist poets, many of the Bellinis’ portraits remained closely tied to the expression of the public and patriotic values of the Venetian Republic. This meant that the sitter was typically presented as a representative of the wider social order. The portrait recorded the outward appearance of this or that person, often in some detail, placing particular value on the naturalistic depiction of fine details of facial appearance. This did not, however, imply anything further than was necessary about the personhood of the figure depicted. The sitter was typically presented as ‘good’, ‘patriotic’, ‘pious’ and so on, as if the indication of these outwardly derived social and religious virtues was sufficient to describe his entire personality. In this way characterization dominated over

20 Giorgione, Portrait of a Young Man, c. 1500–1501, oil on canvas.

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individualization in these portraits. Their function was also primarily commemorative, whether in a familial or official context, preserving the outward appearance so that the sitter would be remembered in the future. Alberti certainly had portraiture in mind when he pointed out that the primary 21 Giovanni Bellini, Portrait of a Man, c. 1485–7, oil on panel.

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value of lifelike paintings of this kind was to make the absent present, and thus to defeat the depredations of time. There was an inbuilt flaw to this claim for portraiture, given that without the aid of supporting written inscriptions the identity of sitters would inevitably be forgotten over time.3 Yet the claim to permanence that Quattrocento portraiture made is evident enough from the formal connection these works assert with antique sculptural busts. Many are represented as cut just below the shoulders, as robustly three-dimensional, and maintain a unidirectional alliance between upper body and head, while avoiding altogether the potential distraction of arms or hands. Giovanni Bellini often depicted young patricians, perhaps around the time of their entry into the ruling Great Council of Venice aged 25 (illus. 21). Such paintings are likely to have been commissioned by more senior members of the given sitter’s family, recording an important rite of social passage into the public life of the city. The elements of restraint evident in Bellini’s approach make such portraits appear like visual extracts from the corporate group portraits that so often featured in official large-scale istorie for the city’s public buildings. Although Bellini’s sitter in the example illustrated here is young, the portrait nonetheless expresses the values of the official gerontocracy of Venice, cancelling rather than promoting the possibility of independent youthful escape into a more private or personal identity.4 Youth, this work seems to proclaim, must inevitably yield to the wider social order established by the old. By comparison, Giorgione’s Portrait of a Young Man suggests the continued freedom of its young sitter from a predetermined social role. It may be that Giorgione’s

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sitter is a little younger than 25, and still remains detached from the duties of Council membership. The richly tailored mauve satin quilted fabric of his doublet suggests his penchant for fine clothing rather than his conformity to the kind of self-repression required of fully fledged male members of the city’s ruling caste. Giorgione marks this kind of difference in other ways too. If Bellini had maintained the usual Quattrocento bust-like alliance of head and body, then Giorgione allows his sitter to break the mould. His young man makes direct eye contact and immediately suggests a new possibility of intimacy with the viewer. This was to sacrifice the permanence of the gaze for the momentariness of the glance: but despite the suggestion of personal closeness it is unclear whether we really will come to know anything more about the sitter. Perhaps we will even know less. The eyes of Giorgione’s Young Man turn in their sockets, although this does not denote shiftiness, as in certain other Renaissance portraits.5 This ocular decentring, with its implication of a sudden inward shift of attention or emotion, again allows Giorgione to retreat from the Quattrocento-style analogy of the painted portrait with the monumental permanence of the sculptural bust. In his new work the sideways shift of pupils and irises secures an impression of direct (if fleeting) connection. Giorgione undermines the air of timelessness that governs Bellini’s portraits of young patricians, suggesting in other ways too that we have suddenly encountered his sitter in the present moment. Although a parapet is included, its indication of a separation between viewer and sitter is undermined by the inclusion of the right hand, whose delicate digits overlap this structure, suggesting continuity of the sitter’s

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world with our own. Giorgione’s ground-breaking inclusion of a hand challenges the exclusive focus on the head in most fifteenth-century portraits.6 Rather than further emphasizing the intellectual power or moral probity of the sitter’s character, the hand serves as a new marker of the significance of his body. It offers the idea of, or invitation to, touch. Such delicate fingertips are, after all, loci of extreme or heightened sensitivity. And the visual interplay between these nodes of haptic feeling and the similarly coloured flesh of the sitter’s head above serves to intensify our apprehension of the reality of the sitter’s corporeal presence. The downward-curving fingers reach over into the viewer’s realm, seeming to acknowledge our own embodied presence before the painting. Giovanni Bellini did not include a ‘sensitizing’ hand in his portraiture until the very last years of his career, preferring to maintain a more traditional reserve and formality.7 Giorgione’s collapse of the abstracted or fixed commemorative portrait into a present moment of close, though brief, interaction is implied again by the casual way in which the uppermost bow of the young man’s doublet is undone, as if he had been caught unawares, not quite ready to sit for a formal portrait. And this detail at the same time reveals the soft white of his underclothing or camicia against his flesh, affording us a glimpse of something more private, physical or perhaps even sexual. These indicators of the young man’s bodily presence simultaneously make his personality less knowable or quantifiable. Unlike the sitter’s official red toga and black stole in Bellini’s portrait, they tell us nothing about his place in the social hierarchy, or about his underlying commitment to patriotic or pious duty as a young patrician. Even

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as they appear to close the gap between viewer and sitter, they generate new levels of ambiguity, encouraging us to speculate rather than allowing us to know. The young man’s delicate features suggest inner refinement, although the nonchalance of his pose, like the febrile momentariness of his glance, might also indicate the intensity of his sensual life, rather than his moral probity or unquestioned commitment to public service. It has been said that Giorgione’s painting is the earliest example of a modern kind of portrait in which the ‘motions of the mind of an individual are laid bare’.8 And yet quite what these inner ‘motions’ might be is made difficult to determine, and must in great part be a matter of the viewer’s projection onto the relatively sparse visual information Giorgione actually supplies in paint. As in the other works by Giorgione discussed so far, it is the diminution of what is given in pictorial terms that provides space for possibilities to grow in the mind of the spectator. The reduction of pictorial clues is simultaneous with withdrawal from the usual more public functions of the picture type in a manner that recalls Giorgione’s privatizing approach to altarpiece design at Castelfranco. If the painter really does suggest the mysterious inner life of a modern individual, then he does so by giving us less rather than more information about his sitter. Our sense that this young man is exquisitely cultivated and sensitive is created, above all, by the soft generalizing touch of Giorgione’s brushwork. This is particularly evident in the fluid handling of the doublet, which threatens to close the space between the object and the observing eye almost entirely. But this newly immediate visual effect also marks a further measure of retreat from the detailed objectivity that characterized late

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fifteenth-century portraits under the influence of Antonello’s example. Giorgione’s Young Man also presents an alternative to the robust male identity featured in Venetian portraiture to this point (Bellini’s blond-haired sitter seems already to have sacrificed something of his previous youthful beauty to the manly cause of the Venetian state). The combination of soft pale flesh and thick, centrally parted chocolate-brown hair also features in Giorgione’s near-contemporary painting of Judith (see illus. 5) and was soon to appear again in his Self-portrait as David (see illus. 2). In Hollar’s print after this latter work, we glimpse a very similar set of downward-facing fingers, with a hint of the slightly separated thumb to their left (see illus. 3). If Giorgione/David’s dexter manus suggests the sitter’s godly probity, then maybe it already does in the Portrait of a Young Man. This identification of his virtue appears to be supported by the ‘v v’ (‘Virtue Victorious’) inscription on the parapet. These explanatory initials are, however, a nineteenth-century addition, and may represent another much later attempt to clarify the meaning of an ambiguous Giorgione painting.9 In the Bellini portrait illustrated here from the later 1480s, the young patrician appears against a blue sky, perhaps suggesting that his commitment to the Venetian state has a sacred foundation. The sitter in Giorgione’s painting appears, by contrast, to be indoors, occupying his own more private space, and this, in tandem with the details noted above, admits a new ambiguity into portraiture, especially regarding who the given person depicted may be or how he might be understood. Even if we must assume that the Berlin portrait was a commissioned work, and that the sitter’s name was well known around 1500, Giorgione’s representation of him nonetheless seems to pose a

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question: would the young man’s identity become any clearer if we were in possession of this lost historical information? Perhaps this question is not specific to Giorgione’s portraiture, given that when ‘individualization’ gets the upper hand over ‘characterization’ in works of this type, a new measure of uncertainty must always be the result. Once the outwardly derived armature of established social or moral qualities and definitions is abandoned, then something much less definable, fixed or understandable takes its place. ‘Individuals’ are almost by definition more ambiguous than ‘characters’, and are not generally given to emitting decipherable or translatable signs regarding their true identity. the ter ris portr ait That Giorgione did not possess a wide clientele eager to sit for commissioned portraits is evident enough from the fact that so few other works of this kind can now be safely attributed to him. One great example is the so-called Terris Portrait in San Diego, a work that belongs to a later period of Giorgione’s short career than the Berlin painting, given its expressive power and less reticent approach to its sitter (illus. 22).10 Giorgione’s change of direction in this work reflects the deepening impact upon him of two very innovative non-Venetian artists, Albrecht Dürer and Leonardo da Vinci. It is possible to make out three digits in an inscription on the back of the painting as ‘150’, though tantalizingly the final one remains difficult to decipher. If this were a ‘6’, then the portrait would be more or less contemporary with Dürer’s working visit to Venice, and would provide further support

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for its often-noted closeness to the German painter’s Portrait of a Man, which is dated to that year (illus. 23). The depiction of the sitter’s mouth is particularly similar in both works, as is the diaphanous fine treatment of the strands of wavy brown hair, perhaps flecked with grey, to either side of the face. The fluid treatment of their aquiline noses is also very close, serving in each case to suggest that we view the figure from slightly to the right. The decentring of the sitters’ pupils serves to counteract the oblique viewpoint, insisting 22 Giorgione, Portrait of a Man (Terris Portrait), c. 1506, oil on panel.

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on a more direct confrontation with the viewer. These men are decidedly past their youth, and consciousness of ageing might be taken as the cause of their haunted expressions, although this effect of melancholy self-reflection is most apparent in Giorgione’s painting. Even if it is very unlikely that the two portraits represent the same sitter, as has been suggested, such similarities remain striking enough.11 And 23 Albrecht Dürer, Portrait of a Man, 1506, oil on panel.

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the fact that Dürer’s portrait was once in the collection of an important Giorgione collector, Gabriele Vendramin, owner of La vecchia and the Tempest, makes the apparent connection between the paintings still more intriguing. On the other hand, Dürer’s sitter wears a fashionable soft hat, and is shown bust-length against a green background, while Giorgione’s portrait dispenses with such outward accessories, focusing solely on the man’s face. It is true that his jacket was once green, a colour which might have allied Giorgione’s portrait even more closely to Dürer’s. And yet in this work we are moved much closer to the sitter, so that his physical presence is very hard to ignore. The mournful intensity of his returning gaze is unsettling, seeming to demand emotional response and acknowledgement. This was a pictorial device that Giorgione was soon to utilize again in works such as La vecchia, in which intensely communicative painted eyes similarly capture and hold those of the beholder, binding us to the image and undermining our ability to separate ourselves from it. It may be that Giorgione learned how to generate this sense of close psychological interaction from the work of the other great artistic influence on his portrait: Leonardo da Vinci. Dürer himself had become very interested in Leonardo’s work during the course of his visit to Italy in 1505–6. Giorgione’s suddenly more Leonardesque paintings of these years were, perhaps, an indirect response, mediated through the Nuremberg painter’s example. Long before Dürer’s arrival, however, a general sense of Leonardo’s approach had been available to local painters in Venice through the example of one-time followers such as Giovanni Agostino da Lodi (active c. 1490–c. 1515), who had settled in the lagoon city in the

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1490s. And the evidence of Giorgione’s own paintings suggests that he had also gained more precise knowledge through some drawings that Leonardo had brought with him on a brief visit to the city in 1500.12 Comparison of Dürer’s Portrait of a Man with the Terris Portrait makes it clear enough that the latter is more profoundly Leonardesque. Abandoning the lively outlines and local colours of Dürer’s painting, Giorgione unifies and simplifies the form of his sitter by allowing the edges of his body to disappear into a warmly toned darkness, and softly modelling his flesh using varying admixtures of black and white to generate an illusion of protruding and receding surfaces. Leonardo had recommended in his notebooks that aspiring portrait painters should observe how, in bad weather or in the evening, when the distraction of local colours and formal outlines is diminished, and lights and shadows exaggerated, the faces of men and women appear with more ‘grace and softness’.13 Less, he had thus suggested, was also more in painting, for such semi-hidden forms appeared more beautiful and were imbued with a heightening sense of psychological mystery. Giorgione ratchets up the drama of his portrait by developing a similar equation between visual concealment and expressive suggestion. If we are now moved uncomfortably close to the sitter’s face, then this does not introduce the kind of meticulously objective surface treatment so typical of northern painting, and still evident in Dürer’s Portrait of a Man. Drawing nearer to the body does not lead to anything more precise or closely stated in Giorgione’s handling. A pool of amorphous shadow creates the nostrils; a slight greying of the pinker tones of the mouth makes the light stubble of his

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potential beard appear over the upper lip, chin and lower jaw. Fluid tonal variations between grey, light pink and cream are enough to generate a sense of the bridge of the prominent nose, the hooded brows and the high forehead. There is no question that Giorgione’s ability to conjure a suggestion of a three-dimensional head had greatly increased in the years separating this work from the Berlin Portrait of a Man of about 1500. But it is also true that this illusionary quality involves a further reduction of the amount of visual information actually supplied by the paint. Softly blended shadows and lights rather than sharp lines or contrasts suffice to give the impression of a face. Our awareness of the sitter’s close physical presence and pensive psychological mood is conjured using an oil technique built out of a series of painterly generalizations and elisions. Giorgione’s mature style insists more absolutely that we must read into the image to make it properly appear, supplying what is missing, for example, in the area of nebulous shadow that conceals the edges of the sitter’s form. It would be possible to misunderstand the nature of Leonardo’s influence on Giorgione in this respect, given that the Florentine’s approach was typically more inductive or empirical. Leonardo indicates that the artist should carefully consider the ‘disappearances’ of sight, but this always served his primary purpose of capturing the material realities (however complex and fluid) of the natural world itself. Giorgione, on the other hand, used Leonardesque sfumato to further develop the expressive possibilities of visual generalization. Rather than attempting to offer accurate calibrations of the complex realities of natural appearance, Giorgione was most

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responsive to the opportunities that Leonardo’s approach offered for exploring the intersubjectivity of the viewerimage relationship in painting. In the Terris Portrait, it is the way in which the beholder’s eye, abhorring a vacuum, must finish the image beyond what is actually given that Giorgione highlights. But this completion remains ambiguous insofar as it does not finally imply our arrival at an objectively accurate image. Despite Giorgione’s presentation of his sitter in dramatic close-up, he appears, in part at least, to be a projection of our own fantasy. For all its apparent naturalism, the Terris Portrait is also a knowing and self-conscious artistic construct, its alluring visual drama created through the modulation of carefully selected effects of light and shade. Giorgione’s own choice about this dispersal of pictorial effects controls what we see and what we do not. And this pictorial arrangement serves less to give a clear idea about who the sitter is than to lend him an air of mystery or enigma, while also creating a self-consciously original, and highly collectable, work of art intended, perhaps, to be of much interest in its own right. It remains an open question whether or not the patron was, in fact, the sitter himself or his family, or a patrician collector keen to possess a new pictorial invention by Giorgione. In any case, Giorgione’s work might remind us of Vasari’s sceptical commentary on the way in which this painter always ‘represented figures according to his own fancy’. In the Terris Portrait, the sitter does not fully survive as an independent person beyond the control of the master who depicts him. In this way, too, Giorgione’s approach compromised the expectations of the commissioned portrait, transforming it into an image that reveals his own artistic

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procedures and choices. We will never know if his sitter really was so poetically melancholic, or if he was haunted by a sense of transience, although we do know that these were common themes in many works by Giorgione. Indications of the sitter’s physical reality and social status in the world still had a fundamental part to play in the portraiture of Dürer and Leonardo, for all the artfulness of their works. In Giorgione’s painting, on the other hand, the man is further removed from such outward factors and is shown secluded within a pictorial 24 Titian, Portrait of Gian Giacomo Bartolotti da Parma, c. 1516, oil on canvas.

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space that is ultimately subject to the painter’s own expressive interests and concerns. The radically artistic quality of Giorgione’s approach becomes more evident still when the Terris Portrait is compared with a work by Titian, probably painted about a decade later (illus. 24).14 Using a style that is at once more formally dynamic and anatomically grounded, Titian returned his sitter to a more objective reality, leaving little doubt as to his appearance, while also hinting at his powerfully three-dimensional body and inner self-confidence. Even if Titian’s painting does not feature the same sitter, as has sometimes been argued, it is clear enough that the younger master sought to sweep away the shadowed melancholy and visual ambiguity of Giorgione’s prototype.15 In Titian’s work, a consistent sense of the independent physical presence of his patron/sitter reappears, firmly establishing his character as a successful and dynamic man of the world. This was also to return the Renaissance portrait to its original moorings in outward empirical reality and to make Giorgione’s divergence seem like an overly subjective aberration.

young man with an ar row Giorgione’s Portrait of a Man and Terris Portrait maintain certain features – the presentation of their subjects in early sixteenthcentury dress and without symbolic attributes – indicating their status as commissioned portraits. But other aspects of these works push against the usual boundaries of this picture type. To this extent, the expressive mode developed in these ‘portraits proper’ is not so different to a further small group

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of paintings in which Giorgione asks us to question their status as portraits in a more fundamental way. In a painting originally described by Michiel in 1532 as a ‘Boy with an Arrow’ but which seems to feature a post-pubescent young man perhaps around the age of twenty, certain of the pictorial devices that Giorgione had deployed in the Terris Portrait are again in play, though they now serve as a vehicle for the depiction of an ideal type of beautiful male youth (illus. 25).16 In making this transformation, Giorgione might have had in mind local examples such as Giovanni Bellini’s so-called 25 Giorgione, Young Man with an Arrow, c. 1506–7, oil on poplar.

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Portrait of a Humanist, a kind of fantasy portrait featuring a young man in the guise of a classical scholar, crowned with laurel leaves and wearing an antique mantle (illus. 26).17 The idea that we see a contemporary individual dressed up or performing in the role of an imaginary one lies behind Bellini’s painting. If the man’s all’antica attire suggests that he is a figure

26 Giovanni Bellini, Portrait of a Humanist, c. 1475–80, oil on panel.

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from the revered world of ancient Rome, then the close Netherlandish-style detailing of his face, replete with realistic Antonellesque stubble around the jaw, leaves us in little doubt that this is a portrait of a living individual who is acting a part. In Giorgione’s painting, on the other hand, the sitter is more thoroughly disguised so that it becomes unclear whether we are viewing a portrait at all. To this extent the real and the imaginary are elided rather than being defined as opposing entities. Giorgione retreats from Bellini’s firm individuation of his sitter, so that this youth appears like a generic type whose appearance is remodelled using a formal vocabulary familiar from classical art. Giorgione uses strong highlighting to emphasize the paleness of his sitter’s flesh, while his facial features, with Roman nose and rosebud lips set into a symmetrical ovoid-shaped head, also insistently recall the ideal forms of antique marble sculpture. Giorgione, as Vasari noted, had a long-lasting interest in the Renaissance debate about the relative merits of painting and sculpture known as the paragone.18 And in the Young Man with an Arrow he deliberately invites a formalistic comparison between visual media of this kind. If Giorgione could closely imitate the conventions of antique sculpture in his painting, then the softening of the surfaces and edges of the form of his figure, using a delicate sfumato derived from Leonardesque examples, indicates the final superiority of painting in the imitation of nature.19 These self-consciously formalistic aspects might also suggest that Giorgione sought to create a generic or ideal pictorial image of a ‘handsome man’ or bell’uomo, a kind of painting that would necessarily involve the correction of more individualized features in

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accordance with the classical canon of perfected forms. The emphasis on the young man’s physical beauty would then serve as a metaphorical figure of Giorgione’s own perfected work of art. On the other hand, Giorgione does continue to suggest that his work is, at least, portrait-like, drawing directly on certain of the pictorial devices he had introduced in the Terris Portrait. We are once again positioned very close to the sitter, who emerges out of the soft darkened background to be physically adjacent to us. And despite the elements of idealization it remains possible that this young man is a contemporary individual dressed up or performing the part of a figure from the past. If it is unlikely that he is playing St Sebastian, as has sometimes been suggested, then it may be that he performs as the classical sun god Apollo or, more likely still, Eros.20 Male physical beauty and its power to generate sexual desire is, after all, the obvious subtext of this painting. The combination of the contemporary-looking camicia worn beneath the classicizing red mantle might suggest that we see a contemporary youth who role-plays a figure from the distant past, in a similar manner to Giorgione’s self-portrait. The display of this subtly extravagant undergarment, laced with gold embroidery, and shown in immediate proximity to the similarly coloured ivory flesh of the young man, suggests that we might enjoy immediate access to his fleshy body. His slightly unfocused gaze out towards us, as suffused with passion in his performance as the young god of love, creates an effect of immediate connection that threatens to make such role-playing seem irrelevant. Meanwhile, his delicately elongated fingers caress the shaft of his upwardly tilted arrow, which is turned into the picture

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space towards his own body, as if it follows the beholder’s own desire-infused sightlines. To this extent, it appears less like an objective identifying attribute of the sitter than as a symbol of our own feelings of amorous attraction to the beautiful figure. The eroticization of the imagery in this painting provides, indeed, a fundamental point of contrast with Bellini’s earnestly sober and masculine Humanist, whose depiction, despite the play-acting, appears always more contained by the external demands of a contemporary portrait sitter for an accurate depiction. Giorgione takes greater pictorial liberties, generating a newly independent kind of pictorial space for his more intimate and sensual depiction. If the sitter’s face has been radically remodelled according to the classical repertoire, his flesh whitened and features evened to suggest flawless marble, then these ‘improvements’ serve only to heighten the sense of intimate physical connection with an impassioned beholder. Here, we might recall again the implicit homoeroticism of Giorgione’s Self-portrait as David, which skilfully manipulates visual types and their associations to create room for the expression of potentially transgressive meanings. Both works are tellingly dependent for such effects on their deliberate maintenance of visual ambiguity: on the way in which they allow real and ideal to interpenetrate or coalesce within a newly independent or self-determining domain of art.

laur a In the painting typically known as ‘Laura’ of 1506 Giorgione retreats, to some extent, from the idealism of the Young Man

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with an Arrow, but nonetheless presents a work that actively challenges our ability to identify the precise kind of picture we see, or what it might mean (illus. 27).21 In this work, as in a further related painting of an old woman known as La vecchia (illus. 28), Giorgione treads the line between portrait, 27 Giorgione, Laura, 1506, oil on wood.

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portrait-like and non-portrait with even greater deftness. The Laura emits pictorial signs that seem deliberately intended to contradict one another. Close attention to the details of her appearance immediately suggest that this is a portrait of a contemporary woman, as does the careful alignment of the sitter’s head and body in the manner of a portrait bust, a typical arrangement, as we have seen, in fifteenth-century portraiture. Such features have encouraged the idea that Giorgione depicted a high-ranking named individual, such as the Venetian noblewoman Laura Donà, who married in June 1506, the same month mentioned in the inscription on the back of the painting.22 Others have argued that we are shown a contemporary sitter as a personification of Poetry. Perhaps we view a now unknown female poet in this guise, or in that of Petrarch’s famous muse, Laura? In either case, the laurel bush behind the sitter would symbolize poetry itself, rather than the chastity or virtue of a recent bride.23 With her dark hair and rounded fleshly face, however, ‘Laura’ looks very unlike a noblewoman or poet. Her thickset and swarthy appearance, with just a hint of a developing double chin, make her appear more like a contemporary woman of the local Venetian popolo (‘populace’) than the ideal blonde muse of Petrarch’s poetry. The ambiguous movement of her right hand, whether this is taken as covering or revealing her breast, appears casual and commonplace, indicating that ‘Laura’ coexists in a shared and intimate present with the viewer, immediately bringing the work closer to the kind of mise-en-scène presented in the Young Man with an Arrow. Giorgione is at pains to suggest the physicality of the young woman’s apparently naked body beneath the partial covering

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of her garment, bringing her flesh into immediate proximity with the luxuriant lining of her jacket. Fingertips, breast and fur, it is suggested, share common qualities of extreme sensitivity and softness. The radical blurring of the fluid red touches that must stand in for the physical reality of her nipple in this passage might suggest the kind of radical diminishment of vision attendant upon intense physical desire: as if the clarity of the painted description of the form must yield to the force of the beholder’s projective passion. The very intensity of Giorgione’s sensual presentation militates against the idea that this painting is a portrait of a respectable wife, just as it makes it difficult to see the work as a lofty and abstract allegory. Perhaps, instead, Giorgione depicted a Venetian courtesan, and of course this would go some way towards explaining the eroticization of the imagery. The name ‘Laura’ was understood as a euphemistic term for courtesans in the sixteenth century, some of whom, at least, became renowned as poets.24 Perhaps this identity also explains the strangely oversized jacket that ‘Laura’ wears, which might have the appearance of a man’s outdoor coat rather than a delicate garment in a lady’s wardrobe.25 Reading the painting as a genre work featuring a morally questionable social type, we might think that this courtesan is naked beneath a jacket owned by her current lover or client, who has asked her to put it on for the sake of decorum, or perhaps to heighten the erotic charge with an implication of cross-dressing. The inscription tells us that the work was commissioned by a mysterious ‘messer Giacomo’, perhaps suggesting that he was this man.26 Or maybe the incongruous jacket was the painter’s own. Following the publication of the inventories of Giorgione’s possessions in

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2011, this garment was quickly identified with one of the listed items: an expensive red jacket lined with fox fur, highly valued at 12 ducats.27 But the identification of the jacket worn by the sitter in Giorgione’s painting with the garment listed in the inventory remains a matter of supposition. And it is not at all certain that ‘Laura’ is dressed in a man’s clothing, given that sixteenth-century women often wore such furlined items as overcoats.28 The possibility that Giorgione’s Laura depicts a type of feminine beauty modelled on the features of a contemporary courtesan remains, though, plausible enough. This would make the painting a kind of female equivalent to the Young Man with an Arrow, suggesting that the woman also represents someone play-acting a figure from the past or from the world of poetry. The ready response of early sixteenth-century Venetian painters to Giorgione’s Laura adds weight to this possibility, given that they apparently took this painting as a model on which to base their own sensuous images of semiclad ‘beautiful women’ or belle donne, often using courtesans for their sitters.29 In these works, painters very often showed young women with one breast revealed, thereby linking their paintings directly to the imagery of Venus Genetrix familiar in classical art. This, of course, was also to follow Giorgione’s lead in his Laura, where the seemingly casual exposure of the woman’s breast similarly serves to suggest that she is a contemporary type of the goddess of love. Giorgione’s adaptation of this all’antica motif was pioneering in Venetian painting. But it must again suggest his fascination with Leonardo, or at least with the Leonardesque, given that the Venus Genetrix reference had already been incorporated into an ideal image

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of a young woman in a drawing from this master’s circle in Milan that Giorgione might have known.30 When Giorgione’s Laura is considered alongside his La vecchia (see illus. 28), a further broad connection with Leonardo becomes apparent: this time with the Tuscan master’s persistent interest in physiognomic contrasts, evident from both his writings and drawings. If Giorgione’s Laura is taken as an image of ideal youthful beauty of this kind, then it might be tempting to see his depiction of La vecchia as a similarly ideal antitype, providing a generalizable image of ugliness and age. Although the two paintings were certainly not pendants, or even commissioned to be seen together, the fact that Giorgione completed them within the space of a year or two nonetheless suggests that he was actively experimenting with contrasting human types in a way that was analogous to Leonardo’s interests in this area. The conduit was again likely to have been Albrecht Dürer, whose Leonardesque Christ Among the Doctors (Madrid, Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection) was probably begun in Venice in 1506. In this work, Dürer meticulously contrasts extremes of youth and age, juxtaposing the beautiful face of the child Christ with the grotesquely distorted visages of the old doctors, employing his knowledge of Leonardo’s drawings featuring facial contrasts. Dürer’s painting also suggests that he did not closely follow or comprehend Leonardo’s implied critique of the supposedly scientific late medieval tradition of physiognomics. Leonardo had juxtaposed contrasting types in order to question simple binary divisions between ideal and real, beauty and ugliness, or youth and age in depictions of the human figure, and the usual assumption that these outward appearances provided

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adequate or reliable outward signs of inner moral qualities, such as knowledge and ignorance, or good and evil.31 Giorgione’s approach in both the Laura and La vecchia shows that he too sought to challenge the traditional idea that outward appearance could serve as an accurate index of inward moral identity. The ravaged appearance of Giorgione’s old woman, as we will see, is not allowed to serve as a visual indicator of her moral status, while the fleshy brunette in the Laura does not conform to the usual conventions of ideal feminine beauty. It is significant enough, in this regard, that Giorgione’s many followers in the Venetian belle donne tradition quickly corrected their prototype, showing their beautiful protagonists as Petrarchan blondes. In both of Giorgione’s paintings the sitters are granted a vital measure of independent personhood that complicates the imagery. An implicit critique of the pseudoscience of physiognomics probably lies behind the persistent implication that these are individualized portraits rather than representative character types. It cannot be doubted that two living people sat for the painter, even if it is unlikely that the paintings were commissioned by themselves, their husbands or families. In imitating the usual procedures of portraiture, Giorgione maintained something of its objectivizing naturalism, and La vecchia is easily the most realistic of his surviving works. The unusualness of such works becomes evident when it is remembered that women had featured relatively infrequently in Venetian portraiture to this point. Admittedly, Vittore Carpaccio had begun to include female portraits in his repertoire, and in the late 1490s had also produced an unusual genre-like painting featuring two fashionably dressed young women on a balcony

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who may or may not be courtesans.32 But depictions of women had featured very rarely, if at all, in the work of the leading painter in the city, Giovanni Bellini.33 Giorgione’s specific, but also monumental, representations of two contrasting contemporary women to this extent represents a highly original and provocative artistic gesture that challenged the usual gender exclusions of the painting type. Quite apart from the natural fact of their gender, the women that Giorgione depicts share a somewhat tangential relationship with respectable society in Venice. Leading courtesans, it has been well noted, could become renowned, owning their own lavish houses and being granted the rights to burial chapels in major Venetian churches.34 But if Giorgione’s ‘Laura’ is a woman pursuing this occupation, then her sale of sex for money would nonetheless have put her in an ambiguous relationship to marriage and the family. The seemingly inevitable corollary of agedness in La vecchia, on the other hand, is abject poverty. Impoverished old street women were occasionally depicted towards the margins of large-scale history paintings in Venice, where they are outsiders to the busy scene, sometimes appearing like Fates that predict the course of tragic future events. But such figures had not typically appeared within the elite frame of portraiture, a picture type largely reserved for the city’s ruling castes. Giorgione’s insistent suggestion that his depiction of the old woman is a portrait must have appeared as particularly provocative. It has been argued that such images supplied a comforting sense of the ultimate weakness of these women vis-à-vis their elite male viewers, nullifying their potential threat as excluded people by setting them into the safe fictive domain of the painted image.35 But

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Giorgione’s particular way of representing them as significant individuals, of great interest to their beholders, closed off the possibility of easy cultural distancing or patronizing misogyny. The characteristic intimacy of his sensual pictorial presentation seems intended to suggest our unavoidably close connection with them.

la vecchia Giorgione seems always to have avoided the use of didacticism in his paintings, even if this was the more established approach taken in many works of the Renaissance. If the Laura does feature a courtesan, it is evident enough that Giorgione was at pains not to moralize over her as if she were venal or culpable. His La vecchia might similarly have provided an opportunity to sermonize on the subject of female vanity and the passing of time (illus. 28).36 In this painting, a singular and fixed moral message appears to be made explicit by the two words displayed near the sitter’s pointing hand reading ‘Col tempo’. ‘With time’, the woman’s appearance seems to tell us, we too will become like her: physically deteriorated and materially impoverished. Giorgione’s painting might easily be taken as an example of the familiar medieval and Renaissance theme of vanitas or as a memento mori. But the fastidious detailing of her physical appearance goes beyond the express needs of a mere moralizing depiction. The very insistence of Giorgione’s portrait-like naturalism in this work occludes or interrupts our ready comprehension of its potential symbolic content, making this painting always something more than a visually encoded didactic message against the woman depicted.37

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Comparison with Dürer’s near-contemporary depiction of the sin of Avarice as an old woman establishes this point (illus. 29).38 In Dürer’s painting the old woman is represented as the very embodiment of a deadly sin, her decayed and ugly physical form narrowly expressing the picture’s governing moral idea in strictly physiognomic fashion. Judgement against the woman dictates every aspect of Dürer’s work and 28 Giorgione, La vecchia, c. 1506–7, tempera and oil on canvas.

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its details allow for no ambiguity in this respect: we note the leering smile, the offer of a sagging breast – a savagely ironic reference to the Venus Genetrix type, and perhaps more specifically to Giorgione’s recent Laura – and then, of course, there is the telltale bag of gold coins.39 A comfortable masculine dig at the avaricious old woman’s expense, as she offers to exchange sex for money, secures the viewer’s sense of a superior and distanced relationship to her. Technical examination carried out in the mid-twentieth century suggested that Giorgione originally showed his sitter in La vecchia in a way that was closer to Dürer, in a revealing low-cut dress, and perhaps with one breast bared.40 But as he worked on the painting, Giorgione moved away from this distancing, satirical kind of representation: his old woman makes no equivalent sexual offer to the viewer, but reaches out to us in an emotional sense across the superficial barrier of the parapet. Her exchange with us will, she seems to insist, always be personal, even if its precise nature becomes uncertain.41 The most recent restoration of the painting in 2018–19 focused primarily on reversing some of the paint additions made by earlier restorers, suggesting a new measure of ambiguity about the age of the sitter. Perhaps she is not quite so old as she had seemed (sixty-ish?), and this more youthful quality makes her more accessible, allowing her to emerge as an individual rather than as a conventionalized type of agedness. Giorgione secures our sense of her powerfully embodied presence by making the picture type to which his image belongs difficult to determine. If Dürer’s painting can comfortably be identified as a mocking allegory, then in Giorgione’s we appear to be presented with a secular portrait: a depiction of

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a living being. Dürer’s work originally served as a cover for a portrait of a young man; and in a Vendramin inventory of 1601, Giorgione’s painting is also listed as a timpano for a now unknown portrait of a young man in furs, indicating that it was then understood to make a misogynistic contrast to his youthful power and wealth.42 But this later usage does not establish the original function of the work, and might well represent yet another posthumous attempt to clarify the meaning of Giorgione’s originally more ambiguous and probing imagery; or perhaps it was even an attempt to diminish or undermine its implication of independent feminine power. There is a still older tradition going back to an inventory of 1567 that identifies the sitter as Giorgione’s mother: one that deserves to be taken seriously given that the wording seems to suggest that the painting features the artist’s parent in particular, rather than a more generic image of a mother.43 But the portrait-like features of La vecchia are, in Giorgione’s characteristic manner, then countermanded by others. Even if Altadona Barbarella did sit for the painting, it does not follow that this is only a portrait of her. The inscription immediately suggests that we must see her as more widely representative of the trials of ageing. Giorgione liked to take drapery for a walk. The woman’s headdress might be attached to the fringed white garment draped over her shoulder, but is more certainly distinct from the similarly coloured undergarment glimpsed at her neckline, which might feasibly be understood as reappearing at her sleeve. 44 The layers of pale cloth around her never quite compose themselves into a winding cloth of the kind used to enwrap the dead, but might nonetheless be another subtle

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way of posing the formulation ‘Col tempo’. We might even be tempted to see the parapet as the forward edge of a tomb, as it sometimes appears in Giovanni Bellini’s devotional works (see illus. 12), with the looming woman as an eerie visitor from beyond the grave. But her inscription, visually mirroring her pointing right hand, is not the familiar cartellino or piece of stiff-edged folded paper often to be seen in Bellini’s paintings, where it typically appears pinned to the 29 Albrecht Dürer, Avarice, c. 1507, oil on panel.

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front of the parapet, its message stating the artist’s facture of the work.45 Closer inspection reveals that Giorgione’s inscription is presented as a further extension of the sitter’s undergarment: an illogical (from a strictly functional point of view) extension of her inner sleeve, made of linen rather than paper, its curling form picking up the looped gathering of pale cloth at her neckline (illus. 30).46 The careful presentation of this detail recalls the tradition of painted banderoles or phylactery: ribbon-like scrolls with inscriptions often to be seen in religious paintings, including many examples from Venice (see illus. 11). Although sometimes held in the hands of angels, they were also especially connected with the idea of speaking, sometimes appearing to issue directly from a figure’s mouth in a manner analogous to a modern speech bubble. Giorgione’s

30 Giorgione, detail from La vecchia.

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woman has her mouth open in mid-sentence, perhaps giving us a more extended account of the deleterious effects of time upon her. Banderoles, we should note, were most closely associated with prophetic speech in visual art, especially that of the pre-Christian Sybils, those often-aged female figures whose oracular pronouncements about the future are contrasted with the fully literate book-carrying male prophets or followers of Christ. The utterances of the Erythrean Sybil, in particular, were understood to have a dark eschatological significance, predicting the immanent coming of the end of the world. In the sixteenth century, several earlier portraits of contemporary women were posthumously associated with these premonitory figures, probably as a result of the growing popularity of half-length ‘portrait-like’ sets of the Sybils in northern Europe. 47 Giorgione’s woman was perhaps also intended to remind the viewer of such authoritative, though sombre, female truth-tellers, whose message predicted a dark future for a viewer imagined as still young and unknowing. But do we really see a Sybil in Giorgione’s painting? And is that really a banderole associated with the prophetic power of speech that curls away from the old woman’s wrist? As with so many other interpretative clues included in Giorgione’s paintings, the apparent indication of a wider meaning is truncated, curtailed or undermined even as it is suggested. After all, pictorial banderoles are more typically featured as extensive flag-like objects that flutter in the upper area of a sacred composition, indicating that their lengthy inscriptions are heavenly utterances. They serve a fundamentally explicatory purpose within the image, revealing the precise underlying meaning of the allegory.48 On the other hand, the apparently

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clarifying inscription in Giorgione’s painting is placed low in the picture field and is attached to her undergarment. The suggestion that she has revealed this writing inadvertently becomes significant. In the banderole tradition, the written words appear as if predetermined and declamatory, flowing away from the mouths or hands of the persons who emit them, as if to supersede their merely physical bodies. In the figure of Giorgione’s woman, the brief inscription remains closely attached to her, as if to deny ‘the Word’ freedom from the complicating experience of ‘the Flesh’. In this way, too, Giorgione holds the more abstract allegorical associations of the ‘Col tempo’ message at bay. It is the illusion of La vecchia’s immediate bodily presence, in the midst of an unfinished conversation with the viewer, that he emphasizes. The observational intensity of Giorgione’s treatment of the sagging flesh of her face, with its contradictory indications of outer physical weakness and inner strength, binds Giorgione’s old woman into the reality of the present moment. Her puffy skin and wisps of thinning grey hair cannot quite prepare us for the challenge of her eyes, which burn with communicative intensity and emotion. Do they express a settled and achieved wisdom, or something much more terrible? Bitter resentment of pleasures lost, for example, or fierce jealousy of the delights of the still young? The famous art historian Erwin Panofsky acknowledged the terribilità of the image, though he also made this the reason for attributing the work to the young Titian instead, arguing that the ‘gentle master from Castelfranco’ could not have produced such a work. 49 Yet, as other Giorgiones such as the Self-portrait as David (see illus. 2) indicate, this painter did

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not always use a delicately retiring poetic mode. Many of his works are much more provocative and disturbingly interactive than Panofsky imagined. As the old woman speaks, revealing a leathery tongue and stumps of yellowing teeth, she breaks the gathering taboo of European portraiture in the service of the educated courtly elites, who understood that the mouth should be shown as closed in order to demonstrate intellectual control over emotions. As an impoverished member of the social underclass, featured in a work that she probably did not commission, condone or control, Giorgione’s sitter was exempted from such rules of polite behaviour. But this does not mean that she is depicted as the kind of posturing misogynistic caricature of Dürer’s imagining. Rather than offering a trite message against carefree sensual pleasure, Giorgione forces us to experience something of the sitter’s experience of loss through the depredations of time, an emphasis that allows her to appear more as a tragic figure than as a satirical one. This old woman is surely not depicted in the positive light imagined by some recent commentators, as an example of virtuous old age, but neither is she made an example of.50 Still very much present in her fleshly state, she goes on suffering its inevitable tortures. Engaging the senses of her viewers, the pain of her lived experience takes on an altogether more bodily kind of connection with us. And her own attitude, it is implied, is based less on pious Christian regret for former pleasures taken, or on the related fear of God’s punishment to come as she approaches death, than on the realities of her painful physical experience in the present. She ‘regrets’, as it were, in a secular rather than a spiritual way, and is tormented

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more by the loss of her former beauty and confident self than by any ethical lesson she has learned. The depiction of open-mouthed figures, like those showing eyes rolling in their sockets, was an increasingly well-known visual trope borrowed from classical antiquity. It is tempting to suggest a connection between Giorgione’s painting and the rediscovery of the antique sculpture known as the Laocoön just a year or so earlier in Rome, which also featured these exaggerated facial indicators of inner emotion. Nearer to home, the probable patron of La vecchia, Gabriele Vendramin, exchanged an antique sculptural figure with bocca aperta with another Venetian collector.51 Such figures were in any case well known in Venice from the mounting of many relief sculptures across the city, known as bocche di leone. In one such work at the Ducal Palace from the Quattrocento those wishing to make a private complaint against another citizen to the state authorities were encouraged to post their defamatory messages through the open mouth of an old woman, with the implication that her terrifying visage was the very image of righteous moral denunciation (illus. 31). It would probably be a mistake to tie these various visual sources too closely to Giorgione’s La vecchia, even if his work shares certain features with them. But his figure does, nonetheless, insist on an unusually direct and intimate kind of communication with us. As she speaks, the woman gestures towards herself with her right hand, the so-called dexter manus that so often suggests truth in Renaissance art and that Giorgione had already employed in paintings such as his Self-portrait as David. And this hand points towards her heart to suggest the verity of what she is saying.

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Speaking pictures were a common enough phenomenon in Renaissance Venice, especially in the field of sacred art, where they regularly caused redeeming miracles to happen, sharing with, and actively responding to, the heightened emotions and concerns of those who prayed before them. But in Giorgione’s La vecchia such pictorial responsiveness is transferred into a newly secularized pictorial domain that persistently evokes the objectivizing conventions of portraiture. And while the miracle-working religious images do not 31 A mid-15th-century bocca di leone in a wall of the Palazzo Ducale, Venice.

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typically envision or make explicit the spoken interchange between painting and spectator, Giorgione dramatized precisely this kind of verbal discourse, using modern illusionistic conventions to make his picture quite literally appear to speak to the beholder. Our uncomfortable discorso or conversation with La vecchia threatens to close completely the gap between painting and viewer. Rather than appearing as a fixed and mute memorial to an individual’s past glory, as in the conventional commissioned portrait, Giorgione’s sitter is presented as unnervingly alive, sharing an ever-shifting present with the countless myriad of succeeding viewers with whom she demands to speak. And yet there is something always ongoing and incomplete about this conversation. La vecchia must always talk on, locked into the endlessness of the recurring moment, paradoxically destined to voice her complaint about the passing of time for all eternity. time and the concert/thr ee ages of man Small details in Giorgione’s portraits and portrait-like paintings, such as the unbuttoned doublet in the Portrait of a Man, or the woman’s slight hand movement in the Laura, have the effect of making the sitter appear to occupy a shared moment of intimacy with the viewer. In La vecchia the old woman speaks directly to us in a conversation without end. She appears to join us determinedly in the ongoing present, and this also elucidates the theme of the painting, with its indication of all prevalent temporality. This was to undo the monumentalizing and mnemonic functions of the Quattrocento portrait, which had promised its sitter an escape from this onward

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temporal flow insofar as it fixed or secured his or her appearance and memory for posterity. As Alberti had noted, undoubtedly with Hippocrates’ famous classical aphorism ‘ars lunga vita brevis’ in mind, painting was god-like in its capacity to defeat time, offering to make ‘the absent present’ and allowing ‘the faces of the dead to go on living for a very long time’.52 The idea of immortalizing people in painted portraits was always over-optimistic, given that the mere depiction of their faces did not, at least without the aid of written inscriptions, secure an ongoing memory of their precise identities.53 In his portraits and portrait-like paintings, Giorgione did not buy into this idea of artistic preservation in the first place, reintegrating his sitters into the moment, even if the price paid for this was that they became more ambiguous. The radical temporality developed in such works defaces, in this way, the pictorial genre that they seem to engage, subjecting the reserved time-defeating space of portraiture to a more radical sense of contingency and transience. But this kind of submission of painting to time does not admit a diminution of its power, as Alberti might have feared. If, in Giorgione’s hands, art no longer maintains, fixes or monumentalizes, then it instead gives a new sense of the ‘ongoing-ness’ of physical existence in the world, and uncovers new possibilities of emotional intimacy with the persons depicted. Questions of time and transience are raised in many of Giorgione’s works, linking La vecchia to the rest of his oeuvre and indicating that it is, despite Panofsky’s doubts, one of his most characteristic works. Time underlies the contrast between youth and age, however mediated, in his Self-portrait

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as David, and it underpins the contrast between the eternal fixity of the monumental foreground of the Castelfranco altarpiece and the indications of contemporary secular life in the landscape beyond. As we shall see, in works such as the Tramonto, the Three Philosophers and the Tempest, the distant sun sets or a thunderbolt suddenly strikes, and considerations of worldly temporality are again central to Giorgione’s conception. And this concern seems also to have been incorporated into the visual elisions and disappearances of Giorgione’s technique, which adumbrates forms rather than painstakingly defining them. The reality of the world he depicts is made dependent on the equally fleeting subjectivity of the eye that beholds it. Meanings, in Giorgione’s conception, are also brief, constantly truncated or obscured, rather than existing fully or enduringly. And painting serves less to hold up or defeat this human condition of transience than to acknowledge its prevailing force. If time had traditionally been understood in Augustinian terms as a moral negative reflecting man’s fall from the grace of God, its passing marking our ever-increasing distance from the original state of paradise, then too much contemplation of it could nonetheless appear as an invitation to the sin of Acedia or sloth.54 But Giorgione’s concern was not primarily moral or ethical in kind, and occurred as readily in his secular works as in his sacred ones. His constant reminders of temporality do not provide a lesson in Christian ethics, as our analysis of La vecchia has already suggested, but lead instead back to issues of human existential reality. Perhaps, too, a heightened apprehension of time and its passing underpins Giorgione’s special concern with music, given that it is a

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specifically temporal medium, and that sound itself is the most short-lived of the human senses.55 In a further painting, traditionally known as the Concert or the Three Ages of Man, the suggestion that we view a scene of music-making is made slight, dependent on our very truncated angled view of a couple of staves of musical manuscript held by the boy (illus. 32).56 This characteristic visual reticence distinguishes Giorgione’s painting from a concert scene by the young Titian, who leaves us in no doubt that music-making is afoot, and includes two penetrating portraits (illus. 33).57 Giorgione’s painting, on the other hand, remains typically ‘portrait-like’, not quite allowing us to believe that it is a triple portrait, let alone to identify specific sitters. A concert is perhaps indicated again 32 Giorgione, Concert/Three Ages of Man, c. 1507–8, oil on panel.

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by the raising of the young man’s finger, as if he is pointing out the figure of musical time or ‘tactus’.58 There are no instruments, however: if we are to see these three as making music, then this is imagined as a matter of hearing alone (notice the emphasis on the old man’s ear that visually answers the pointing hand). Through hearing, the figures might share a brief moment of harmony, appearing as unified by a regularized and sequential rhythm. Music, Giorgione’s visual elisions may suggest, cannot be seen, and to this extent is the very opposite of painting, which engages precisely that which is visible. Developing the comparison or paragone between artistic media, music is different from painting again insofar as it is a sequential medium that unfolds through time, while its

33 Titian, Concert, c. 1511–12, oil on canvas.

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linear progress is organized by melodic harmony and rhythm. But to this extent, Giorgione might suggest, it is also inferior to painting, which possesses a special capacity to present effects of visual simultaneity. Painting surpasses music just because of its openness to a more complex and nuanced sense of temporality. It might have been expected that the other kind of longer-stretch human time implied in Giorgione’s Concert, that relating to the idea of the ‘Three Ages of Man’, would merely support the idea of the regularized beat of the musical tactus. Drawing on a sacred iconography familiar from recent tomb sculpture in Venice, Giorgione here appears about to reinforce a more conventional kind of harmony between the different generations.59 But then the old man’s doleful, knowing gaze out of the painting is allowed to meet our own, disturbing the comforting pattern. Once again engaging Leonardesque ideas of physiognomic contrast, while also recalling something of the power of the aged woman’s stare in La vecchia, this man’s wizened features form a telling contrast with those of the beautiful boy and young man to his left, one that speaks eloquently enough of time’s inevitable depredations. Suddenly breaking the harmonious spell of the intimate circle of listeners to look out over his shoulder, the old man’s sadly knowing eyes catch our own, as if to collude with us in our knowledge of something less comforting about time, beyond the short-lived illusions of harmony.

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G

iorgione’s interest in individualized human beings is evident enough in the portrait and portrait-like paintings discussed in the previous chapter. But he was also, and seemingly from the very outset of his career, particularly concerned with the non-human appearances of the landscape. Natural forms had, of course, always been subject to symbolic interpretation in painting, as in many other art forms. But they nonetheless offered special opportunities for the play of artistic invention or fantasia beyond the control of text-based meanings or narratives.1 Unlike portraiture, however, landscape painting had not yet properly emerged as an independent artistic genre around 1500.2 Among Giorgione’s works are one or two in which the natural setting itself appears to be the primary carrier of meaning. But in the majority of his paintings the exact relationship between the landscape and the figures so carefully set within it remains more ambiguous, appearing as the underlying question posed to the viewer. In the Three Philosophers and the Tempest, Giorgione keeps us guessing as to whether the human figures, placed as if in a narrative painting or allegory in the foreground of the picture space, will serve to explain the theme of the painting; or whether they are to be understood

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as expressions of the powerfully evoked natural environments they inhabit.3 Giorgione’s special engagement with the landscape was undoubtedly another aspect of his artistic inheritance from Giovanni Bellini, in whose paintings it had long played an important role. 4 For Bellini, the landscape was not just a secondary natural setting or background to the sacred subject, but was centrally involved in the expression of the given theme. Bellini typically drew on the countryside of the terra ferma, Venice’s territory inland from the city, a place of great affection for the lagoon city-dwellers, many of whom would have been very familiar with its appearances, or have owned

34 Giovanni Bellini, St Francis in the Desert, c. 1476–8, oil and tempera on panel.

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properties and land there. Bellini often included topographical details of well-known landmark buildings in terra ferma towns and cities in order to further remind his viewer of this or that location.5 These buildings were, however, typically set within landscape arrangements that Bellini himself had invented; and to this extent his views of the countryside are also generic or synthetic products of his own imagination. These carefully constructed landscapes are also arranged to best express the given sacred theme. Despite their familiar or worldly appearance, they are always ‘landscapes of faith’, closely allied to the visual realization of the given sacred subject matter.6 Natural or ‘disguised’ symbols, sometimes bringing Bellini’s approach close to that of fifteenth-century Netherlandish painters, were also important, so that a rising sun might serve well to express Christ’s Resurrection, or a battle between an egret and a snake, the fight between Good and Evil.7 In Bellini’s St Francis in the Desert, which once hung near to Giorgione’s Three Philosophers in the Venetian palace of Taddeo Contarini at Santa Fosca, the miraculous theological event of the Receiving of the Stigmata is easily contained within the natural economy of the landscape, rather than dramatically overturning its order (illus. 34).8 The sacred world is to this extent made intimate and familiar by the inclusion of the landscape. Religious meanings always remain at the level of disguised analogy, rather than being more explicitly stated, so that naturalistic appearances are not disturbed or undermined. Powerful effects of light play a similar role in Bellini’s landscapes, suggesting at once God’s divine radiance and the natural conditions of the powerful sun on the terra ferma. In the St Francis, it is the way in

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which the sudden intrusion of heavenly light at the top left is not wholly distinguishable from that falling so intensely across the entire shining landscape that best indicates Bellini’s approach. Whether heavenly or earthly, Bellini’s light is always clarifying and defining, allowing the precise details of a myriad of natural objects, flora and fauna to stand out in plain view. And the natural world that Bellini presents is a cultivated, humanized and comforting domain, well populated and cancelling the potential of otherness or threat. Nature supports or accommodates, its tranquil mood encouraging serene reflection and the contemplation of the eternal truths that underpin its appearances. This is the case even when Bellini depicts a saint in the wilderness, such as St Francis on Mount Verna, who experiences a supernatural intervention. Bellini lays out the landscape in order to facilitate our ready movement through it, and this effect of easy accessibility is increased by the provision of linking elements, such as man-made gates and pathways, or natural features such as rivers and mountains. Even the striated rocks seem ready to accommodate the needs of St Francis, as if ready carved by nature to provide a natural seat or arbour to facilitate his constant prayer and meditation. Rather than providing a limit to human experience or knowledge, Bellini’s landscape is a domain that benignly overlaps and supports the practical and spiritual activities of man and his relationship with God. the ador ation of the shepherds In the early religious works by Giorgione landscape already plays a significant role in a manner that immediately recalls

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Bellini’s example. But despite his development of various pictorial devices to link figures and settings, the landscape itself is glimpsed from afar, partially hidden or interrupted by foreground forms or structures, or appearing as a hazy abstraction beyond dividing walls or partitions. In his Adoration of the Shepherds, which might date from a few years later in 1505–6, we are granted more immediate visual access to a landscape that seems for the first time to fully absorb the figures into its wider domain (illus. 35).9 Giorgione generated the meaning of his painting by developing contrary spatial directions between a plunge into the depth in the landscape to the left and a lateral movement across the picture surface encouraged by the horizontal arrangement of the two shepherds. The idea of contrasting imagery between the two halves of the painting supports this, juxtaposing an accessible and gentle country view towards a lakeside with contemporary-looking buildings and distant mountains – replete with a tiny figure admiring the view – and the more enclosed and secluded scene to the right. In this latter zone, our progress into depth ends abruptly with the mountainous rock and the visual obscurity of the cave. Like the enlarged tree bole included to the right of the early Judith (see illus. 5), this vertiginous feature is presented as a section of an even larger structure that notionally continues beyond the picture. The motif of sheer rock harbouring a deep cavity gives an impression of the monumentality of nature, its massive but incomplete form remaining indecipherable. In many ways, this feature offers a stark contrast to the accommodating familiarity and accessibility of the well-populated civilized landscape to the left. It may be that Giorgione sought to imply that the shepherds have just arrived from the

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one domain – domesticated and humanly knowable – into another much less comforting one, dominated by unyielding vertical rocks and dark obscurity where they encounter the mystery of Christ’s birth. There are some well-known precedents in north Italian painting for showing just two shepherds rather than the more usual three in this subject.10 But it may nonetheless be that Giorgione implies that the ‘missing’ shepherd is the viewer himself, whose eye must turn away from the sensual pleasures of the lowland landscape to the left, towards the harsher, but more sacred, scene to the right. The position of the two shepherds also accommodates a direct view of the Christ child from the spectator’s position in front of the work. To this extent Giorgione’s painting subtly dramatizes this projected viewer’s moral choice. And reference to the patron’s own elevated rank is perhaps also reflected in the way that these ‘shepherds’ appear, despite their theatrically ragged clothing, as young Venetian noblemen in disguise, their delicate bodies and postures, like the elegant lost profile of their heads, supplying clues that these are rustics in disguise, and share a more elevated social status with the viewer.11 So much might tell us that this painting was made for an elite young patrician collector in Venice, who may have liked to imagine the rural world through the prism of pastoral poetry, but also understood his moral duties as a devout Christian. If Giorgione departed to some extent from the expected rustic humility of the Adoration of the Shepherds theme in making the adaptation to the context of a private cabinet painting, then he also invited his patron to contrast two opposing realities between the secular left and sacred

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right of his painting. It is no accident that the two depicted shepherds so definitely turn their backs on their comfortable former domain in the course of their new engagement with the latter. And this sacred region is, unlike in the early Adoration of the Magi (see illus. 13) or the Holy Family (see illus. 15), now separated off from the world of man. An arch-like natural grotto replaces the ruined man-made architectural structure in the Benson painting, and the sense in that work that we might still see a stable in the town of Bethlehem is, despite the inclusion of the anachronistic cave-dwelling ox and ass, cancelled altogether. Giorgione’s relocation of the Nativity to a rocky wilderness was anomalous enough in iconographic terms, but did reconfirm the contrasts of secular-sacred and 35 Giorgione, Adoration of the Shepherds, c. 1505–6, oil on panel.

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culture-nature between the two sides of the painting. Such clever and knowing departures from convention would have been greatly enjoyed by Giorgione’s sophisticated patron. Who this was is not quite clear, but might well have been the Venetian citizen Vittorio Beccario who, as Isabella d’Este’s agent reported, so prized his ‘very beautiful and unusual’ depiction of a ‘Night’ (or ‘Holy Night’) that he could not be persuaded to sell it at any cost. the tr amonto or ‘sunset landscape’ In the Adoration of the Shepherds Giorgione more definitely engaged landscape with the theme of his painting, such that its visual structure helps to express its underlying meaning. The close interlinking of figure, subject and natural setting is evident enough, and its general composition owed a great deal to Bellini’s St Francis.12 But certain of the ideas that Giorgione first experimented with in this work were soon to be developed further in works such as the Tramonto and the Three Philosophers. In these paintings, Giorgione developed the idea of a partial occlusion of the distant view, allowing the landscape to be still further truncated or sectionalized. The massive outcrop of rock in the Adoration, which sequesters the figures to the foreground right, already served as a kind of anti-landscape feature, contradicting the possibility of extended human vision that underpins the presentation of an open panoramic view. In the new works, large rocks and trees are combined with the obscurity of shadowy caves to further undermine the expectation of clarification given in a horizontally presented landscape.

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In the Tramonto, the first of these works, perhaps dating to about 1507, the sheer or vertically overhanging rocks might be mistaken for mere framing devices, facilitating movement towards the buildings glimpsed along the horizon at the centre (illus. 36).13 But these indications of human habitation are almost lost to sight through their distance, so that they do not provide a visual focal point, or a comforting alternative to the sombre harshness of the foreground scene. The contre-jour effect of the outcrop at the left indicates the presence of the setting sun behind it, but also emphasizes our distance from it. Our frustrated search for this light source only returns us back to the foreground, in which the densely opaque and space-destroying foliage of the trees supports the colourless effect of the rocks, preventing escape into the softer world of the far distance. The pool of yellowish water, still and brackish, provides no relief from the monochromatic opacity of the other natural forms depicted, creating irregular cliff-like banks that destroy any sense of a firm horizontal or level ground. The irrational folds of the rock, in which faces might easily seem to appear, further confuse our sense of a logical spatial arrangement or recession: of how one part of this haunting landscape might cohere with another. In this psychologized pictorial domain, a darkly ambiguous netherworld lurking beneath the hopeful surfaces of rational understanding seems to emerge: one in which uncontrolled monstrous chimeras appear among the shadows. And this sinister effect is exacerbated by the disturbing appearance of the twisting roots of the trees to the left, which rise up from the depths to slither appallingly over the surface of the rocks.

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Something of the sense of dis-ease created by Giorgione’s imagery in this painting is undoubtedly reflected in the overzealous restorations of the twentieth century, when sinister additions were made in the form of two monstrous creatures lurking in the pool at the centre and towards the right.14 As we have observed in a number of other instances, these interventions are likely to have been stimulated by the posthumous need to clarify Giorgione’s originally more ambiguous mode of visual presentation. Yet a further pool-dweller, the deformed open-beaked creature who appears about to leave its sludgy domain and move towards the foreground figures, appears to be entirely original. Although the seated figure appears to glance in its direction, the men do not seem to

36 Giorgione, Il Tramonto (Sunset Landscape), c. 1507, oil on canvas.

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have registered the creature’s imminent threat to their apparently altruistic activities. If the St George and the Dragon in the middle distance is a distracting modern addition, then the disintegrating head and arms of St Anthony, glimpsed in a cave to the right, seem also to be Giorgione’s work (illus. 37). Giorgione’s inclusion of this saint, like the menaced men who appear to help and heal one another in the foreground, might suggest that this painting was another commission from the powerful Grimani family who funded an Antonite hospice in Venice. The family leader, Cardinal Domenico Grimani, apparently had a special taste for the gruesome paintings of Hieronymus Bosch (1450–1516), and owned two versions of the Temptation of St Anthony, which include many similarly devilish creatures.15 But in the Tramonto, the saint has retreated so far from view that he is easily missed. Perhaps, in his quest for the spiritual insight attendant upon self-denial, he actively seeks to become part of the rock itself, disappearing into its dismal light-defying structure and losing many of his identifying human qualities in the process.

37 Detail from Giorgione, Il Tramonto (Sunset Landscape).

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Giorgione’s petrifying saint is very far from Bellini’s joyous figure of St Francis who steps boldly forwards to meet the clarifying light of God (illus. 34). This difference can stand as a paradigmatic marker of Giorgione’s direction of travel away from Bellini’s visual and spiritual certainty. If, in the older master’s work, the landscape and its figures serve to make nature always more intelligible to us, as well as newly comprehensible in terms of its relationship with the divine, then the opposite is true in Giorgione. The shadowy Tramonto is a painting that undoubtedly reflects the intensifying impact of Leonardo’s work on Giorgione around the years 1506–7, modelled with sweeping masses of softly contrasting lights and shadows that cancel the possibility of closely defined details. But this generalizing approach also provided a new opportunity to create overall mood or atmosphere, and by extension to suggest that what is seen in a landscape is always in part a matter of our own human projection. Giorgione’s approach in the Tramonto, as in the works that followed immediately from it, introduced a new dimension of emotional subjectivity into the depiction of landscape forms, suggesting that they may be no more than projections of the beholder’s inner thoughts or emotions. The recent technical examination of Tramonto has indicated that it is a religious painting, despite the fact that its main protagonist is quite literally buried within the all-prevalent forms of the landscape. Such imagery still engages, in certain ways, earlier depictions of the sacred wilderness or desert in which rocks and caves dominate over verdant pastures.16 It is often argued that Giorgione’s approach to landscape is essentially more classical than Christian, reflecting the impact of

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imagery derived from all’antica pastoral poetry, and that this distinguishes his work from Bellini’s.17 But the evidence for this is less than convincing, given the kind of darkly ambiguous meanings that Giorgione increasingly allowed to infuse his depictions of the natural world. The simple harmonies of shepherd life imagined in the Virgilian literary tradition of pastoral have relatively little place in his troubling paintings, even if they become more familiar in those of his followers. If, in a work such as the Adoration of the Shepherds, the possibility of pastoral escape into the innocence of nature underpins the left side of the painting, this is already juxtaposed with a more serious sacred conception to the right. In the sinister rocky domain of the Tramonto from a year or two later, with its distant and disappearing sun and foreboding sense of imminent darkness, we are further still from the comforting poetic ideals of the classical Arcadia. But the evident connection of such paintings with earlier depictions of the Christian wilderness was not ultimately to prove defining. As works such as the Three Philosophers and the Tempest reveal, Giorgione’s darkening vision of nature did not lead to his development of a new kind of sacred landscape art. the thr ee philosophers In the Three Philosophers, the enlarged figures, shown in brightly coloured and elaborately contrasting dress and placed towards the front of the picture, immediately suggest that this work is a subject painting or an allegory (illus. 38).18 Yet the precise subject is even less apparent than that of the Tramonto. Giorgione’s careful maintenance of a visual balance between

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natural and human forms is in itself one source of the doubts about its wider meaning. Despite the prominent figures, the landscape serves as much more than a mere setting and is visually demanding. Its complex or ‘difficult’ formation still draws to some extent on the Adoration of the Shepherds and the Tramonto, in particular expanding the motif of the darkened cave mouth. The painting has been cut down at the left by as much as 17.5 centimetres (7 in.), meaning that the effect of a visually impenetrable void would originally have been still more apparent. Set opposite to this dominating feature are a series of massive intertwining tree trunks that are equally difficult to understand in terms of their exact position in space, 38 Giorgione, Three Philosophers, c. 1507–8, oil on canvas.

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their relation to one another or to the earth beneath. Then, still further to the right, and completing the screened-off effect of the foreground, Giorgione includes a dark bed of dense foliage, whose creeping shadow engulfs the right side of the old man. This landscape is, in fact, radically irregular (note the bizarrely erratic ‘hairy’ line of the edge of the cave, which seems to respond to the writhing confusion of the bare tree boles). The eye has no way of navigating in a logical way from front to back in the Three Philosophers, given that the middle ground disappears once again, as in several of Giorgione’s earlier works. A thin residual sliver of far distance is all that remains to provide a sense of an expansive or explicatory view. As in the Tramonto, an impression of sequestered exile from the wider world of human culture dominates. It is uncertain whether Giorgione directly responded to Bellini’s St Francis in the Desert, given that this much earlier work may not have arrived in Taddeo Contarini’s collection until after the death of its original patron, Zuan Michiel, in 1513.19 But there are enough similarities between the two paintings to indicate that Giorgione had Bellini’s ground-breaking work closely in mind as he worked on the Three Philosophers. He maintained Bellini’s overall idea of a contrast between rocky foreground and a softer agrarian distance with human habitations, as also the curving pools of striated rock that provide a kind of natural dais for the figures. Bellini’s influence is evident again in the depiction of the old philosopher’s softly modelled head and beard, which recalls the older master’s recent figure of St Jerome in his San Zaccaria altarpiece of 1505. But Giorgione also asserted his difference from Bellini in many other details.

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In the draperies of the old man, he indicated his modernity in painting by using the newly available mineral-based pigments of orpiment and realgar.20 The broad tubular and looping fall of highly lit drapery is much closer to Leonardo than to Bellini. If Bellini’s St Francis shows a brightly lit and precisely defined world of pristine clarity and light that barely needs to acknowledge the miracle that occurs within it, then in Giorgione’s painting everything is much less apparent, with pools of dark and amorphous shadow becoming extensive. The strange assemblage of obscure or contradictory visual motifs generates an effect of bricolage, undermining the idea that we view a joined-up landscape whose combined features will help to elucidate the underlying meaning of the painting. Its various elements are disintegrated, perhaps even selfcontradictory. The way in which these individualized motifs press up close to the picture surface, appearing as incomplete sections of larger unseen formal masses, only makes them appear more ambiguous. The close juxtaposition of the bare wintry tree trunks with the lush summer foliage to the right and the spring sapling to the left suggests the appearances of more than one season at once. And the setting sun apparently glimpsed as a yellowing orb on the horizon is contradicted by the fall of light onto the facades of the distant buildings from a position far to the left. If the sun really does set to the left, then it remains hidden away in a similar position to that in the Tramonto, and must also be taken as the cause of the powerful contre-jour or silhouetting effect of the zigzagging foreground bank. The combination together of these diverse features might suggest that Giorgione sought to present a more allegorical image of the changeability of the natural

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world, featuring its different phases and appearances through time, rather than recording a single moment. This wider temporal conception would correspond with the presentation of the three men in different phases of life (young, middle aged and old), and is perhaps also picked up again in their placement on three shallow ascending natural rock steps, each of which relates to the other in a series of interlinked concentric circles. But all this remains a matter of conjecture, and it is no surprise to find that doubts about the precise identity of the three men have multiplied since Michiel’s initial description of them as ‘philosophers’ in 1525.21 In an inventory from twenty years later, they are described only as ‘figures’, while in another of 1638 they appear as ‘geometers and mathematicians’. Much later again, in 1783, they are mentioned in an inventory of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna as the ‘Three Magi’, so initiating a long series of interpretations of the work as a biblical painting showing the three kings waiting for the appearance of the star of Bethlehem. That interpretation appeared to gain further authority when an x-ray taken in 1932 seemed to prove that Giorgione had initially shown the middle philosopher as black rather than tawny-skinned, therefore further encouraging an identification of him as the well-known African magus Melchior.22 But this figure currently appears as Arabic rather than African, and further technical examination of what lies beneath the painted surface, undertaken in 2004, has shown that the figure had never been painted as black.23 The new infrared reflectography also put paid to the more general theory that Giorgione initially made paintings whose subjects were clear,

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then deliberately obscured his imagery in the course of painting in order to create ‘picture puzzles’ for the enjoyment of his patrons.24 We now know that while Giorgione certainly experimented quite radically with figures and appearances in the course of pictorial execution (the old philosopher once wore an astonishing headdress with solar rays exploding from it), he did not typically move from clarity to obscurity in the process of making a painting; neither did he systematically attempt to hide the subject matter of his works that had begun as clearly stated. Giorgione’s thematic ambiguity might instead have been more fundamental still. There is, in fact, no reason to disbelieve Michiel’s initial identification of these men as ‘philosophers’, even if his assertion that the youngest of them studies ‘the rays of the sun’ is difficult to understand from what we can see in the painting; his further comment that the work was finished by Sebastiano del Piombo has also been disproved by the recent technical analysis.25 Two of the philosophers certainly appear to be intent on explaining the meaning of the world, given that they hold instruments for its potential explication through precise measurement. The elder holds up a parchment sheet to our view with astrological diagrams: we glimpse a quarter moon and a circular spiked disc numbered from 1 to 7, both suggesting calculations relating to a lunar eclipse. In his right hand he holds a compass with which he has presumably made these figures. But the parchment appears oddly irregular in shape, as if it has been bitten into or partially damaged, and some of its findings lost. Similarly, the young man holds a set square and compass in his hands, and looks outwards as if directly observing and analysing the forms

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of nature, making an earthly and practical contrast to the old philosopher’s more abstract or theoretical focus on the movements of the heavens. Yet this young and eager scientific observer peers only into the empty sight-annihilating darkness of the cave. It is unclear whether he has noticed the fig and ivy leaves that appear out of the penumbra, let alone recognized their possible meaning as symbols of the coming of Christ, as has been suggested.26 It is, rather, the cave itself that he looks towards, and his preoccupation with this amorphous feature must cast doubt on his ability to accurately measure what he sees. The enormous cave in Giorgione’s painting has perhaps inevitably been linked to that featured in Book 7 of Plato’s Republic.27 But it seems very unlikely that the painter closely followed Plato’s famous book, given that many features of his painting do not conform to the text. It is, after all, hard to see the Three Philosophers as either a subject painting or a learned allegory. If it is allowed that Plato was in Giorgione’s mind, it is likely that this was because the philosopher’s famous cave metaphor served the wider implication, evident in many of his paintings, that it is difficult to arrive at true or precise meanings merely by observing the ambiguously changeable appearances of the world. If the philosophers in Giorgione’s painting, like those in Plato, have escaped from the cave, shedding the illusions of the many still enchained within it watching flickering shadows of reality, then their own efforts to understand the truth appear little better. Giorgione’s painting has also been seen as a celebration of the supposed intellectual progress of human understanding, with the three contrasting figures understood as representative of

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three consecutive historical phases of Aristotelian philosophy: ancient Greek scholasticism, Arabic Averroism and the experimental ‘scientific’ humanism of the Italian Renaissance.28 But Giorgione’s presentation remains altogether less positivistic, suggesting rather the inevitability of the ongoing human struggle to properly understand the world. So much is evident from many of the unsettling features of his pictorial presentation: above all, perhaps, from the setting of the philosophers in a disjointed contradictory landscape, in which what is seen might superficially appear familiar enough, but cannot, in the end, be fully understood or interpreted. The tattered parchment of the old man, whose aged body is in any case about to be swallowed up by the encroaching darkness, does not necessarily promise insight or lasting understanding. Neither does the inert passivity of the turbaned figure to his right, presented trivially touching his belt and without the aid of instruments to suggest the possibility of new insight. Such negative implications might even explain the way in which the seated figure turns determinedly away from these two and directly towards the natural forms before him, his measuring tools at the ready in his attempt to truly understand them. But his stare into the darkened void indicates that he too is destined to fail in his attempt. Indeed, his grounded posture, as if fatefully bound to the lowly earth, might deliberately recall the folkloric Renaissance type of the creative but frustrated figure of Melancholy: the humour often shown as a frustrated seated figure holding instruments of measurement that prove of little use in the quest for knowledge.29

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man in a landscape In both the Tramonto and the Three Philosophers, Giorgione’s treatment of the relationship between man and nature is haunted by darker possibilities of danger and ignorance. Populating his landscape using the enlarged forms of twisting tree trunks, sinister pools, impenetrable foliage, sheer cliffs and black caves, Giorgione developed a new vocabulary of natural imagery that departed from Bellini’s uplifting ‘landscapes of faith’, just as it differentiated itself from the pleasing leisure-filled dreams of the classical Arcadia envisaged in pastoral poetry. Giorgione’s landscapes in these works are made significant in visual terms, but are also structured so that our eye cannot pass easily through them or arrive at precise explanations about what they might mean. Enlarged but also obscured natural forms have a habit of looming over the human protagonists who have shrunk by comparison, and might be threatened by them. In two further works, probably made in the years 1509–10, Giorgione explored these divisions or tensions between figure and landscape still more closely. In a red chalk drawing known as the Man in a Landscape (illus. 39) a more precise level of information about the place depicted seems to be given. It was demonstrated by a group of local architects in 1978 that this drawing features the walls of the Castel San Zeno at Montagnana.30 Despite this, the familiar Giorgione traits of visual reticence and semantic uncertainty are nonetheless very much in play, and the apparently objective topographical information of the background is undermined by other elements that indicate that

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something much more than a local view is intended. As in the Three Philosophers, the foreground figure appears to be very significant or even determining; but who he is, precisely, remains mysterious. The figure is shown beyond the protective walls of the castle or city, his body pointedly turned away from human habitation as if he is in a self-imposed exile, beyond the reach of society or culture. The Man in a Landscape is the sole survivor from a larger group of graphic works that were, until about thirty years ago, quite regularly ascribed to Giorgione.31 Within less than a decade this number had been cut to just one by leading Giorgione scholars, although it seems implausible that this really is the only drawing that he produced. The very high quality of the Man in a Landscape indicates in itself that Giorgione was a practised draughtsman and that he drew often enough.32 The Rotterdam drawing might tell us something about Giorgione’s approach to graphic media more generally, given its very particular visual qualities. It is relatively large for a Renaissance drawing and finely executed using a subtly abbreviated touch directly comparable with Giorgione’s paintings. It may be that this carefully composed work was intended more practically to serve as a model for a contemporary printmaker in Venice such as Giulio Campagnola (1482–1515), who certainly produced ‘Giorgionesque’ engravings from his arrival in Venice in 1507 onwards (see illus. 56). But no prints directly after Giorgione’s works are known, and it is equally possible that the drawing was made as a stand-alone work to be enjoyed in its own right. Given the finished appearance of this surviving example, it may be that Giorgione more generally treated drawing

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as a kind of semi-independent medium, rather than merely as a working tool in the preparation of a painting. If Giorgione did not, as Vasari later noted, use drawing in a preparatory way like a central Italian painter, he did nonetheless draw, creating works that he considered as autonomous works of art. Such productions would have readily overlapped with his paintings, especially as in both media he typically worked on a smaller scale and with a free and adumbrating touch. If the Man in a Landscape takes on painterly qualities in its easy generation of a broad sense of spatiality and atmosphere, then Giorgione’s paintings themselves contain many sketch-like formal abbreviations that remind us of drawing. This was to blur the conventional Renaissance boundaries between visual media, as also the related distinction between finished and unfinished works. 39 Giorgione, Man in a Landscape, c. 1509, red chalk on paper.

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It is possible that Giorgione might have seen one or other of Jacopo Bellini’s great sketchbooks, both of which contain detailed perspective drawings of architecture, including careful recordings of receding city walls (illus. 40).33 Jacopo’s mid-fifteenth-century example might even have encouraged Giorgione’s return to a superficially more objective (or at least recognizable) treatment of the walls at Montagnana. But 40 Jacopo Bellini, City Walls with Well, c. 1450, leadpoint on paper.

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closer comparison with Jacopo’s example immediately indicates that Giorgione readily reduced the solidity of bricks and mortar to a wash-like insubstantiality in the background of his image to serve his usual highly pictorial and self-expressive mode. The idea that the spatial objectivity of architecture could serve to provide the basis for a carefully plotted linear perspective so evident in Jacopo’s drawings is undermined as Giorgione makes the precise spatial recessions of his castle walls difficult to understand. If his drawing still allows us to identify these walls as those of Castel San Zeno, then it is also true that the diaphanous pictorial treatment reduces them to mere indicators, abbreviated in a similar manner to the very loosely suggested folds of the river bluffs in front of them. Even allowing for the severe loss of chalk from the surface over time, it is evident enough that Giorgione sought to maintain a delicate sense of the way in which all forms (solid and otherwise) lose their three-dimensionality under prevalent atmospheric conditions of light, moist, vaporous air and distance.34 But this atmosphere is also bleakly emotional in kind, seeming to take its tone from the solitary crumpled man in the foreground. The surrounding landscape might even be taken as an outward manifestation of his ‘difficult’ inward thought or emotion. Who precisely this suffering figure is has inevitably become a matter of speculation. The Old Testament religious prophet Elijah has been mentioned, whose time in the desert was alleviated through his miraculous feeding by a God-sent raven. Or perhaps he is the ancient poet Aeschylus, father of Greek tragedy, shown in exile from the city of Athens.35 There is an indication that he might be weak from hunger, or even further

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physically disabled, given that he leans heavily on his stick, despite his already seated position. But the supposed bird at the upper right that might suggest that he is Elijah is very difficult to see, given the extent of the water damage in this particular area of the drawing, and there is little else to confirm a precise identification. Giorgione had already developed the idea of the landscape as desert or wilderness in recent paintings, apparently without remaining closely tied to a specific subject matter or text. The sense of a figure’s potential isolation and vulnerability is already a kind of semi-independent visual trope in his works and might just as easily suggest that this outsider is a more generic figure of a philosopher, hermit or pilgrim, wandering alone in nature, beyond the protection of the city walls. Perhaps his apparent physical disability suggests that he is an impoverished beggar, given that representatives of this common social type were often shown wearing outsized cloaks and hoods and brandishing sticks in this period.36 On the other hand, Giorgione’s lonely man is in animated conversation or discourse with himself, pointing with the first finger of his raised left hand like an ancient rhetorician, as if suddenly inspired by some deep philosophical thought. For all the hardship, this detail seems to suggest that social or cultural exile might also stimulate enlightenment. the tempest The little painting known as the Tempest is perhaps the most often explained painting in the entire Western tradition of painting to the extent that it has become almost impossible to view it without a myriad of earlier ideas about what it might

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mean crowding in (illus. 41). For the twenty-first-century viewer the Tempest can all too easily appear as little more than a palimpsest of interpretations in which dense patterns of exposition ‘show through’, even if each theory was originally intended as discrete and all-encompassing. Now, they inevitably overlap with one another so that no one theory quite 41 Giorgione, Tempest, c. 1509, tempera and oil on canvas.

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manages to exclude or suppress the next. Giorgione would undoubtedly have been surprised that his little work would eventually stimulate such an effect, although he might not have been too upset. It is true enough that the zeal for a conclusive reading only really gathered force when a more ‘scientific’ kind of art history emerged in the later nineteenth century. Prior to this, the Tempest was very little noticed (it is not mentioned at all by Vasari or Ridolfi, for example). Around 1800, when it was displayed in the Manfrin Gallery in Venice, it was repeatedly identified as a self-portrait of the painter with his wife and child.37 This interpretation was not based on any information about Giorgione’s personal life, and owes more to emergent nineteenth-century ideas about the virtues of family life than to historical reality. But it at least has the advantage of recognizing that the Tempest is something other than a ‘subject’ or allegorical painting, suggesting that it might be better understood as an intensely personalized kind of work that seems to reveal the painter’s own formative input at every point. It was only from the later nineteenth century onwards that this strange little painting began to attract significant attention among art historians, though the lateness of this interest does not mean that these more recent modern exercises in interpretation are entirely beside the point. Even if such attempts can sometimes appear as little more than displays of the given interpreter’s learned knowledge, it remains likely that Giorgione particularly encouraged his viewers to venture a ‘reading’, presenting his work as an open visual template ready to receive the impress of a myriad of differing responses. In all his works, as we have seen, Giorgione generates an

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extended space for the viewer’s projections, encouraging or even requiring this as much by his visual elisions and formal reductions as by his departures from standard Renaissance iconographies. This kind of performative visual ambiguity is nowhere more apparent than in the Tempest, where even the superficially simple folds of the ground at the front of the picture are difficult to understand as receding clearly into space: how does the foreground stream relate to the ruins at the left or to the river flowing towards the city beyond? How far are we, exactly, from the bridge leading to the city gate, or from the breaking storm beyond that? As we have encountered before in Giorgione’s work, the Tempest does not readily divulge its precise picture type or category. It is slightly taller than it is wide, unlike the other works discussed in this chapter, in which the horizontal format supports the idea of a landscape painting. The shape of the painting is thus somewhat unexpected and yet important enough in generating its particular mode of address. The picture shape might suggest that we see something other than a landscape and that the figures are more significant, especially as the man is in an upright position, his wooden staff providing a powerful indication of verticality, and that this is re-emphasized by other elements on his side of the painting, such as the two broken columns, the edge of the ruined wall and the spindly trees, even if all these potentially stabilizing features are shown as slightly awry. As in many paintings in a vertical format, the most dramatic action occurs at the top of the painting. It is the evident importance of the human figures that has given rise to the plethora of suggestions for the painting’s

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subject: the way in which they are placed almost (but not quite in the case of the woman) in front of the landscape, suggesting that they express a story or allegory of some kind, and that the landscape will ultimately take its meaning from them. This idea has encouraged an understanding of the work as a moral allegory of Fortune, Fortitude and Charity, for example, with the figures seen as virtues that counteract the danger of the storm.38 The upright posture of the standing man contrasts with the reclining, seated woman, and this gendered 42 Titian (?), A Mother and a Soldier in a Landscape, c. 1510–11, oil on canvas.

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figural contrast recurs in a near-contemporary painting that can be seen as an immediate Venetian response to the Tempest, perhaps by the young Titian (illus. 42).39 In this work, however, the staff-holding man is dressed in armour, while in the Tempest he wears parti-coloured stockings and breeches, and a fashionably short-cut jacket over a gold-embroidered white camicia: an elaborate attire that has reminded some of the extravagantly sensuous costumes worn by patrician members of the Compagnie della Calza.40 Michiel’s identification of these figures as ‘a soldier and a gypsy’ in 1530 thus appears immediately difficult to understand. Was Michiel simply being careless, or was he already confused about the figures in the Tempest? Giorgione was in the habit of creating just this kind of doubt about the precise identity of his figures, suggesting that the ambiguity was quite intentional and that Michiel’s uncertainty was genuine enough. If the young Titian did indeed make the painting that is now in the Fogg Museum at Harvard, then it seems likely that he followed Giorgione’s lead, rather than vice versa, and that his work was painted shortly after Giorgione’s, around 1510–11. In making his response, Titian characteristically sought to clarify and confirm identities, paying particular attention to the male figure, who now becomes unambiguously a soldier. Although the early provenance of the work is unknown, it may be that Michiel had also seen it in a Venetian collection, and that he simply followed Titian’s clarification of the male figure when describing the Tempest itself. On the other hand, it is evident enough that Giorgione knew very well how to paint a soldier, as his armoured saint in the Castelfranco altarpiece tells us (see illus. 18). The man

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in the Tempest may superficially recall the contrapposto of this saint, but his air of studied nonchalance or sprezzatura, like his lavish dress, is closer to the lolling attendant to the right of the Adoration of the Magi (see illus. 14). Is this young man really so comfortable as his stylish posture would suggest, given that his head twists sharply against the frontal position of his body, suggesting the intensity of his response to the woman and child? This movement appears as momentary and is further emphasized by the disappearance of his left arm behind his torso. At the same time, the potential connection between the two figures is serially interrupted. The man does not share the same horizontal plane with the feminine object of his attention, and is in any case physically separated from her by the deep fissures of the stream and its steep banks. And then she twists her head away from him as if to put the possibility of their intimate relationship still further in doubt. Given the questions over Michiel’s identification of the ‘soldier’, we might also doubt his idea that this woman is ‘a gypsy’. Both soldiers and gypsies were becoming familiar in the gradually emergent tradition of genre art across Europe around 1500.41 And such everyday social types were particularly associated with outdoor settings. Soldiers loll in the background of Giorgione’s Castelfranco altarpiece, for example, while breastfeeding gypsy women had recently appeared in Italian popular prints.42 Taking Michiel’s identification of the woman at face value, could it be that Giorgione depicts a gypsy family in the Tempest, destined to wander beyond the safety and control of the city and radically subject to the vicissitudes of nature?43 The lightning flash would then symbolize the special vulnerability of such people to

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fortune (fortuna), as also their harsh fate as earthly and potentially sinful wanderers on earth. The idea that Giorgione here represents social outsiders is tempting enough, given his depiction of similarly exiled figures wandering in lonely landscapes in works such as the Tramonto and the Man in a Landscape drawing, a work more closely related to the Tempest in visual terms than any other in his oeuvre. The lavish and elegant costume of the man suggests, however, that he is a wealthy Venetian patrician rather an impoverished or ragged travelling gypsy. Giorgione had already demonstrated his readiness to depict such young noblemen in the guise of shepherds in his Adoration of the Shepherds (see illus. 35), and the sense that the man in the Tempest might be performing a rustic part (with wooden shepherd’s staff rather than sharp-edged metal weapon) persists. The woman’s glance away from him indicates that this might not, after all, be a family of any sort. Her eyes unexpectedly meet the spectator’s, immediately making us a constituent part of the drama. This was a device that Giorgione had often used before in his portraits, with the beholder made key to the imaginative completion of the work. If the sensual power of the woman’s sideways glance is made poetically analogous to the sudden lightning flash beyond, tellingly positioned slightly to the right of centre, on her side of the painting (and perhaps echoing the profile of the left side of her semi-naked body), then this is also to implicate ‘us’. We must engage with her with a special interest, or even a longing, that is every bit as passionate as that of the man. It seems likely that Giorgione again sought to tailor his imagery to the immediate physical presence of his patron

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viewing the work, as he had already done in earlier paintings such as the Castelfranco altarpiece and the Adoration of the Shepherds. This patron was, in all probability, the Venetian nobleman and art collector Gabriele Vendramin. The careful arrangement of the figures in relation to both one another and to the spectator also allows us to appreciate just how significant these are in the Tempest, quite apart from the way in which they may or may not reflect a precise subject matter. A well-known reconstruction of the painting based on x-rays shows that Giorgione had originally included a seated naked woman in a different posture on the man’s side of the stream (illus. 43). This might suggest that Giorgione originally conceived of his painting as an entirely feminine domain, perhaps drawing on well-established literary convention of the Renaissance dating back to Boccaccio in the fourteenth century that placed alluring female nudes in landscapes. The addition of the man, however, complicates the scene, generating a new kind of erotic tension between the ‘masculine’ left of the painting and the ‘feminine’ right. The continued presence of this second woman, even after the young breastfeeding mother and the storm were already in place, suggests that her final replacement (the man) was a very late addition to the work. The very lateness of this switch from female to male might suggest in itself that this figure was an afterthought, and that he was intended to function as a kind of surrogate viewer within the painting. The man’s presentation as a stylish and contemporary young patrician who also views the woman would have enabled Vendramin to identify directly with him. Unlike the woman he replaced, who also stared out of the picture at the viewer, he shares ‘our’ fascination with the one who remained.

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Half in and half out of the picture space, he too is immediately enamoured with the semi-naked young beauty to the right. But Giorgione was careful to pay his young patron a further compliment by making him, imagined as the primary viewer, the first object of her attention. The proxy painted observer is thus finally defeated by the real one standing before the work, given that he does not enjoy the acknowledgement or confirmation of her returning gaze. It may be, however, that the viewer’s ‘victory’ is less certain than this would make it appear, and that the Tempest is as much about the denial of the gaze as it is about reciprocity. In a much 43 Reconstruction of Giorgione’s Tempest based on x-rays.

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later Venetian mythology from the late 1550s, Titian recalled the arrangement of the figures in the Tempest, generating the drama of his work by extending a similarly passionate male view horizontally across the empty central foreground of the picture space towards a desirable seated and semi-naked female to the right (illus. 44). In Titian’s work, the relationship between the two is more fraught again, becoming central to the tragic theme of the painting, in which the hapless mortal Actaeon inadvertently stumbles across the chaste goddess Diana, who later responds by turning him into a stag to be hunted down and killed by his own dogs. Nothing so dramatic or explicit is, of course, evident in Giorgione’s Tempest, which is typically reticent in its presentation of a narrative. But it may be that the impotency of male desire is nonetheless hinted at in features of the landscape such as the truncated or frustrated phallic verticality of the columns and ruins directly behind him, which contrast so markedly with the fertile horizontal spread of vegetation that surrounds the women’s sprawling body. Observation of the complex erotics of the man/woman relationship in the Tempest have inevitably led to suggestions that she is the untouchable goddess Venus suckling Cupid, who is admiringly watched by an impassioned young male mortal from across a sacred stream. Images of Venus spied on by amorous masculine eyes had become very popular in contemporary prints. Even if the dandified appearance of the young man is far enough removed from the aroused satyrs often featured in such imagery, it may be that Giorgione had something similar in mind. Perhaps he is shown as Polifilo, the wandering amorous lover in the Hypnerotomachia Polifili (1499), who comes

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across a statue of his beloved goddess Venus in the woods and waxes lyrical on its sensual power.44 Giorgione was certainly aware of this recent flagship vernacular production of the Aldine press in Venice, and drew directly on one of its woodcut illustrations for his Venus (see illus. 51 and 54). Yet there is no close visual or textual equivalent for the imagery of the Tempest in the Hypnerotomachia, and no other artist of the period attempted to directly illustrate a scene from it in a painting. Many interpretations of the subject matter of the Tempest fall short because they cannot account for all of the features of the painting, or must exaggerate some of these at the expense of others in order to arrive at a supposedly watertight conclusion. It is often argued that the painting represents a response to a classical text: more recently, Lucretius’ De rerum natura and Hesiod’s Theogony have been suggested. 45 But in each case the proposal is weakened in an art-historical sense by the fact that these ancient works did not inspire any other paintings in the period; and in a methodological one by the implicit assumption that Giorgione’s painting must necessarily be an illustration of a specific literary text. Seeing the Tempest, instead, as a religious work at least has the advantage of making it appear to contribute to a known visual iconography; and added support can be given to the given theory by linking its composition to previous visual examples. In the most famous recent offering of this sort, the man and woman are seen as Adam and Eve, recently ejected from Paradise (represented as the Eternal City beyond), and newly subject to a life of sin, work and death.46 God’s wrath is symbolized by the lightning flash. But in order to arrive at such an interpretation many visual details of the painting have to be set aside (such

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as the contemporary appearance of the man and the city), while others have to be superimposed that are not fit for purpose, for example the spindly bush in front of the woman becomes a fig leaf suggesting Eve’s shame. And it is even possible to add one or two details that might not be present in the painting at all, such as the supposed snake seen creeping into a hole at the lower foreground. Given the evident problems with seeing the Tempest as a recognizable subject painting, whether mythological or religious in kind, it may be more fruitful to ask whether it had a more precise historical meaning, perhaps reflecting recent dramatic events in Venice. Could it be that Giorgione constructed a deft political allegory showing the Siege of Padua by the forces of the League of Cambrai in 1509, with the storm 44 Titian, Diana and Actaeon, 1556–9, oil on canvas.

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symbolizing the coming of war?47 Can we see the man as a member of the makeshift army of patricians sent to heroically lift the siege, with the woman understood as a symbol of the charity of the Venetian state itself? There are, as might by now be expected, serious issues with both these identifications. As we have seen, the man cannot really be taken as a soldier, while the figure of Charity conventionally has two or more children, and there is little to connect Giorgione’s sensuous woman with the kind of patriotic allegorical figures of ‘Venetia’ often featured in the city’s official art. Such attempts do, though, have the virtue of revealing that Giorgione was not quite so ambiguous about where, exactly, the scene of his painting is set. The view of a town or city along the horizon was familiar enough in Venetian paintings with landscapes, as was the implication that this might show a specific place on the terra ferma. In the Tempest, the presence of the Venetian lion and the upturned cart that was the coat of arms of the Carrara family on the facades of two of the background buildings indicates that we see Padua, the local town close to the area known as the Padavano where Gabriele Vendramin owned extensive country estates. As we have seen, Giorgione had already depicted the city walls of nearby Montagnana, just to the south of the city, in a similar fashion in his drawing of Man in a Landscape, a work that might well have been another commission from Vendramin. As we have seen, the painter had made just this kind of special visual accommodation to the terra ferma interests of another patron, Tuzio Costanzo, in his Castelfranco altarpiece (see illus. 18). The reference to Padua does not, however, mean that the Tempest is a political allegory of the Cambrai War. It might

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just as easily be a response to Vendramin’s personal interest in poetry, given that this town was the birthplace of Petrarch. Much more certain again is the fact that Giorgione’s depiction of a storm was wholly unprecedented in Venetian painting, making a clear departure from Bellini’s calm and sunlit landscapes, as also from his own earlier work. We have seen, however, that Giorgione had already moved away from the more comforting, humanly orientated landscapes of late Quattrocento painting towards imagery suggesting visual obscurity and potential danger, in which nature is granted a new measure of independent power in works such as the Tramonto and the Man in a Landscape. Now, in the Tempest, he indicated its unruly energy with greater emphasis still. But however forceful it might be, nature was not ultimately permitted to overpower Giorgione’s own skill as a painter. The Tempest is, after all, an extraordinarily well resolved and ‘artful’ painting in a formal sense. Giorgione pays particular attention to the way in which changes in the sky control and transform what is seen in the landscape below, with the actual colours of objects giving way to chance and shifting atmospheric effects. The dark turquoise grey of the lowering storm cloud has not yet cancelled out the last shafts of sunlight – note how the sun can still be glimpsed at the edge of a cloud above the lightning fork – but has nonetheless exaggerated these to a livid cream or yellow. As this altered light strikes the facades of the buildings it makes them appear to glow preternaturally against the dark of the arriving storm. At the same time, the blue of the river and green of the foliage have become suffused with black, their original colours again radially distorted. This

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was to capture the most fleeting of visual effects using subtle admixtures of paint. It was also to emphasize the susceptibility or contingency of human sight itself. Yet Giorgione’s colours are carefully chosen and manipulated to create a dramatic artistic effect, serving to compose or unify his painting so that every form is suffused with closely related modulations of olive green, sandy yellow and dark blue. Even the hint of scarlet in the man’s jacket is modulated to suggest a foreground equivalent to the fiery heat of the lightning flash far beyond. Giorgione may have been asked by Vendramin to make a free kind of work based on the ancient Greek painter Apelles’ depiction of a thunderbolt, which he had read about in the new Aldine edition of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History published in Venice in 1506. 48 And perhaps in making his little painting, so bespoke in kind, Giorgione also had in mind the kind of sensual imagery fashionable in so-called imprese, the emblematic hatpins or badges worn by high-ranking individuals to reflect their changeable states of mind. It is true that Giorgione represents a tempest that has not quite arrived: one about to break, rather than raging in full force directly overhead. But in the luridly transformed premonitory colours we already sense the way in which normal human vision must yield to the effect of blinding lightning and the deafening crack of thunder. The Tempest to this extent engages and acknowledges the contest between the human senses in the midst of such rapidly changing natural phenomena: the way in which their usual ordering is suspended or overturned within the temporal flux of the present moment. Sonic allusions often occur in sixteenth-century imprese, and although the Tempest is certainly larger than these tiny images, it may be that this painting

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was, like them, also presented as a reflection of the subjective experiences of its owner. The Tempest would, to this extent, appear as a kind of impresa in the form of an easel painting: as an outward representation of personal mental associations, albeit with an emphasis on the ultimate power of the human senses. Perhaps a very diluted response to Giorgione’s little painting is evident in one emblematic sonic work of this kind dating from the 1550s showing a thunderbolt striking a mountain with the motto ‘lightning strikes the highest mountain tops.’49 But as with so many other later responses to Giorgione, this moralizing emblematic message also represents a kind of clarificatory retreat from his originally enigmatic pictorial presentation. Giorgione’s Tempest can be usefully compared with the near-contemporary paintings of the Danubeschule by Lucas Cranach (1472–1553), Albrecht Altdorfer (1480–1538) and Wolf Huber (1485–1553), even if it is difficult to make close formal parallels based on mutual influence.50 Comparison with contemporary German painting is most useful for its suggestion of a parallel, though perhaps essentially independent, development towards fully fledged landscape painting in the first decade of the sixteenth century, though this was arrived at first in the drawings and paintings of Altdorfer, rather than in Venice. Whatever Giorgione meant by his figures in the Tempest, it is evident that they remain highly charged and expressively significant. On the other hand, all these artists, north and south, seem to have shared a sense that the painting of natural forms and effects allowed them a new space for experimentation. Just as Altdorfer’s intimate, densely wooded forest views served as a locus for artistic

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self-reference or signature, marking him out as an innovative and original northern master, so Giorgione’s depiction of the storm in the Tempest was perhaps always intended to be seen as a pictorial tour de force, a self-conscious display of art’s ultimate supremacy over the powerful forces of nature.

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n the second version of his ‘Life of Giorgione’, published in 1568, Giorgio Vasari strongly criticized the painter’s frescoes on the canal facade of the German Warehouse (Fondaco dei Tedeschi) at the Rialto in Venice, announcing that the painter ‘thought of nothing save making figures according to his own fancy, in order to display his art’. The result, we hear, was that ‘there are no scenes to be found there with any order, or representing the deeds of any distinguished person, either ancient or modern’. Vasari goes on to state that ‘I, for my part, have never understood them, nor have I found, for all the inquiries I have made, anyone who understands them, for in one place there is a woman, in another a man, in diverse attitudes . . . nor can one tell what it may all mean.’1 Vasari’s criticism of Giorgione’s frescoes in the later edition of his book has its context in his gathering attack on the Venetian painters’ supposedly unfocused sensuality by comparison with the more intellectual Florentines, a position that owes something, at least, to the rise of Counter-Reformatory aesthetics. Giorgione’s frescoes are faulty, Vasari states, precisely because they fail to illustrate an underlying ethical idea, based on the illustration of a given subject matter drawn from a culturally revered literary source

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(the Bible, history and so on). Even if Vasari’s critical words reflect his Tuscan bias against the Venetians, it may also be that he put his finger on a key feature of Giorgione’s approach. As the discussion so far has suggested, this painter did indeed seek to move beyond the control of a given text or a conventional meaning, introducing many sensual, intimate or psychological details that work against clear moral meanings. fr escos for the fondaco dei tedeschi Given Vasari’s partisan and punitive tone, it comes as no surprise to find that many sympathetic art historians have since attempted to answer his charge by claiming that Giorgione’s paintings originally had a dignifying subject matter that has been lost over time. His frescoes for the Fondaco, it has been claimed, had a coherent or justifying iconography of this kind, perhaps representing ‘Hercules and the Nymphs of the Hesperides’.2 The ‘flaming’ red colouration of the surviving fragment of the Standing Woman (illus. 45) has been used to suggest that his cycle visually and thematically responded to the setting of the sun on the west-facing Fondaco facade. And yet the evidence for such an environmentally engaged interpretation remains slender especially given that the recent restoration of the fragment has revealed a much less red or ‘flaming’ flesh coloration. The underlying meaning of Giorgione’s cycle is, in fact, as obscure today as it was for Vasari in the sixteenth century. This need not mean that these largely destroyed works were of lesser significance or value; and perhaps it is their ‘notsubject’ quality that is the most interesting thing about them.3 Although the official documents tell us that Giorgione’s cycle

45 Giorgione, Standing Woman, 1508, fresco removed from the top floor of Fondaco dei Tedeschi (between fifth and sixth windows from left on the canal facade).

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was commissioned by the Venetian state in 1508, neither the surviving fragments nor the eighteenth-century engravings recording certain details of their already damaged appearance indicate that these works closely illustrated a specific text or had a precise allegorical meaning. Instead, they seem to have featured a series of anonymous male and female figures freely invented by Giorgione. Giorgione’s ‘artistic’ approach at the Fondaco must in part have been encouraged by the given picture type. Facade fresco painting in Venice was traditionally commissioned independently of the state by leading families of the city. However prominently such works fronted the city’s public spaces, they were not considered so valuable (in either an aesthetic or financial sense) as interior oil painting, and were typically commissioned as a kind of money-saver against the higher costs of sculptural facade decoration. By the late fifteenth century, when one foreign visitor described Venice as ‘a painted city’, facade painting had developed its own partially distinct visual vocabulary, featuring decorative illusionistic fantasies, including vegetal and zoomorphic motifs rather than ‘serious’ patriotic or sacred histories.4 Facade painting in Venice already bore an ephemeral relationship to the mainstream of oil painting, and was typically executed by young artists towards the outset of their careers. It was not expected to survive too long, given the salty climate of the city. But Giorgione’s commission of 1508 was different insofar as it was an official commission to decorate the exterior of a newly built state building at the mercantile heart of the city. And the kind of full-length naked figures that he painted had not been seen before in the context of Venetian facade frescoes.

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The depiction of nudes was certainly a fast-emerging theme in Renaissance art, but still had few precedents in large-scale public works in Venice. It may be that the increasing interest in the representation of naked bodies in the second half of the fifteenth century owed as much to incarnational theology as it did to the classical revival, and it is telling that nude figures first appear in Venetian art in large-scale sacred works.5 Giovanni Bellini had introduced contrasting old and young male nudes in his San Giobbe altarpiece as early as the late 1470s (see illus. 17), while Antonio Rizzo (1430–1499) and Tullio Lombardo had done likewise in certain of the niche sculptures they produced for the Ducal Palace and for the lavish patrician tombs in the city’s monastic churches. These figures were presented as representations of familiar sacred persons, as if the public’s identification of them as saints Job and Sebastian, or as Adam and Eve, was necessary to control or offset their potential to suggest the more independent realities of corporeal existence. The context of these ‘hidden nudes’, typically presented as standing figures within wider formal ensembles, and as contributors to carefully arranged programmes of sacred and/or patriotic iconography, mitigated still further their potential to generate more direct or immediate effects of physicality. At the Fondaco, Giorgione’s figures were presented outside any such justificatory sacred context, apparently as showpieces of his own decidedly secular artistic interests. These anonymous figures possess a new kind of independent sensuous (though necessarily more ambiguous) existence beyond the reach of conventional narratives or meanings. Giorgione’s approach at the Fondaco appears to reflect his more general concern to escape the close control of

46 After Giorgione, ‘Standing Woman’, engraving from Anton Maria Zanetti, Le varie pitture a fresco de’ principali maestri veneziani (1760).

47 After Giorgione, ‘Seated Woman’, engraving from Anton Maria Zanetti, Le varie pitture a fresco de’ principali maestri veneziani (1760).

48 After Giorgione, ‘Seated Man’, engraving from Anton Maria Zanetti, Le varie pitture a fresco de’ principali maestri veneziani (1760).

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externally derived literary subjects. It had already encouraged his particular interest in portraiture and ‘portrait-type’ paintings as also in the creation of ‘landscape-like’ works. Now in the Fondaco figures he once more dispensed with the usual supportive props of subject-based paintings. Insofar as the original appearance of these works can be reconstructed from the surviving fragments and engravings, it appears that they continued his approach in the smaller-scale paintings he completed in the media of oil and tempera. From Anton Maria Zanetti’s engravings published in 1760, it seems that 49 Pier Jacopo Alari Boncolsi (‘Antico’), Apollo, c. 1490–96, bronze and silver.

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Giorgione featured full-length figures shown in a variety of complex standing and seated postures, some of which (at least) were placed in foreshortened architectural niches (illus. 46–8).6 Fingertips and toes poked out over carefully defined parapets to suggest the illusionistic three-dimensionality of the figures. Zanetti undoubtedly embellished these figures in accord with his eighteenth-century classical-academic taste, presenting them in the manner of antique sculptural fragments that makes it difficult to reconstruct the precise mode of Giorgione’s original address. But it is evident enough that Giorgione sought to make his figures appear as living beings, whose attractive mobile bodies appear to share the same world as ourselves, and who make familiar unanticipated movements rather than studiously premeditated ones. While their nudity might seem to recall the sculptures of classical Greece or Rome, these figures are not closely based on any known examples from the art of antiquity. Despite Zanetti’s classicizing idealizations, it appears that the original effect was intensely lifelike and sensuous rather than formally correct. Perhaps Giorgione again engaged the paragone between painting and sculpture, allowing his figures to appear superficially as if they were a carved frieze (and thus fulfilling one expectation for Venetian facade painting noted above), while then revealing them as painted illusions whose capacity to give an impression of the pinkish flesh of human bodies went beyond the non-naturalistic tones of marble or stone. The heads of Giorgione’s figures seem to have remained important, and perhaps appeared more like his closely individualized portraits or portrait-like works than the generalized types featured in classical sculptures. The gazes of the seated

50 Michelangelo, Ignudo, c. 1511–12, fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Vatican City.

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figures are sometimes turned downwards, as if to directly acknowledge and engage the viewer. The familiar interactivity of Giorgione’s approach is thus evident again, as if his imagery anticipated the active input or projection of his viewers in order to achieve its intimate effect. And despite the dramatic foreshortenings and contrapposti of the figures’ limbs, their bodies appear to move and respond casually, as if in response to a chance conversation continued with the beholder or each other. The Seated Man looks intently to his lower right while pointing to his left, apparently towards the next painted figure along (illus. 48). His figure might faintly recall the upper part of the already revered late antique sculpture known as the Apollo Belvedere, a work well known in Venice by 1508 through the production of reproductive statuettes by sculptors such as Antico (c. 1460–1528, illus. 49). In Giorgione’s figure, however, the effect is made decidedly non-classical, given that the man’s head points in the opposite direction to his arm. This opens his body to the lateral scansion of the facade surface while also suggesting that his posture is fleeting or contingent, defined by a passing or chance movement or emotion. In these works Giorgione seems more generally to have avoided an effect of all’antica monumentality, as can be found in the idealized ignudi that Michelangelo began to depict on the Sistine Chapel in the same year. Perhaps the contrasting position of the lower limbs in the Seated Man, with the right leg dramatically raised and the foot tucked in behind the calf of the left, had an influence on certain of Michelangelo’s figures (illus. 50).7 If Michelangelo’s muscular anatomically perfected figures are presented as exemplars of internal formal cohesion and resolution, expressing independence from both the narrow

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spaces they occupy and the viewer peering up from below, then Giorgione’s figures appear as if radically subject to these immediate contingencies. Perched uncomfortably and precariously on the fictive architectural edges, they peer at one another or down to the spectator below, making immediate eye contact, or gesture to point out something to us. Perhaps drawing on a famous distinction made by Kenneth Clark, they are better considered as ‘naked’ rather than ‘nude’, at least insofar as they refer more directly to the fluid realities and unstable contexts of the human body, rather than to a fixed or abstracted ideal version of it.8 Vasari strongly implied that Giorgione’s figures were drawn directly from life, and this might be reflected in their apparent independence of existing formal models or types. And yet passive conformity to the outward appearances of the examples he found in nature had never been the defining feature of Giorgione’s approach; and Vasari’s suggestion probably owes more to his own central Italian opposition to the supposedly more empirical Venetian approach than to the historical reality of Giorgione’s working practice. It seems much more likely that in these frescoes Giorgione freely invented lifelike figures without being closely dependent on specific living models. In sensual portrait-like works such as the Young Man with an Arrow (see illus. 25) and the Laura (see illus. 27) he had already presented mysterious figures which were apparently modelled on the appearance of real individuals but that can hardly be understood as the products of a naive inductive naturalism. In these paintings there is already a sense that we might be viewing partially dressed figures, at least insofar as the sitters’ remaining clothing serves more to reveal the soft

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flesh beneath than to cover or conceal it. This effect of seminakedness is not so apparent in an early work such as the Judith (see illus. 5), but the careful attention given to his heroine’s revealed flesh and to the extremity of her limbs (fingers and toes) nonetheless makes her physical presence appear tangible enough. In the frontally presented Standing Woman (see illus. 45 and 46), Giorgione appears to have returned to his figure of Judith, recalling her upright and frontal presentation, with bent right arm slightly recessed from the right of her torso, but this time showing her naked. The Seated Woman (see illus. 47), on the other hand, might conceivably be taken as a first idea for the woman in the Tempest (see illus. 41) completed a year or two later, particularly in the area of the left arm shown trailing across her body to touch her right knee, and the consequent slight hunching of her shoulders as she looks to her left. Giorgione’s ambiguous Fondaco frescoes might not, after all, have been narrowly based on the close analysis of real bodies. If an observation-based approach to the human form had become the norm by the late fifteenth century in parts of central Italy, ‘life-drawing’ was by no means an established or standard practice in Venetian workshops by 1508. Giorgione’s approach was equally free from the close control of an established formal canon based on the works of antiquity to regulate how a body might be shown, despite his odd reference to one classical sculpture or another. At the time of the Fondaco frescoes the depiction of the nude in Italian art remained a field of experimentation and diversity, not yet governed by the concern to accurately represent the facts of human anatomy, or to remodel these with reference to the revered models of the classical tradition.9 If Giorgione

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was relatively uninterested in the supposed science of perspective painting, or in theories of physiognomic expression, then in the Fondaco figures he maintained a similar freedom from the rationalizing control of anatomical study. But he did maintain and further develop his concern to present the sensuous reality of living human bodies that we have noted in many of his other paintings. Rather than showing his naked figures as physical exempla that embodied an intellectual ideal of the perfect human, he presented them instead as ambiguously transient beings, whose forms move unexpectedly or adventitiously, and who might even appear like fluid projections of the beholder’s own inner world.

venus In a further important painting from this period showing the goddess Venus, Giorgione again demonstrated his burgeoning interest in the depiction of the unclothed human body

51 Giorgione and Titian, Venus, c. 1510–11, oil on canvas.

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(illus. 51). In this work, the naked figure is extended expansively across the foreground space, echoing the horizontality of the picture shape, her reclining form turned outwards to maximize our view. Giorgione’s painting was easily his most influential work, given that it was destined to serve as a fundamental model for many subsequent painters in Venice, as also for hundreds of later artists across Italy and Europe when dealing with the subject of the reclining erotic nude. In these circumstances it would be easy to see it as a prototypical Renaissance depiction of the idealized female form: as a perfect image of beauty that owed more to the abstract intellectual idea in the mind of the painter than it did to the realities of a specific living human body. Recalling Clark’s formulation again, it may be that Giorgione’s Venus appears more as ‘nude’ than ‘naked’. The perfected internal balance and proportionality of her body, like the careful classicization of her head, announces a universalizing ideal rather than a personal identity or physical reality. And to this extent it might be assumed 52 Giorgione and Titian, detail from Venus.

53 Roman copy of Praxiteles, Venus, 2nd century ce, marble; restored by Ippolito Buzzi (1562–1634).

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that Giorgione, in this self-consciously artful presentation, abandoned the more spontaneous and interactive qualities so evident in his Fondaco figures. But perhaps it would nonetheless be a mistake to claim that ‘all the sensuality has been distilled off from this sensuous presence, and all the incitement.’10 Closer attention to Giorgione’s figure reveals that he introduced an easily overlooked detail that suggests something quite different. As Venus lies back with eyes closed, she moves her left hand across her pubic area, the fingertips of her left hand seeming to slip into her vagina (illus. 52). As we have noted in other Giorgiones, the visual suggestiveness of the detail resides in the measure of ambiguity that he allows to surround it. In characteristic fashion, Giorgione first suggests a possibly meaningful detail but then does not allow us to quite confirm its presence or precise significance. We cannot, after all, be quite certain that we see what we seem to see: might the fingers, after all, just lie innocently on the surface of the goddess’s body? And isn’t her covering gesture an action of modesty, following a well-established visual convention in classical and all’antica depictions known as the Venus pudica (illus. 53)? Nonetheless, closer visual comparison with the arm and hand in famous examples of this latter type does suggest that it was Giorgione’s intention to introduce a potentially transformative semantic possibility. In many sculptural examples, well known in the Renaissance, an all-important space between hand and body is maintained with the fingertips extended downwards and remaining wholly visible in front of the body. In the ‘Venus of Modesty’ tradition, the goddess covers rather than touches herself. In Giorgione’s figure, on the other hand, the fingers are no

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longer outstretched, but bent at the distal and proximal interphalangeal joints so that the tips themselves disappear from view into the shadow (with perhaps a hint of pubic hair) between her thighs. We do not, that is, quite see that she pleasures herself, although that seems to be the implication. Even if we take Giorgione’s hint, and her action is thus understood to offer a reverse meaning to the Venus pudica, was this really such a departure from the wider all’antica tradition in Renaissance art and culture? Sexual excitement on seeing an image was well established as a natural and justifiable response to the great masterpieces of ancient erotic art.11 In a much-read passage in Pliny’s Natural History, recently republished in a lavish new Aldine edition in Venice, the author describes how Praxiteles’ Venus of Cnidos (widely known from Roman copies such as that illustrated here) had been stained by the seed of a young male admirer who was no longer able to distinguish image from reality.12 As a classical topos of the mimetic power of naturalistic art, the sexually excited male response to a great erotic artwork was deemed appropriate enough. It was, in fact, already becoming a popular subject for visual imagery in the early sixteenth century. Prints had appeared featuring voyeuristic satyrs with erections viewing naked Venuses or nymphs, aroused figures who served as playful surrogates for the responses of stimulated male viewers. A woodcut illustration of this type in another Aldine publication, the Hypnerotomachia Polifili (1499), provided an important formal source for Giorgione’s figure of Venus. The goddess in this print, tellingly placed adjacent to a passage in the text relating the hero’s aroused response to a Cnidian-style sculpture

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of Venus, reclines horizontally in the foreground with her right arm raised to her head and her legs crossed in a very similar manner to Giorgione’s goddess. At the same time, she is approached by a sexually excited satyr with an erect penis (illus. 54).13 In this woodcut, however, it is also true that the goddess’s genital region is decorously covered by drapery, while her left 54 Benedetto Bordone (attrib.), ‘Satyr with Sleeping Nymph’, woodcut from Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499).

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hand lies passively on her raised hip. If the appropriateness of sexual arousal is certainly suggested by the approaching satyr, then this is strictly a male response to the sight of her beautiful body. In Giorgione’s work, on the other hand, the physical excitement appears to be transferred to, and generated by, the heroine herself. The goddess’s body beautiful is now presented as independently self-stimulating rather than as a passive object, dependent on an externalized male gaze. And the suggestion that Giorgione’s Venus is sexually excited may also encourage us to see other details of the painting in this light. Another formal source for Giorgione’s figure was the Sleeping Ariadne, a well-known and much-studied antique work in the early sixteenth century (illus. 55). Probably working from a print after the sculpture, Giorgione reprises the 55 Sleeping Ariadne, 2nd century ce Roman copy of a Pergamene original of c. 200 BCE, marble.

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Ariadne’s horizontally reclining posture with crossed legs, her raised right arm encircling the head, and the lowered eyelids suggesting that she sleeps. But the Ariadne exposes just one breast and is otherwise elaborately draped, and both her arms encircle her head. In Giorgione’s Venus, the half-concealed left arm is altogether more active, snaking up from behind the area of her breasts to engage with her pubic area, rather than reiterating the significance of her head. And if her closed lids might seem to indicate that she sleeps, then perhaps the implied action of her fingers suggests otherwise, and that the work’s traditional title is a misnomer. If she is not, in fact, asleep, then her closed eyes may instead reflect an immediate physical response to the sensations caused by the action of her fingers. The sense of sight is, after all, temporarily suspended or occluded during sexual arousal. As in his other paintings, Giorgione allows a new kind of authority to what Lessing once described as the ‘dark senses’, those conventionally understood as most closely (and fatally) attached to the body, especially, of course, in the Venus, the sense of touch.14 Giorgione’s softened and blended brushwork frequently realigned the usual Renaissance hierarchy of the senses. He readily dethroned the rational clarity of vision through his eliding and obscuring painterly touch, while granting the physical bodies he depicted a new kind of sensual presence. And perhaps too the closed eyes of his Venus served to further undermine the usual balance of power between an active, penetrative, all-seeing (and male) eye that fantasizes, and a passive, non-aware female body that is the object of his projections. As she closes herself off from the viewer, it is Giorgione’s goddess herself who appears to determine things.

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The pleasure depicted in the image becomes, to this extent, her own: integral to the reality of her body and to some extent independent of the sanctioning gaze of a male observer. The all-dominant female body in Giorgione’s painting emits contradictory signs regarding her identity. If she is on the one hand presented as a remote iconic nude who exists out of time as the masculine ideal of feminine beauty, then her disappearing fingertips suggest something very different. If the artfully arranged dispersal of her limbs and symmetry of her facial features, which broadly recall the kind of famous prototypes in classical sculpture noted above, suggest an abstract formal perfection, then the all’antica spell is broken by this detail, indicating that we might view instead a ‘real’ and living body, capable of feeling powerful physical sensations and of taking independent pleasure. If she masturbates, then she must also be understood as existing in present time. She becomes corporal and embodied. But the detail remains just a detail, a mere suggestion that does not wholly undo the wider effect of her finished beauty as a revered classical deity. Giorgione’s ambiguous presentation undermines the influential conceptual binary regarding the body envisaged by Bakhtin, for example, between one presented as fully alive and receptive but also ‘grotesque’, and one seen as perfect and complete but also as fixed, closed and cut-off.15 If she pleasures herself, she must in any case necessarily imagine others, her apparently self-isolating action paradoxically predicated on her desire to engage with the world beyond her own body. And yet all this remains unpainted, as a mere association within the mind of the viewer. The goddess herself is outwardly still and impassive, her beautifully balanced and

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finished figure appearing as the very image of a perfected work of art. In order to understand further Giorgione’s ambiguous presentation of his nude, we need to take account of the possible original function of the work as an invitation to scopophilia, a stimulus to sexual excitement or activity for those who viewed it. It has gradually become clear that many of the erotic paintings featuring reclining naked figures of Venus or her followers that feature in Venetian Renaissance painting from the time of Giorgione’s Venus onwards were commissioned in the context of a marriage.16 As the apparent prototype of this kind of imagery, the original context for Giorgione’s painting has itself been understood as epithalamic, with the work seen as commissioned to mark the marriage of its patron, Girolamo Marcello, to Morosina Pisani on 9 October 1507.17 If so, then it seems more than likely that it was made to hang in the newlyweds’ bedroom, where it would have served as a visual stimulus to the couple’s sexual activity and to their anticipated production of family heirs. In order to serve its purpose, the painting would have to excite both partners equally, and this would provide a plausible contextual reason for the painter’s inclusion of the intensifying onanistic detail. The possibility that the goddess self-stimulates would hardly have excluded the young husband from the effect of excitement. It may have been intended to further absorb his young wife into the erotic circuitry between image and reality, especially as the female orgasm was sometimes understood as a prerequisite to the conception of a child in the Renaissance.18 As the young couple viewed their work in the intimate privacy of their bedroom, the

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pleasurable action of the goddess of love’s fingers would have served as a suitably affecting model for them both. If Giorgione was more widely concerned to maximize viewer response or engagement with his paintings, his inclusion of this ‘stimulating’ detail must come as no surprise. But the close association of Giorgione’s painting with Marcello’s marriage is more difficult to establish than this would allow. It seems likely that Giorgione never delivered his painting to the Palazzo Marcello: Michiel tells us that it was finished by Titian, presumably after Giorgione’s death in September 1510. Recent technical analysis suggests that Titian did, indeed, finish the work, adding an iconographically clarifying Cupid, the landscape, the wine-red pillows and the crisp swathe of silvery drapery at the front of the painting.19 In these circumstances, different possibilities present themselves: perhaps the work was not a marriage painting after all, but rather a more independent kind of production, made as a bespoke collector’s piece to hang in Marcello’s collection alongside his other works by Giorgione?20 This might, after all, better account for its overall effect of visual newness. The more functional interpretation in the marriage context is in danger of assuming that the work was a somehow inevitable visual response to circumstances and that its meaning would have been crystal clear to its original viewers. But this was far from Giorgione’s usual procedure in painting, and it is more likely that his Venus would initially have appeared as a very strange and unprecedented work that challenged its contemporary viewers to understand its new form and meanings. And even if Giorgione was initially commissioned by Marcello around the time of his marriage in 1507 to make a celebratory picture, it remains

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significant that the work was still unfinished almost three years later in September 1510. Perhaps the painter was distracted by other important commissions such as that at the Fondaco? Or perhaps he hesitated just because the figure that he had already completed was so ambiguously risqué, fearing that even a progressive patron such as Marcello might baulk at its appearance? Given the lack of precise documentation, it remains impossible to fully answer these questions. Yet it is clear enough from the early responses of Giorgionesque artists working in Venice that the significance of his provoking detail was quickly registered or understood. The talented printmaker Giulio Campagnola certainly reveals a pressing awareness of it, appearing to decide that Giorgione had indeed depicted the goddess self-pleasuring (illus. 56). He may have followed another (now lost) depiction of a reclining Venus by Giorgione 56 Giulio Campagnola, Venus or Nymph, c. 1511–12, engraving.

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mentioned in the sources that showed the goddess from the back.21 Perhaps this lost ‘Venus-from-behind’ was a kind of pendant to the Dresden painting that shows the goddess from the front, and also showed a masturbating figure? Or maybe Campagnola responded to Giorgione’s motif in the surviving work. However this may be, it is hard not to see his selfabsorbed earthy nymph as intent on taking her pleasure as her right hand moves between her legs. But he also studiously turns the woman’s body away, excluding the spectator from too explicit a view. This was also a subtle response to the ambiguity of Giorgione’s original figure. In a further work by Palma Vecchio (1480–1528), the painter is less equivocal, decorously removing the goddess’s left arm away from her pubis so that it once again lies passively on her left hip, as it had done in the Polifili illustration noted above (see illus. 54 and 57). If the hands of Palma’s woman retreat altogether from her genital region in a manner 57 Palma Vecchio, Venus, c. 1525, oil on canvas.

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that reveals her pudenda, this part of her body also becomes a kind of inert visual blank or caesura, a semantic sacrifice to the painter’s eagerness to cancel the possibility that she might be sexually excited. In subsequent reclining Venuses by Palma himself and younger painters such as Paris Bordone (1500–1571), the hands of the goddess remain similarly distant from her pubic region, simultaneously revealing this hidden part of the body while also making it appear visually anodyne and desexualized.22 Among the many local artists who responded to Giorgione’s Venus in the first half of the sixteenth century, only Titian himself, the painter who had been closest to the master, continued to develop the masturbatory motif, remaining uniquely sensitive to its expressive implications and possibilities. It is very likely that Giorgione had always planned to set his figure in an extensive landscape, given that he was well aware of the conventional literary connection between female nudes and outdoor settings in erotic all’antica works such as the Hypnerotomachia Polifili.23 He had already featured nudes in works to be viewed outdoors, such as the Fondaco frescoes, and he had placed a semi-naked female figure in the foreground of the Tempest. Titian may have worked on the unfinished painting in the years immediately following Giorgione’s death. Even if he did not know anything about the master’s original ambitions for the Marcello painting, he managed to supply a studiously ‘Giorgionesque’ landscape that supports or echoes the figure rather than challenging her authority. Titian made the soft reclining folds of the grassy pastures appear to take their shape from the gentle curves of her body, as if to suggest that the outward world in the painting was nothing more

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than a further projection of her own self-pleasuring body. And the younger master proved himself even more alert to the possible significance of her disappearing fingertips by adding a powerfully expressive twist of ridged drapery to the immediate foreground area beneath this detail that serves as a kind of visual analogue to the goddess’s auto-eroticism, drawing further attention to its defining significance.24 Titian carefully maintained and developed the motif in his apparent homage to Giorgione’s painting from the 1530s (illus. 58).25 If certain aspects of Giorgione’s prototype are altered (she is now awake), the position of the left arm and hand is scrupulously maintained, the significance of the fingertips further marked out by the vertical fall of the dividing curtain, and euphemistically referred to again by the mirroring disappearance of their counterparts on her right hand into a bed of purple petals. All this was to make Giorgione’s visually slight detail more explicit, and perhaps even to suggest its centrality to the meaning of the work. But it was also to undo the ambiguous duality of the prototype, to make masturbation rather than modesty more definitely the meaning of the image. Dropping the poetic pastoral connection between nude and landscape, Titian relocated the scene to a contemporary bedroom complete with servants putting the woman’s clothes into a cassone chest. And now this ‘so and so reclining on her couch’, as Wallace Stevens once described her, becomes more explicitly a contemporary beauty of the here and now. Perhaps replete with the portrait-like head of the contemporary courtesan Angela Zaffetta, she sports a fashionable coiffure and wears expensive jewellery.26 And as she looks out of the painting, her finger action is now made

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a response to external stimulus, tacitly brought back under the control of the male onlooker. Wide awake and sexually ready, she stares lovingly into the eyes of her unpainted partner, her erotic movement an accommodating reaction to his commanding presence. All this says much about Titian’s artistic response to Giorgione. If he certainly understood the sensual provocation of the left hand in the Venus, and the related suggestion that the nude female body depicted is living and sensate, then he was also unhappy with the ‘doubleness’ of the older master’s depiction: the way in which his original Venus balanced contradictory possibilities of unfinished physical reality and completed intellectual ideal. But Titian’s leap into a newly explicit art of fully realized sensuous naturalism came at a certain price. Giorgione’s Venus remains, by comparison with 58 Titian, Venus of Urbino, c. 1536–8, oil on canvas.

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Titian’s modern woman, independently powerful and selfpossessed, whether or not she masturbates. Her stimulation of male desire is made a mere by-product of her own authoritative identity and bodily experience. She is decidedly not supplied with the head of a contemporary courtesan; neither does she appear as a safely accommodating wife in the contemporary home, as the domesticated puppet of her husband’s desires. Giorgione’s always more independent image of female power is not subject to any such masculine control, and poses (without answering) a more subtle kind of question. She maintains within herself a sense of possibility that allows her to escape from the kind of misogynistic erotic entrapment lurking beneath the surface sparkle of Titian’s ‘updated’ version. The mysterious power and relevance of her figure is maintained precisely because she remains ambiguous, playing between contrary associations without conforming finally to one or the other.

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itian’s early attraction to the work of Giorgione soon diminished, but in a work such as the Concert Champêtre, probably dating from the same years in which he completed the Venus, the young painter offered the most sensitive response to the mode of the older master in the entire history of art (illus. 59).1 It is the most difficult to attribute among a group of very early Giorgionesque paintings made in Venice that closely reprise his style, but which are nonetheless hard to accept as by the master himself. These include still controversial works such as the Shepherd with a Flute (Hampton Court, Royal Collection), the Archer (Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland) and the Portrait of a Young Man (Budapest, Szépművészeti Múzeum), all of which remain difficult to attribute to a known master. The large-scale unfinished work featuring the Judgement of Solomon (Kingston Lacy, The Bankes Collection), first mentioned as a Giorgione by Ridolfi in 1648, was rightly recognized as a major early work by Sebastiano del Piombo in 1903. Other paintings that were long considered to be by Giorgione, such as the Christ and the Adulterous Woman (Glasgow, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum) and Christ Carrying the Cross (Venice, Scuola Grande di San Rocco), were probably painted by the young Titian.

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The haemorrhage of attributions away from Giorgione might seem to throw his artistic identity (and even his wider art-historical significance) into question.2 And yet the much leaner Giorgione oeuvre that has now come into view also offers a new opportunity to better understand this elusive painter. Close attention to works that can no longer be attributed to him, such as the Concert Champêtre, can also help to further define Giorgione’s own approach. Self-consciously Giorgionesque paintings continued to be made for centuries after the master’s death, as we will see, but typically simplify or clarify his approach while busily filling in the semantic gaps that he had originally opened up. Titian’s Concert, on the other hand, is perhaps the very finest early Giorgionesque painting, 59 Titian, Concert Champêtre, c. 1510, oil on canvas.

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appearing uniquely responsive to the master’s open-ended approach, with its difficult-to-establish subject matter, loose and blurry handling of paint and tonal approach to colour. The combination of clothed male figures and female nudes placed in a lush landscape must remind us of the Tempest (see illus. 41), while the apparently pastoral or Arcadian theme of music-making, with the pointed inclusion of finely dressed young patricians, all seem to point to Giorgione and his favoured pictorial themes and motifs. Yet the figures already possess a certain immediacy and dynamism, a propensity to twist and turn independently on their own axes, supported by expansive billowing draperies. They interact more intensely with one another (with the admitted exception of the woman drawing water from the well at the left), while the landscape itself is busier than Giorgione’s, its curving hollows and hillocks and deeply wooded appearance recalling other early Titians. And perhaps too this painting is made somewhat more ‘poetic’ than any known example from Giorgione’s own oeuvre: did Titian even exaggerate this aspect of the older master’s approach in his early attempt to encompass and surpass the older master’s approach? The Concert Champêtre was certainly not the only Giorgionesque painting that Titian made in his early period; and he sometimes remembered his one-time mentor’s compositions in much later works (see illus. 44). But as we have already seen in the examples illustrated in this book (see illus. 24, 33, 42, 58), Titian’s approach was distinct, based on a more direct approach to the given narrative, as also on a keen interest in formal movement and surface detail in support of this. The paintings of Giovanni Bellini can appear closer to Giorgione’s

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penchant for stillness and visual understatement than those of Titian; and in certain of his late works it is Bellini rather than Titian who appears as Giorgione’s most sympathetic early interpreter. While it would be an exaggeration to describe Bellini’s paintings from the final decade of his career as defined by Giorgione’s pictorial innovations, it is true that the expressive scope of the old painter’s work was widened by his growing interest in the younger painter’s experimental example. Bellini’s Lady with a Mirror (illus. 60) is unimaginable without the example of Giorgione’s Laura (illus. 27). And it is no accident that recent arguments about the status and meaning of this late work have developed along similar lines to those surrounding many of Giorgione’s paintings, some interpreting it as an allegory of vanity, while others see only a sensual depiction, devoid of any moralizing intent.3 Giorgione’s Venus (illus. 51) was in Bellini’s mind when he depicted the sleeping nymph Lotus approached by the libidinous Priapus in his late mythology for Ferrara showing the Feast of the Gods (1514, Washington, dc, National Gallery of Art). And Giorgione’s reclining nude was still an important point of reference in one of Bellini’s very last sacred paintings, the disturbing Drunkenness of Noah (c. 1515, Besançon, Musée des Beaux-Arts), which features the naked body of the aged patriarch sprawling in a drunken stupor across the lower foreground like a parody of his one-time pupil’s sensuous goddess. While the Besançon painting might suggest that the elderly Bellini shrank from Giorgione’s sensuousness, he nonetheless remained closer to this pupil than to others in his workshop such as Titian and Sebastiano del Piombo. If these emergent artists initially fell under Giorgione’s spell, their sympathy

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for his approach was relatively brief. Their engagement with the monumental and dynamic all’antica art of Raphael and Michelangelo in Florence and Rome was deeper and more longlasting.4 We have seen how Giorgione’s art was characterized by its own form of subtle rebellion against Bellini’s established model for painting. It is nonetheless true that Giorgione’s mode also resists the increasingly muscular narrative-based approach evident in the early works of Titian or Sebastiano, whose repeated employment on large-scale public commissions in Venice is symptomatic of their artistic direction of travel. The interactive urgency of Titian’s bulky protagonists enacting the story was more suitable for such productions, while the Venetian works of Sebastiano make still more overt reference to the Central Italian canon of classicizing forms. In his Death of Adonis, perhaps painted after his move to Rome in 1511, Sebastiano’s atmospheric yellowing sunset pointedly recalls Giorgione, but the large and smooth-skinned figures appear more like a Roman sculptural frieze, their interlocking forms and flamboyant rhetorical gestures combining to express the tragic subject of the painting (illus. 61). Given Giorgione’s evident difference from these younger painters, it is understandable that Giorgio Vasari equivocated over ascribing him a position in the history of art in the Lives of the Artists, initially suggesting that he painted ‘without the modern manner’ (1550 edition) before changing his mind to ally him with the leading artists of the sixteenth century (1568 edition). There was, indeed, something ambiguous about Giorgione’s position between the Quattrocento past and the Cinquecento future. But Renaissance painting did not simply progress in teleological fashion, as Vasari imagined,

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and it would be a mistake to see Giorgione as a convenient linking figure in a wider and coherent historical narrative, who facilitated a smooth and inevitable artistic development between one century and the next. The approaches of Titian and Sebastiano were, as the subsequent history of art was to prove, more adaptable to the mainstream of the European classical-academic tradition of the future, with its preference for clearly articulated dramatic action and explicit moral meaning presented on a large scale, based on the established formal vocabulary of ancient art (primarily sculpture). Giorgione’s ambiguous painting, on the other hand, appears more like a turning aside from this gathering tradition, his example becoming most significant at points of transformation or 60 Giovanni Bellini, Lady with a Mirror, 1515, oil on panel.

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hiatus within it, when the pictorial orthodoxies came under particular scrutiny or were challenged. Giorgione was always a more tangential or marginal figure, whose obscurely original art somehow escaped the more worldly demands on painting. Giorgione’s non-explicitness was also his expressive strength, and can be considered as an aesthetic position in its own right. The details of his paintings frequently suggest a meaning that is then downplayed or deferred. More obvious associations are typically undermined even as their possibility is presented to us. One thinks of the woman’s slight gesture to cover or reveal her breast in the Laura, which suddenly suggests that she might be the Venus Genetrix; or the powerful sense of the old woman’s physical presence in La vecchia, which renders the moralizing inscription insufficient to explain the full visual effect of the painting. The measuring instruments

61 Sebastiano del Piombo, Death of Adonis, c. 1512, oil on canvas.

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featured in the Three Philosophers promise to uncover precise meanings, but might not finally deliver a sense of certainty or clarity. And the paired broken columns or lightning flash in the Tempest appear as familiar symbols but nonetheless refuse to divulge their significance. The ambiguous position of the left hand in the Venus simultaneously suggests contrary possibilities without attempting to resolve the issue. Withholding what might have confirmed a conventional symbolic or iconographic meaning, Giorgione undermines the idea that painting must offer a coherent explanation of the things it represents, however naturalistically they are presented. By doing so he undoes the clarifying or explicatory principle of illusionistic or mimetic art in the Renaissance. Our attention turns instead to the way in which the given illusion or meaning might be produced or withheld as the painter chooses. We inevitably think again of Vasari’s telling critical comment about Giorgione’s too wilful determination to show off his technique and to ‘follow his own fancy’. Giorgione’s works run against the grain of the artistic mainstream insofar as they introduce what might be described as an aesthetic of diminution. As we have seen, many of his works were on a smaller scale, and in some, at least, the figures within them are reduced in size again in relation to the overall picture space. This was to move painting in a different direction from the monumentalizing mode of Renaissance art in the Cinquecento as practised in the dominant artistic centres of Italy: not only in Florence and Rome but in Venice itself, where painters like Tintoretto (1518–1594) and Veronese (1528–1588) followed Titian’s lead in building an art based on crowds of enlarged, dynamically interacting figures. And

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diminution can also be taken in a less literal sense, as relating to the wider meanings of his paintings. Some of this might merely reflect Giorgione’s youthful obscurity: his relative inexperience as a beginner in painting and as one yet unable to win large-scale commissions.5 His larger-scaled figural works on the Fondaco, and the more monumental aspects of his Venus, might indicate the beginnings of a very different direction of travel in the final years of his life. But the evidence of many of the works that he previously completed nonetheless suggests that diminution, rather than enlargement or expansion, had already become established as Giorgione’s defining mode. Even if his approach owed rather less to poetry than many have thought, it is tempting to see his work as a visual parallel to literary tradition, in which the mock-humble pastoral had long presented itself as the antithesis to the lofty epic, with its grand scale and sweep and related moral idealism. General parallels between the small physical scale of the printed publications of the Aldine press in Venice and Giorgione’s paintings, or between the bespoke spaces left for the individual reader’s interpretations at the margins of these books and the artist’s encouragement to his viewers to make their own readings of his works, appear suggestive enough.6 In the field of painting, Giorgione’s insistence on intimate smallness offered an analogous contrast to the monumental public istoria promoted by theorists such as Alberti as the ideal kind of painting. Giorgione’s is the art of the trace rather than the mark, the unfinished glance rather than the steady gaze, less a fully achieved composition than a youthful sketch. Moving beyond the usual chronological or diachronic view of Renaissance art,

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and allowing that Giorgione was to some extent an outsider to its typical preoccupations and concerns, we can recover something of his original strangeness. Stepping aside from the seemingly inevitable ‘progress’ towards fully achieved all’antica classicism in the Western tradition, Giorgione was something of a fugitive transitional, whose art finally belongs neither to the past nor the future. This half-formed quality must appear to us latecomers, at least, as the issue of the eternal youthfulness granted by his premature death. His paintings are always those of a partially unformed and experimental artist who is finding his way. Each work is different from the next, and offers a new point of departure, rather than a fully explored territory. There is something fundamentally intuitive about a Giorgione compared to a settled and mature painting by Giovanni Bellini or Titian, and this might be taken as both a weakness and a strength. Like any original young man, Giorgione provokes and stimulates, without finally arriving; but there is also a certain painful delight for the posthumous viewer in the fact that he did not live on to fully monumentalize himself in painting. Giorgione’s ambiguous example came back into play at moments of artistic change or crisis in the later history of European art: in Rome at the beginning of the seventeenth century, for example, when the realist Caravaggio turned away from the eclectic ideal classicism of the nascent academy. The development of the Fête galante theme in eighteenthcentury France by Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) and his followers offered a delicately ambiguous Rococo alternative to the heavy monumentalized explicitness of the Baroque tradition, and again owed much to Giorgione’s example

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(admittedly via Titian’s Concert Champêtre and Rubens). And Giorgione – or at least a Victorian version of him – became important once again for members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in mid-nineteenth-century Britain as they sought to recreate a lost mode of painting from before the rise of the mainstream of Renaissance-style academic classicism.7 In the obscurity of his youthfulness, Giorgione could stand as a romantic ideal of the innocent self-determining painter who works beyond the control of the old and established and their institutions and conventions. But his kind of painting could also serve as a model for nascent modernists in this period, given that its ambiguity exposed the roots of painting, revealing something of its core condition of materiality beneath the external demands of a prescribed subject matter, meaning or illusionistic effect. Edouard Manet (1832– 1883) turned to the Concert Champêtre, then believed to be a seminal Giorgione, in the course of his work on Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe; and to Titian’s Venus of Urbino, a work closely inspired by Giorgione’s Venus, for his Olympia.8 But if Giorgione’s independent painterly example provided a useful alternative model, it was always more implicated in the marketable future of European painting than this might allow. In Venice, as elsewhere in Italy, and eventually right across Europe, approximations of his delicate manner of painting had become very popular, especially in the field of small-scale domestic works. Giorgione’s approach to portraits and portrait-like images, like his penchant for placing sensuous (often naked) figures in landscapes, was often imitated. His influence is pervasive in many ‘lesser’ paintings made to decorate furniture in the home, where his blurry

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painting technique was also emulated. Such Giorgionesque works typically featured naked nymphs and handsome men, chivalric soldiers and their pages, dreamy musicians and ancient philosophers, along with poetic shepherds in pastoral landscapes, and were produced in large numbers for more than three centuries after his death. Many such works may miss the point insofar as they transform Giorgione’s paintings into renditions of the convenient clichés of young romantic life. Giorgione’s more historically distanced followers knew very little about what he had actually painted, and produced works that came to have only the most generic relationship to his originals. As we have seen throughout this book, Giorgione was an altogether more ambiguous and difficult painter than these later works would imply. Much of this posthumous imagery substitutes Giorgione’s own subtle visual reticence and sometimes disturbing obscurity with something more plangently and pleasingly poetic. But it nonetheless remains likely that Giorgione’s imagery was always particularly open to simulation. His understated works can appear like open visual templates or pictorial blanks that invited subsequent painters to ‘fill them in’. If Giorgione’s works were also produced as self-consciously original aesthetic objects, then this also implies that he played an important role in the early development of the art market. His works were apparently always understood as bespoke collectables, and were (as the letter of Isabella d’Este’s agent from October 1510 tells us) very highly valued by their original owners. They mark a new stage in the apprehension of artistic style as a more independent category within Western culture, one that had the potential to undermine the authority of externally

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derived meanings originating in the world beyond the picture. In these circumstances, it is no surprise to find that the name Giorgione gradually came to obsess the European art market during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was the Venetian writer Marco Boschini who first coined the term ‘Giorgionesque’ to describe an already very popular category of painting in 1660.9 He went on to especially commend his painter-friend Pietro della Vecchia (1603–1678), who made a good career from such productions, as ‘Giorgione’s ape’. By the mid-eighteenth century, literally thousands of pseudoGiorgiones of the kind produced by Della Vecchia and others were present in aristocratic collections, or were on sale in auction houses, all across Europe.10 To this extent, the ‘Giorgionesque’ is a very misleading category and a most uncertain indicator of the master’s own approach, which is both more reticent and more radical in its implications. Close analysis of the small but powerfully original oeuvre that remains after all the recent reattributions indicates that Giorgione was especially significant as an originator of the Venetian aesthetic of colorito, which emphasized the materiality of painting, as also its capacity for sensual embodiment.11 This approach offered an alternative to the rationalizing disegno-based tradition of central Italy with its emphasis on figure drawing and firmly defined outlines that served to secure the visual realization of the artist’s original intellectual and moral idea for the work. If this latter tradition enthroned vision or sight as the primary means of human knowing, and thus elevated painting as the perfect artistic medium, then Giorgione’s example did not conform. In his work, depicted forms appear as mirage-like rather than things

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that can be objectively or intellectually known. In this way, Giorgione questioned the illusionistic principles of the Renaissance, redeeming and promoting the ‘lower’ senses that it sought to master, overcome or set aside. We have seen how sound and touch could gain a new kind of authority in his work. At the same time the ambiguous sensate body emerges as the primary subject of painting, as much in his portraits and portrait-like paintings as in his nudes. It is intimately connected to that of the beholder, conjoined with our own in a wave or circuit of sensual response. Even in those works in which natural forms play a more important part the figures remain significant, while the landscape itself takes on ‘moods’ that appear to reflect theirs, or those of the viewer. This interactive approach, with its assumption of an individualized or sensitized viewer, marked an alternative to the traditional patriotic and pious culture of Venice around 1500. It would be easy to oversimplify the relationship between ‘private’ and ‘public’ in Venice, cultural domains that certainly overlapped and interpenetrated.12 But it is nonetheless likely that Giorgione’s career reflects, or perhaps was even defined by, the rise of the art market and of interlinked practices and categories of aesthetic taste, individual ownership and monetary investment. Giorgione’s paintings signal the rise of a more elite and personalized kind of aristocratic culture within the city. His works undoubtedly possessed a special allure for sophisticated and wealthy art collectors and connoisseurs within the short span of his lifetime. Perhaps, too, the newly intimate reach into the sensate body of the spectator proposed in Giorgione’s paintings marks a new stage in the colonization of the individual under the conditions of

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early modern capitalism. That Giorgione surfaced in Venice, then one of Europe’s great entrepôts, is no accident. The persistent implication of existential aloneness or isolation that haunts so many of the actors in his paintings might indirectly reflect his withdrawal from the communal life of the past. Giorgione offered a new acknowledgement of the fluid but defining realities of personal life. To the extent that his imagery moved beyond the control of outwardly defined, conventionally derived or abstracted meanings, so too it demanded a new kind of attention to immediate corporeal matters. The thematic ambiguity of his paintings is closely linked to this intensified engagement with sensuous phenomena, whether this involved the intimate depiction of usually forbidden flesh, slight gestural, eye or finger movements, the sounds of a voice or a storm; or attention to the way that apparently fixed colours and shapes in a landscape are transfigured by equally sudden switches of weather, psychological mood or emotion. Giorgione constantly challenged the intellect’s cold demand for encompassing or over-arching meanings, engaging instead a more carnal reality that networks his imagery directly to ‘the flesh of the world’.13 Yet there is a darker side to this embodied approach that might underpin the melancholic emotional tenor of many of his paintings. A fundamentally sceptical hermeneutic question is raised by Giorgione’s equivocal paintings. Despite his very evident extensions to the traditional expressive range of Western painting, what can finally be known about reality beyond its immediate sensuous appearances, Giorgione paintings seem also to imply, is uncertain and obscure. Implicit within his alluring sensual explorations is also an indication

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of the limits to human understanding. If his kind of painting gives the viewer access to a more immediate and existentially true sense of human life, then this does not entail some positivistic increase in knowledge. Rather it suggests that the underlying meaning of the world has become newly uncertain, unfixed and ambiguous.

references

Introduction 1 For a similar equation between paintings and traps in the context of Pieter Bruegel’s works, see Joseph Leo Koerner, Bosch and Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life (Princeton, nj, and Oxford, 2016), pp. 35–6, 339–40. 2 James Elkins, ‘On Monstrously Ambiguous Paintings’, History and Theory, xxxii/3 (October 1993), pp. 227–47. 3 For the philosophical background to this distinction, see Martin W. Bloomfield, ‘Allegory as Interpretation’, New Literary History, iii/2 (Winter 1970), pp. 30–117. 4 See John Shearman, Only Connect . . . Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Washington, dc, 1988). 5 Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (London, 2005), p. 13. 6 See the section on ‘Optics’ in Edward MacCurdy, trans., The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (London, 2009), vol. i, pp. 175–223. 7 Martin Jay, ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’, in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle, wa, 1988), pp. 3–27. 8 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture: The Latin Texts of De Pictura and De Statua, ed. and trans. Cecil Grayson (London and New York, 1972), pp. 36–59. 9 John Gage, Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (London, 1993), pp. 117–38; Paul Hills, Venetian Colour: Marble, Mosaic, Painting and Glass, 1250–1500 (New Haven, ct, and London, 1999), pp. 201–26. 10 David Rosand, Painting in Sixteenth-century Venice: Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 18–25.

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11 See Sylvia Ferino-Pagden and Giovanna Nepi Scirè, Giorgione: Myth and Enigma, exh. cat., Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (Milan, 2004), pp. 255–76; and Enrico Maria dal Pozzolo and Lionello Puppi, Giorgione, exh. cat., Castelfranco Veneto, Casa Marta (Milan, 2009), pp. 225–42. 12 Salvatore Settis, ‘Giorgione e i suoi committenti’, in Giorgione e l’umanismo veneziano, ed. Rodolfo Pallucchini (Florence, 1981), vol. i, pp. 373–98. See also Chapter One below. 13 Jennifer Fletcher, ‘“Fatto al specchio”: Venetian Renaissance Attitudes to Self-portraiture’, in Imaging the Self in Renaissance Italy, ed. Hilliard T. Goldfarb (Boston, ma, 1992), pp. 45–60. 14 Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere (London, 1996), vol. i, p. 643.

1 Who Was Giorgione? 1 He is already named as ‘Zorzo(n)’ or ‘Giorgione’ in a recently discovered inscription apparently applied to a drawing shortly after his death in 1510. Jaynie Anderson et al., ‘Giorgione in Sydney’, Burlington Magazine, clxi/1392 (March 2019), pp. 190–99. 2 Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere (London, 1996), vol. i, pp. 640–45. 3 Claudio Strinati, ‘Giorgione e la musica’, in Enrico Maria dal Pozzolo and Lionello Puppi, Giorgione, exh. cat., Castelfranco Veneto, Casa Marta (Milan, 2009), pp. 163–8. 4 Anderson et al., ‘Giorgione in Sydney’. 5 Renata Segre, ‘A Rare Document on Giorgione’, Burlington Magazine, clxi/1299 (June 2011), pp. 383–6. 6 Giambattista Magazza, for example, punningly describes ‘the beautiful heads of Barba Zorzon’ in a poem of 1568. See Jaynie Anderson, Giorgione: Painter of Poetic Brevity (Paris, 1996), p. 68. 7 Lionello Puppi, ‘Il cognomen di Giorgione è Barbarella’, Corriere del Veneto, 12 October 2011. See also Lionello Puppi, ‘Tracce e scommesse per un biografia impossibile’, in Dal Pozzolo and Puppi, Giorgione, pp. 21–36. 8 Giovanni Chiuppani, ‘Per la biografia di Giorgione da Castelfranco’, Bollettino del Museo Civico di Bassano, vi (1909),

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pp. 73–8. See also Giacinto Cecchetto, ‘Castelfranco tra la fine del xv secolo e i primi decenni del xvi: “mappe urbane” e paesaggi del contado’, in Dal Pozzolo and Puppi, Giorgione, pp. 63–7. Anik Waldeck, ‘Vicenzo Catena and Giorgione Reconsidered’, Artibus et Historiae, 74 (2016), pp. 59–71. 14 August 1507 and 24 January 1508 (more veneto 1507): Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Provveditori al Sal, b. 60, reg. 3, c. 144v.; and b. 60, reg. 3, c. 119r. See especially Tullio’s so-called ‘double-portrait’ reliefs, such as the Bacchus and Ariadne, c. 1505, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. 11 December 1508: Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Provveditori al Sal, b. 63, reg. 7, c. 95r. 25 October 1510: Archivio di Stato di Mantova, Archivio Gonzaga, b. 2996, copialettere 28, c. 70r. 8 November 1510: Archivio di Stato di Mantova, Archivio Gonzaga, b. 1893, c. 68. For this possible local connection, see Danila Dal Pos, Museo Casa Giorgione (Castelfranco Veneto, 2009), pp. 74–117. For the attribution to Giorgione, see ibid., pp. 147–219. Marcantonio Michiel, Der Anonimo Morelliano (Marcantonio Michiel’s Notizie d’opere del Disegno, ed. Theodore von Frimmel (Bologna, 1884). See Marco Paoli, La Tempesta Svelata: Giorgione, Gabriele Vendramin, Cristoforo Marcello e la Vecchia (Lucca, 2011), pp. 143–60, who argues that Cristoforo Marcello rather than Vendramin was the original patron of the Tempest and La vecchia. Anderson, Giorgione, pp. 160–75. Rosella Lauber, ‘Taddeo Contarini’, in Il Collezionismo d’arte a Venezia: Dalle origini al Cinquecento, ed. Michel Hochmann, Rosella Lauber and Stefania Mason (Venice, 2008), pp. 263–4. Anderson, Giorgione, pp. 181–2. For Domenico Grimani’s collection see, most recently, Rosella Lauber, ‘Per il cardinal Domenico Grimani: Tra eccellenza e “materia della fantasia”’ and the entries under ‘Il cardinal Domenico Grimani’ in Bernard Aikema, Jheronimus Bosch e Venezia, exh. cat., Palazzo Ducale, Venice (Venice, 2017), pp. 35–51 and pp. 121–35. Puppi, ‘Tracce e scommesse per un biografia impossibile’, in Dal Pozzolo and Puppi, Giorgione, pp. 26–8.

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23 Guido Ruggiero, Violence in Early Renaissance Venice (New Brunswick, nj, 1986). For the development of an ‘aesthetic of violence’ in Florence, see Scott Nethersole, Art and Violence in Early Renaissance Florence (New Haven, ct, and London, 2018). 24 See Helen Langdon, Caravaggio: A Life (London, 1998), pp. 30 and 385. 25 For the Grimani collection, see note 21 above. 26 In addition to the work now in Vienna mentioned below, a near-contemporary copy, painted on paper, is now in Budapest, Szépmüvészeti Múzeum: see Sylvia Ferino-Pagden and Giovanna Nepi Scirè, Giorgione: Myth and Enigma, exh. cat., Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum (Milan, 2004), cat. no. 17, pp. 232–3. 27 See Enrico Maria dal Pozzolo, ‘La Barba di Giorgione’, in Dal Pozzolo and Puppi, Giorgione, esp. pp. 215–16. 28 See Jodi Cranston, The Poetics of Portraiture in the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge, 2000), p. 86. 29 See Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment (New Haven, ct, and London, 1981). 30 On a preparatory drawing for the sculpture now in the Louvre, Paris, Michelangelo wrote, ‘David with the sling and I with the bow – Michelangelo’. 31 See James Hall, The Sinister Side: How Left–Right Symbolism Shaped Western Art (Oxford, 2008) 32 Tom Nichols, Titian and the End of the Venetian Renaissance (London, 2013), pp. 162–3. 33 Walter Pater, ‘On the School of Giorgione’ (1877), in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (Oxford, 1990), p. 85. 34 This painting, almost certainly by a follower, is now in Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum: see Ferino-Pagden and Nepi Scirè, Giorgione: Myth and Enigma, cat. no. 20 and p. 270. For the drawing see Anderson, Giorgione, p. 71, illus. 35. 35 Anderson, Giorgione, p. 317. The Teniers painting mentioned here is in the Suida-Manning Collection, New York. 36 See below, Chapter Three. 37 ‘She took sandals upon her feet, and put about her bracelets and her chains, and her rings, and her earrings, and all her ornaments,

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and decked herself bravely, to allure the eyes of all men who should see her.’ Anderson, Giorgione, p. 196. Marianne Koos, ‘Identität und Begehren: Bildnisse effeminierter Männlichkeit in der venezianischen Malerei des frühen 16. Jahrhunderts’, in Männlichkeit im Blick: Visuelle Inszenierungen in der Kunst seit der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Mechthild Fend and Marianne Koos (Cologne, 2004), pp. 53–78. See John Shearman, Only Connect . . . Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton, nj, 1992), p. 25. Albrecht Dürer, Orpheus Slain by Bacchantes, 1494, Hamburg, Kunsthalle, with the inscription reading ‘Orfeus der erst puseren’. ‘Medusa’s Head’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. xviii (1920–22), pp. 273–4. For the possibility of Giorgione’s amorphous sexuality, see Anderson, Giorgione, p. 286.

2 Artistic Context and Early Religious Paintings 1 Patricia Fortini Brown, Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio (New Haven, ct, and London, 1988). 2 David Rosand, Myths of Venice: The Figuration of a State (Chapel Hill, nc, and London, 2001). 3 See, for example, Domenico Ghirlandaio’s St Francis Healing the Injured Child, c. 1482–6. Florence, S Trinità, Sassetti Chapel. 4 Rona Goffen, ‘Icon and Vision: Giovanni Bellini’s Half-length Madonnas’, Art Bulletin, lvii/3 (1975), pp. 487–518. 5 Keith Christiansen, ‘Bellini and the Meditational poesia’, Artibus et Historiae, xxxiv/67 (2013), pp. 9–20. 6 Adrian Stokes, Venice: An Aspect of Art (London, 1945), p. 52. 7 Roberto Longhi, Richerche sulla pittura Veneta, 1946–1969 (Florence, 1978), p. 17. 8 Carolyn C. Wilson, ‘St Joseph and the Process of Decoding Vincenzo Catena’s Warrior Adoring the Infant Christ and the Virgin’, Artibus et Historiae, xxxiv/67 (2013), pp. 117–32, esp. pp. 121–3. 9 A recent infrared reflectogram of the painting indicates that the postures of the Virgin and Child are quite close to the figures

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in the recently discovered drawing in Sydney University library: Jaynie Anderson et al., ‘Giorgione in Sydney’, Burlington Magazine, clxi/1392 (March 2019), pp. 196–7. Matteo Casini, ‘“The Company of the Hose”: Youth and Courtly Culture in Europe, Italy and Venice’, Studi Veneziani, 63 (2011), pp. 133–53. Peter Humfrey, Cima da Conegliano (Cambridge, 1983), cat. no. 61, pp. 108–9. David Alan Brown, in Sylvia Ferino-Pagden and Giovanna Nepi Scirè, Giorgione: Myth and Enigma, exh. cat., Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum (Milan, 2004), cat. no. 2, pp. 170–72. See Bernard Aikema and Beverley Louise Brown, Renaissance Venice and the North: Crosscurrents in the Time of Dürer, Bellini and Titian, exh. cat., Venice, Palazzo Grassi (London, 2000). Louisa C. Matthew, ‘“Vendecolori a Venezia”: The Reconstruction of a Profession’, Burlington Magazine, cxliv/1196 (Nov. 2002), pp. 680–86. For cangiantismo in Renaissance painting, see Marcia B. Hall, Color and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 20–22, 123–9. See also the new Venetian interest in perspective evident in the woodcut illustrations to Manutius’s flagship vernacular publication of 1499: Roswitha Stewering, ‘Architectural Representation in the Hypnerotomachia Polifili’, Journal of the Society of Architectural History, lix/1 (March 2000), pp. 6–25. See Pacioli’s mention of these discussions in his Summa di arithmetica geometria, proportioni e proportionalità (Venice, 1494), p. 2. Quoted in Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York, 1993), p. 59. Francesco Valconover, ‘La Pala di Castelfranco’, in Giorgione e l’umanismo veneziano, ed. Rodolfo Pallucchini (Florence, 1981), vol. i, pp. 173–4. See also Giorgio Castelfranco, ‘Nota su Giorgione’, Bolletino d’Arte, xl (1955), p. 298. Salvatore Settis, ‘Giorgione in Sicily: On the Dating and Composition of the Castelfranco Altarpiece’, in Ferino-Pagden and Nepi Sciré, Giorgione: Myth and Enigma, pp. 133–63.

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21 Francesca Cortesi Bosco, ‘Matteo Costanzo nella Guerra del Casentino: Considerazioni sull’esecuzione della tavola di Giorgione a Castelfranco’, in Enrico Maria dal Pozzolo and Lionello Puppi, Giorgione, exh. cat., Castelfranco Veneto, Casa Marta (Milan, 2009), pp. 113–22. 22 Settis, ‘Giorgione in Sicily’, pp. 136–46. 23 Ibid., pp. 143–4.

3 Portraits and Portrait-types 1 ‘A “historia” will move spectators when the men painted in the picture outwardly demonstrate their own feelings as clearly as possible’: Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture: The Latin Texts of De Pictura and De Statua, ed. and trans. Cecil Grayson (London and New York, 1972), pp. 80–81. 2 See Per Rumberg, Peter Humfrey and Paul Joannides, ‘The Portrait Debate: Giorgione or Titian?’, 17 February 2016, www. royalacademy.org.uk, accessed 1 November 2019; Sylvia FerinoPagden and Giovanna Nepi Scirè, Giorgione: Myth and Enigma, exh. cat., Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum (Milan, 2004), cat. no. 4, pp. 176–8. 3 Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture, pp. 60–61; Evelyn Welch, ‘Naming Names: The Transience of Individual Identity in Fifteenth-century Italian Portraiture’, in The Image of the Individual: Portraits in the Renaissance, ed. Nicholas Mann and Luke Syson, exh. cat., London, British Museum (London, 1998), p. 92. 4 See Robert Finlay, ‘The Venetian Republic as a Gerontocracy: Age and Politics in the Renaissance’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, viii/1 (1978), pp. 157–78. 5 Lorne Campbell, Renaissance Portraits: European Portrait-painting in the 14th, 15th and 16th Centuries (New Haven, ct, and London, 1990), pp. 9–11. 6 The foreshortened hand might reflect the influence of the Netherlandish painter Hans Memling. See Erich Schleier, Gemäldegalerie Berlin: Geschichte der Sammlung und ausgewählte Meisterwerke (Berlin, 1985), p. 330. 7 Rona Goffen, Giovanni Bellini (New Haven, ct, and London, 1989), p. 210.

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8 John Pope Hennessy, The Portrait in the Renaissance (Princeton, nj, 1966), p. 132. 9 Probably a shortening of V[irtus] V[incit]. See Simone Facchinetti and Arturo Galansino, In the Age of Giorgione, exh. cat., London, Royal Academy (London, 2016), p. 40. 10 See, most recently, for this work, Facchinetti and Galansino, In the Age of Giorgione, cat. no. 5, pp. 48–9. 11 Klàra Garas, ‘Bildnisse der Renaissance: ii, Dürer und Giorgione’, Acta historiae artium Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, xviii/1 (1972), pp. 125–35. 12 Peter Humfrey in Pietro Marani and Giovanna Nepi Scirè, Leonardo and Venice, exh. cat., Venice, Palazzo Grassi (Milan, 1992), pp. 42–3; and David Alan Brown and Sylvia FerinoPagden, Bellini, Giorgione, Titian and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting, exh. cat., Washington, dc, National Gallery of Art; Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum (New Haven, ct, and London, 2006), p. 15. 13 Edward MacCurdy, ed. and trans., The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (London, 2009), vol. iii, p. 17. 14 Peter Humfrey, Titian (Ghent, 2007), cat. no. 47, p. 88. 15 William Schupbach, ‘Doctor Parma’s Medicinal Macronic: Poem by Bartolotti, Pictures by Giorgione and Titian’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xli (1978), pp. 147–91. 16 ‘La testa del gargione che tiene in mano la frezza’: Marcantonio Michiel, Der Anonimo Morelliano (Marcantonio Michiel’s Notizie d’opere del Disegno), ed. Theodore Frimmel (Vienna, 1884), pp. 78–9. 17 Caroline Campbell et al., Mantegna and Bellini, exh. cat., London, National Gallery (London, 2019), pp. 216–17. 18 Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere (London, 1996), vol. i, p. 644. 19 See, for example, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio’s Portrait of a Boy as St Sebastian (c. 1490–95, Moscow, Pushkin Museum of Fine Art) as a possible formal source. 20 Ferino-Pagden and Nepi Scirè, Giorgione: Myth and Enigma, cat. no. 6, pp. 184–7. 21 For further references, see Brown and Ferino-Pagden, Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, cat. no. 38, pp. 208–11.

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22 Rudolf Schier, ‘Identifying Giorgione’s Laura’, Italian Studies, lxix/1 (2014), pp. 24–40. For the painting as an allegory of marriage, see Enrico Maria dal Pozzolo, ‘Il lauro di Laura e delle “maritate veneziane”’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz, xxxvii (1993), pp. 275–7. 23 Mary Garrard, ‘Leonardo da Vinci: Female Portraits, Female Nature’, in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, ed. N. Broude and M. Garrard (New York and London, 1994), pp. 59–85; Paul Holberton, ‘To Loosen the Tongue of Mute Poetry: Giorgione’s Self-portrait as David as a Paragone Demonstration’, in Poetry on Art: Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Thomas Frangenberg (Donington, 2003), pp. 40–42. 24 For a useful summary of the literature, see Patricia Fortini Brown, Private Lives in Renaissance Venice: Art, Architecture and the Family (New Haven, ct, and London, 2004), pp. 162–4. 25 Anne Christine Junkermann, ‘The Lady and the Laurel: Gender and Meaning in Giorgione’s “Laura”’, Oxford Art Journal, xvi/1 (1993), pp. 49–58. 26 For the recent infrared analysis of the inscription, see Enrico Maria dal Pozzolo, ‘Il problema della committenza della “Laura” di Giorgione: una revision paleografica e un’ ipotesi aperta’, Jahrbuch des Kunsthistorischen Museums Wien, 17–18 (2015–16), pp. 44–57. 27 Hasan Niyazi, ‘Giorgione’s Woman in Red’, online blog, 4 June 2011, www.3pp.website, accessed 1 November 2019. 28 Ferino-Pagden and Nepi Scirè, Giorgione: Myth and Enigma, cat. no. 8, pp. 197–201. 29 Rona Goffen, Titian’s Women (New Haven, ct, and London, 1997), pp. 65–86. 30 Jaynie Anderson, Giorgione: Painter of Poetic Brevity (Paris, 1996), p. 38. 31 Michael W. Kwakkelstein, ‘Leonardo da Vinci’s Grotesque Heads and the Breaking of the Physiognomic Mould’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, liv (1991), pp. 127–36. 32 For this work, which survives in two separate fragments now in the Museo Correr and the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, see Simona Cohen, ‘The Enigma of Carpaccio’s Venetian Ladies’, Renaissance Studies, xix/2 (2005), pp. 150–84.

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33 Two lost female portraits attributed to Bellini and known from watercolour copies are, however, listed in the Vendramin collection in 1627; see Karl Schütz, ‘Dürer in Venice: A Few Comments on the Relationship between German and Venetian Painting around 1505’, in Giorgione: Myth and Enigma, ed. FerinoPagden and Nepi-Scirè, p. 106. 34 Brown, Private Lives in Renaissance Venice, pp. 162–4. 35 See Patricia Simons, ‘Portraiture, Portrayal and Idealization: Ambiguous Individualization in Representations of Renaissance Women’, in Language and Images in Renaissance Italy, ed. Alison Brown (Oxford, 1995), pp. 263–311. 36 See the discussions of this work in Jodi Cranston, The Poetics of Portraiture in the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 8–11 and pp. 102–3; Mary E. Frank, ‘Visible Signs of Aging: Images of Old Women in Renaissance Venice’ and Erin J. Campbell, ‘“Unenduring Beauty”: Gender and Old Age in Early Modern Art and Aesthetics’, in Growing Old in Early Modern Europe: Cultural Representations, ed. Erin Campbell (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 139–52 and pp. 153–68, respectively. 37 Campbell, ‘“Unenduring Beauty”’, p. 155 and p. 161 argues instead that La vecchia contributes to ‘a Renaissance aesthetic discourse based on the ideal of masculine beauty’ and ‘obeys a decorum for the repulsive female body’. 38 These two paintings were initially compared by Hans Tietze and Erica Tietze-Conrat, Kritisches Verzeichnis der Werke Albrecht Dürers: Der reife Dürer (Basel and Leipzig, 1937), vol. i, p. 341. 39 The crude symbolism of the coins is conveniently ignored in the recent interpretations of Dürer’s painting as showing a vanitas rather than the sin of Avarice: see Schütz, ‘Dürer in Venice’, pp. 107–8. 40 G. M. Richter, ‘Lost and Rediscovered Works by Giorgione’, Art in America, XXX (1942), p. 151. 41 For an alternative reading of Dürer’s painting as more rather than less ambiguous than Giorgione’s see Schütz, ‘Dürer in Venice’, pp. 107–8. 42 See Campbell, ‘“Unenduring Beauty”’, p. 161. 43 The painting is described as ‘retrato della madre di Zorzon de man de Zorzon’ (‘portrait of Giorgione’s mother by the hand of

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Giorgione’) in the inventory of Vendramin’s collection of 1567: see Brown and Ferino-Pagden, Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, cat. no. 39, pp. 212–15. The sitter’s white headgear links her to images of impoverished widows, often shown receiving alms in Venetian Renaissance art, and it remains possible that Giorgione’s La vecchia is presented as a street woman requesting charity. For some relevant comparisons, see Tom Nichols, ‘Secular Charity, Sacred Poverty: Picturing the Poor in Renaissance Venice’, Art History, xxx/2 (2007), pp. 138– 69, esp. figs. 1.3 and 1.13. Rona Goffen, ‘Signatures: Inscribing Identity in Renaissance Art’, Viator, xxxii (January 2001), pp. 303–70. This area of the painting has sometimes been seen as clumsy and perhaps overpainted by a later artist. But the restoration of the work by the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice completed in 2019 suggests that the paint is original, even if Giorgione seems to have added the inscription at a late stage: ‘La “Vecchia” di Giorgione prima e dopo: Tutto sul restauro del capolavoro di Venezia’, Finestre sull’arte, 11 February 2019, www.finestresullarte.info, accessed 1 November 2019. See Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character (New York, 1971), vol. i, pp. 293–4. The inscription in Giorgione’s La vecchia differs greatly from that in Andrea Mantegna’s moralizing Minerva Expelling the Vices (1502, Paris, Musée du Louvre) for Isabella d’Este’s studiolo in the Mantuan Ducal Palace, in which extended ribbon-like scrolls wound around the tree figure to the left offer a precise description of the meaning of the allegory. Erwin Panofsky, Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographic (New York, 1969), p. 91. See Peter Lüdemann, ‘Col tempo impara scientia e virtude: Spunti per una rilettura iconologica della Vecchia di Giorgione’, Studi Tizianeschi, ix (2016), pp. 18–20. Vendramin gave Antonio Pasqualino a marble head of an openmouthed woman according to Michiel; see Anderson, Giorgione, p. 162. Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture, pp. 60–61.

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53 Welch, ‘Naming Names’, p. 92. 54 For the wider cultural and philosophical background, see Ricardo J. Quinones, The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Cambridge, ma, 1972). See also Simona Cohen, Transformations of Time and Temporality in Medieval and Renaissance Art (Boston, ma, 2014), p. 116. 55 Sound has been aptly described as ‘the natural symbol of transience and the lostness of past time’: see Jonathan Rée, I See a Voice: A Philosophical History of Language, Deafness and the Senses (London, 2000), p. 23. 56 It was probably owned by Gabriele Vendramin. For a reading of the painting as showing the ‘Education of Marcus Aurelius’ following a very brief indication in a Venetian inventory of 1666, see Anderson, Giorgione, p. 298. 57 The man at the centre of Titian’s painting has been identified as Gusnasco da Pavia, while Gabriele della Volta is to the right: see Maria H. Loh, Titian’s Touch: Art, Magic and Philosophy (London, 2019), p. 59. 58 Joseph Hoffman, ‘Giorgione’s Three Ages of Man’, Pantheon, xlii (1965), pp. 238–44; Jane Hatter, ‘Col Tempo, Musical Time, Ageing and Sexuality in Sixteenth-century Venetian Painting’, Early Music, xxxix/1 (2011), pp. 3–14. 59 The ‘Four Ages of Man’ is a sub-theme in the sculpture included in Antonio Rizzo’s Nicoló Tron monument in the Frari of c. 1476, for example, although in this context it supports tetrarchic references to the seasons and the humours.

4 Landscape and Figure 1 For the growing importance of creative fantasy rather than mere imitation in the Renaissance, see Martin Kemp, ‘From Mimesis to Fantasia: The Quattrocento Vocabulary of Creation, Inspiration and Genius in the Visual Arts’, Viator, viii (1977), pp. 347–98. 2 ‘Di là dal fiume e tra gli alberi’: Il paesaggio del Rinascimento a Venezia. Nascita e fortuna di un genere artistico (secoli xv–xvii), ed. Laura de Fuccia and Christophe Brouard (Ravenna, 2012). 3 Lost Giorgiones such as the Finding of Paris, an early work owned by Taddeo Contarini, but now known only through a seventeenth-

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century copy by David Teniers, apparently featured figures in a broadly treated landscape: see Jaynie Anderson, Giorgione: Painter of Poetic Brevity (Paris, 1996), p. 317. Davide Gasparotto, Giovanni Bellini: Landscapes of Faith in Renaissance Venice, exh. cat., Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles, 2017). Felton Gibbons, ‘Giovanni Bellini’s Topographical Landscapes’, in Studies of Late Medieval and Renaissance Painting in Honor of Millard Meiss, ed. Irving Lavin and John Plummer (New York, 1977), vol. i, pp. 174–84. Augusto Gentili, ‘Bellini and Landscape’, in The Cambridge Companion to Giovanni Bellini, ed. Peter Humfrey (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 167–81. See Bellini’s Resurrection, c. 1475–7 (Berlin, Staatliche Museen, Gemäldegalerie) and Madonna of the Meadow, c. 1495–1500 (London, National Gallery). Susannah Rutherglen and Charlotte Hale, ed., In a New Light: Giovanni Bellini’s St Francis in the Desert (New York and London, 2015). David Alan Brown and Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, Bellini, Giorgione, Titian and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting, exh. cat., Washington, dc, National Gallery of Art; Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum (New Haven, ct, and London, 2006), cat. no. 17, pp. 116–18. See, for example, Andrea Mantegna’s Adoration of the Shepherds, c. 1450–51, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. For the fashionable Renaissance literary trope of the nobleman shepherd and its impact on painting, see Patricia Emison, Low and High Style in Italian Renaissance Art (New Haven, ct, and London, 1997), pp. 37–89. Its immediate success is suggested by the near-replica painting now in Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, which, though of lesser quality, might have been the version originally recorded in Taddeo Contarini’s collection. Brown and Ferino-Pagden, Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, cat. no. 29, pp. 160–63. The title now used for this painting was invented by Roberto Longhi. See Jill Dunkerton, ‘Giorgione and Not Giorgione: The Conservation History and Technical Examination of Il Tramonto’, National Gallery Technical Bulletin, xxxi (2010), pp. 42–63.

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15 See Bernard Aikema, Jheronimus Bosch e Venezia, exh. cat., Venice, Palazzo Ducale (Venice, 2017). Perhaps Grimani’s taste for the macabre is also reflected in Giorgione’s Self-portrait as David (see illus. 1), a work that he may well have commissioned. 16 See, for example, the paintings discussed by Hans Belting, ‘Poetry and Painting: Saint Jerome in the Wilderness’, in Gasparotto, Giovanni Bellini: Landscapes of Faith, pp. 25–35. 17 See Rudolf Wittkower, ‘L’Arcadia e il giorgionismo’, in Umanesimo europeo e umanesimo veneziano, ed. Vittore Branca (Florence, 1963), pp. 473–84; David Rosand, ‘Giorgione, Venice and the Pastoral Vision’, in Places of Delight: The Pastoral Landscape, ed. Robert C. Cafritz (Washington, dc, 1988), pp. 20–81. 18 Brown and Ferino-Pagden, Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, cat. no. 30, pp. 164–6. 19 Rutherglen and Hale, eds, In a New Light, p. 55. 20 Giorgione had recently used these colours in a similar fashion in the figure of Joseph in his Adoration of the Shepherds (see illus. 35); see Brown and Ferino-Pagden, Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, pp. 26–7. 21 Michiel notes ‘The canvas in oil of three philosophers in a landscape, two standing and another seated, who contemplates the rays of the sun, with a painted rock that is miraculously rendered. It was begun by Giorgione da Castelfranco and finished by Sebastiano the Venetian’; Marcantonio Michiel, Der Anonimo Morelliano (Marcantonio Michiel’s Notizia d’opere del Disegno), ed. Theodore Frimmel (Vienna, 1884), pp. 86–8. 22 Johannes Wilde, ‘Röntgenaufnahmen der Drei Philosophen Giorgiones und der Zigeunermadonna Tizians’, Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, vi (1932), pp. 141–54. 23 Brown and Ferino-Pagden, Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, p. 293, fig. 11. 24 See Salvatore Settis, Giorgione’s Tempest: Interpreting the Hidden Subject (London, 1990), pp. 15–48. 25 Brown and Ferino-Pagden, Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, cat. no. 30, p. 164. 26 Johannes Wilde, Venetian Art from Bellini to Titian (Oxford, 1981), p. 67. 27 Peter Meller, ‘I tre filosofi di Giorgione’, in Giorgione e l’umanismo veneziano, ed. Rodolfo Pallucchini (Florence, 1981), vol. i, pp. 227– 47.

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28 Arnaldo Ferriguto, Attraverso i misteri di Giorgione (Castelfranco Veneto, 1933), p. 61. 29 See, for example, the seated female figure of ‘Geometry’ surrounded by such instruments in Gregor Reisch’s Margarita philosophica (1504), one of the sources for Dürer’s great engraving of Melencolia i of 1514. 30 See S. Carezzolo, A. Giacomelli, N. Parola and C. Vitali, ‘Castel San Zeno di Montagnana in un disegno attribuito a Giorgione’, Antichità viva, xvii/4–5 (1978), pp. 40–52. 31 For example, the Rotterdam drawing was one of nine still attributed to Giorgione in the large exhibition held in Paris in 1993. See Gilles Fage, Le Siècle de Titien: L’âge d’or de la peinture à Venise, exh. cat., Paris, Grand Palais (Paris, 1993), cat. nos 86–94 and pp. 484–95. 32 For the further attribution of a red chalk drawing showing the Virgin and Child to Giorgione, along with a reiteration of an earlier attribution of a drawing showing Cupid Bending His Bow (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art) relating to the Fondaco commission, see Jaynie Anderson et al., ‘Giorgione in Sydney’, Burlington Magazine, clxi/1392 (March 2019), pp. 190–99. 33 Colin Eisler, The Genius of Jacopo Bellini: The Complete Paintings and Drawings (New York, 1989), pp. 105–82. 34 The drawing is badly abraded after it was washed in warm water by Sebastiano Resta, its owner in the late seventeenth century; see Catherine Whistler, Venice and Drawing, 1500–1800: Theory, Practice and Collecting (New Haven, ct, and London, 2016), pp. 242–3. 35 See Bert Meijer, ‘Due proposte iconografiche per il Pastorello di Rotterdam’, in Giorgione: Atti del Convegno, ed. Rodolfo Pallucchini (Venice, 1979), pp. 53–6. 36 Tom Nichols, The Art of Poverty: Irony and Ideal in Sixteenth-century Beggar Imagery (Manchester, 2007). 37 Pietro Edwards identified the Tempest as showing ‘the family of the painter’ in 1797, and his interpretation was followed by Lord Byron when he viewed the work in the same gallery twenty years later. See Linda Borean, La galleria Manfrin a Venezia: L’ultima collezione d’arte della Serenissima (Udine, 2018), p. 17. 38 Edgar Wind, Giorgione’s Tempesta with Comments on Giorgione’s Poetic Allegories (Oxford, 1969).

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39 Peter Humfrey, Titian: The Complete Paintings (Ghent, 2007), cat. no. 3, p. 32. 40 Sandra Moschini Marconi, in Giorgione a Venezia, ed. Antonio Ruggeri, Francesco Valconover et al. (Milan, 1978), p. 104. 41 Andrew Morrall, ‘Soldiers and Gypsies: Outsiders and their Families in Early Sixteenth-century German Art’, in Artful Armies, Beautiful Battles: Art and Warfare in Early Modern Europe, ed. Pia Cuneo (Leiden, 2002), pp. 159–80. 42 See, for example, Nicoletto da Modena’s engraving of a Gypsy Family (c. 1500, London, British Museum). 43 Paul Holberton, ‘Giorgione’s Tempest or “Little Landscape with the Storm with the Gypsy”: More on the Gypsy and a Reassessment’, Art History, xviii/3 (September 1995), pp. 383–404. 44 Joscelyn Godwin, trans., Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream (London, 1999), pp. 71–3. For the Tempest as an illustration of the Hypnerotomachia, see Luigi Stefanini, Il motivo della Tempesta di Giorgione, 2nd edn (Padua, 1955). 45 Stephen Campbell, ‘Giorgione’s “Tempest”, “Studiolo” Culture and the Renaissance Lucretius’, Renaissance Quarterly, lvi/2 (Summer 2003), pp. 299–332; Ursula Kirkendale and Warren Kirkendale, Hesiod’s Theogony as Source of the Iconological Program of Giorgione’s ‘Tempesta’: The Poet, Amalthea, the Infant Zeus and the Muses (Florence, 2015). 46 Settis, Giorgione’s Tempest, pp. 81–125. 47 Deborah Howard, ‘Giorgione’s Tempesta and Titian’s Assunta in the Context of the Cambrai Wars’, Art History, viii/3 (1985), pp. 271–89; Paul H. D. Kaplan, ‘The Storm of War: The Paduan Key to Giorgione’s Tempesta’, Art History, ix/4 (1986), pp. 405–27. 48 See Oliver Logan, Culture and Society in Venice, 1470–1790 (London, 1972), pp. 165 and 229. 49 Included in Paolo Giovio, Dialogo dell’imprese militari e amorosi (Florence, 1555; repr. Lyons, 1574). See François Quiviger, The Sensory World of Italian Renaissance Art (London, 2010), p. 32. 50 Bernard Aikema, ‘Giorgione: Relationships with the North and a New Interpretation of La Vecchia and La Tempesta’, in Sylvia FerinoPagden and Giovanna Nepi Scirè, Giorgione: Myth and Enigma, exh. cat., Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum (Milan, 2004), pp. 85–103.

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5 Nudes 1 Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere (London, 1996), vol. i, p. 645. 2 Jaynie Anderson, Giorgione: Painter of Poetic Brevity (Paris, 1996), pp. 277–84. 3 Creighton Gilbert, ‘On Subject and Not-subject in Italian Renaissance Pictures’, Art Bulletin, xxxiv/3 (1952), pp. 202–16. 4 Philippe de Commynes, the French ambassador, described Venice as an urbs picta in 1495. 5 Thomas Kren, ‘The Nude and Christian Art’, in The Renaissance Nude, ed. Thomas Kren with Jill Burke and Stephen J. Campbell, exh. cat., Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum; London, Royal Academy of Arts (Los Angeles, ca, 2018), pp. 14–77. 6 His facade might also have included a naked Cupid as recorded in a surviving drawing and fresco fragment: see Anderson, Giorgione, pp. 278–9. 7 Anderson, Giorgione, p. 283, argues that the Fondaco nudes influenced Michelangelo’s ignudi, although there is little evidence of close formal borrowings. See also Craig Hugh Smyth, ‘Michelangelo and Giorgione’, in Giorgione: Atti del Convegno Internazionale, ed. Rodolfo Pallucchini (Venice, 1979), pp. 213–20. 8 Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art (London, 1956), pp. 1–25. 9 Jill Burke, The Italian Renaissance Nude (New Haven, ct, and London, 2018). 10 S. J. Freedberg, Painting in Italy, 1500–1600 (London, 1971), p. 134. 11 James Grantham Turner, Eros Visible: Art, Sexuality and Antiquity in Renaissance Italy (New Haven, ct, and London, 2017), pp. 223–69. 12 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, trans. Harris Rackham (Cambridge, ma, 1952), vol. x, books 36–7, pp. 16–17. 13 First noted by Fritz Saxl, ‘Titian and Aretino’, in Lectures (London, 1957), vol. i, pp. 162–3. 14 For Lessing’s coinage, see Jonathan Rée, I See a Voice: A Philosophical History of Language, Deafness and the Senses (London, 2000), pp. 350–51. 15 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, in, 1984), pp. 27–8.

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16 This has been used to refute the idea that such images show courtesans, although the marriage context might not cancel the possibility that courtesans were featured. See the discussion of Titian’s Venus of Urbino below. 17 Anderson, Giorgione, pp. 223–4. 18 Rona Goffen, Titian’s Women (New Haven, ct, and London, 1997), pp. 151–2. 19 Marlies Giebe, ‘Die Schlummernde Venus von Giorgione und Tizian: Bestandsaufnahme und Konservierung – neue Ergebnisse der Röntgenanalyse’, Jahrbuch der Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen Dresden, 33 (1992), pp. 91–108. 20 For the other Giorgiones that Michiel recorded in Marcello’s collection in 1525, see Chapter One. 21 M. J. Zucker, The Illustrated Bartsch, xxv: Early Italian Masters (New York, 1988), pp. 473–6. 22 See Palma’s Venus and Cupid (c. 1523–4, Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum) and Paris Bordone, Venus and Cupid (c. 1545–60, Warsaw, Museum Narodowe). 23 The connection between sleeping female nudes and landscapes first surfaces in Boccaccio’s tale of Cymon and Iphigenia in The Decameron (1349–53); see Maria Ruvoldt, The Italian Renaissance Imagery of Inspiration: Metaphors of Sex, Sleep and Dreams (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 107–14. 24 Tom Nichols, Titian and the End of the Venetian Renaissance (London, 2013), pp. 43–5. 25 See the essays in Rona Goffen, ed., Titian’s Venus of Urbino (Cambridge, 1997). 26 David Rosand, ‘So-and-so Reclining on Her Couch’, Titian 500, Studies in the History of Art, 45 (Washington, dc, 1993), pp. 100–119, repr. in Goffen, ed., Titian’s Venus of Urbino, pp. 37–63. For Titian’s putative use of Zaffetta’s head, see Sheila Hale, Titian: His Life (London, 2012), pp. 343–4 and 761 note 5.

Conclusion 1 This painting was attributed to Giorgione in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (like many others), but over the past thirty

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3

4

5

6

7

8

9 10

11

References

years has typically been given to Titian. See Jaynie Anderson, Giorgione: Painter of Poetic Brevity (Paris, 1996), pp. 308–9, for one very significant scholar’s continuing advocacy of Giorgione’s authorship. Augusto Gentili, ‘Traces of Giorgione: Jewish Culture and Astrological Science’, in Sylvia Ferino-Pagden and Giovanna Nepi Scirè, eds, Giorgione, Myth and Enigma, exh. cat., Vienna, Kunsthistoriches Museum (Milan, 2004) pp. 57–8. Sarah Blake McHam, ‘Reflections of Pliny in Giovanni Bellini’s Woman with a Mirror’, Artibus et Historiae, xxix/58 (2008), pp. 157–71; Elise Goodman-Soeliner, ‘Poetic Interpretations of the “Lady at Her Toilette” Theme in Sixteenth-century Painting’, Sixteenth Century Journal, xiv/4 (Winter 1983), pp. 426–42. Michel Hochmann, Venise et Rome, 1500–1600: Deux écoles de peintures et leurs exchanges (Geneva, 2004), pp. 193–242; Matthias Wivel, Michelangelo and Sebastiano (London, 2017). Gentili, ‘Traces of Giorgione’, pp. 57–8, for Giorgione’s defining professional marginality and a putative association with the Jewish community in Venice. Paolo Sachet, ‘Aldine Books for Collectors’, in Guido Beltramini and Davide Gasparotto, Aldo Manuzio: Renaissance in Venice, exh. cat., Venice, Fondazione Cini (Venice, 2016), p. 87. Elizabeth Prettejohn, Modern Painters, Old Masters: The Art of Imitation from the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War (New Haven, ct, and London, 2017). Manet worked from a drawing after the Concert Champêtre by Henri Fantin-Latour, while he made a copy of Titian’s Venus of Urbino during a visit to Florence in 1857; see Stéphanie Guégan and Gabriella Belli, Manet: Ritorno a Venezia, exh. cat., Venice, Palazzo Ducale (Milan, 2013). For Boschini, the Giorgionesque and Pietro della Vecchia, see Anderson, Giorgione, pp. 74–5. Francis Haskell, ‘La sfortuna critica di Giorgione’, in Giorgione e l’umanismo veneziano, ed. Rodolfo Pallucchini (Florence, 1981), pp. 583–606. See more recently, for example, Michel Hochmann, Colorito: La technique des peintres Venitiens à la Renaissance (Turnhout, 2015)

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and Jodi Cranston, ed., Venetian Painting Matters (1450–1750) (Turnout, 2015). 12 Patricia Fortuni Brown, Private Lives in Renaissance Venice: Art, Architecture and the Family (New Haven, ct, and London, 2004). 13 See Amelia Jones, quoting Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in ‘Meaning, Identity and Embodiment: The Uses of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology in Art History’, in Art and Thought, ed. Dana Arnold and Margaret Iversen (Oxford, 2003), p. 75.

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—, Giorgione (Milan, 2010) —, and Lionello Puppi, Giorgione, exh. cat., Castelfranco Veneto, Casa Marta (Milan, 2009) Puppi, Lionello, ‘Tracce e scommesse per un biografia impossibile’, in Enrico Maria dal Pozzolo and Lionello Puppi, Giorgione, exh. cat., Castelfranco Veneto, Casa Marta (Milan, 2009), pp. 21–36 Quinones, Ricardo J., The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Cambridge, ma, 1972) Quiviger, François, The Sensory World of Italian Renaissance Art (London, 2010) Rée, Jonathan, I See a Voice: A Philosophical History of Language, Deafness and the Senses (London, 2000) Rosand, David, ‘Giorgione, Venice and the Pastoral Vision’, in Places of Delight: The Pastoral Landscape, ed. Robert C. Cafritz (Washington, dc, 1988), pp. 20–81 —, Painting in Sixteenth-century Venice: Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto (Cambridge, 1997) Roskill, Mark W., Dolce’s ‘Aretino’ and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento (Toronto, Buffalo, ny, and London, 2000) Ruggeri, Antonio, and Francesco Valconover, Giorgione a Venezia, exh. cat., Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia (Milan, 1978) Ruggiero, Guido, Violence in Early Renaissance Venice (New Brunswick, nj, 1986) Rutherglen, Susannah, and Charlotte Hale, ed., In a New Light: Giovanni Bellini’s St Francis in the Desert (New York and London, 2015) Schier, Rudolf, ‘Identifying Giorgione’s Laura’, Italian Studies, lxix/1 (2014), pp. 24–40 Segre, Renata, ‘A Rare Document on Giorgione’, Burlington Magazine, cliii/1299 (2011), pp. 383–6 Settis, Salvatore, ‘Giorgione e i suoi committenti’, in Giorgione e l’umanismo veneziano, ed. Rodolfo Pallucchini (Florence, 1981), vol. i, pp. 373–98 —, ‘Giorgione in Sicily: On the Dating and Composition of the Castelfranco Altarpiece’, in Sylvia Ferino-Pagden and Giovanna Nepi Scirè, Giorgione: Myth and Enigma, exh. cat., Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum (Milan, 2004), pp. 133–63

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—, Giorgione’s Tempest: Interpreting the Hidden Subject, trans. Ellen Bianchini (Chicago, il, and Cambridge, 1990) Shearman, John, Only Connect . . . Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Washington, dc, 1988) Simons, Patricia, ‘Portraiture, Portrayal and Idealization: Ambiguous Individualization in Representations of Renaissance Women’, in Language and Images in Renaissance Italy, ed. Alison Brown (Oxford, 1995), pp. 263–311 Smyth, Craig Hugh, ‘Michelangelo and Giorgione’, in Giorgione: Atti del Convegno Internazionale, ed. Rodolfo Pallucchini (Venice, 1979), pp. 213–20 Stokes, Adrian, Venice: An Aspect of Art (London, 1945) Strinati, Claudio, ‘Giorgione e la musica’, in Enrico Maria dal Pozzolo and Lionello Puppi, Giorgione, exh. cat., Castelfranco Veneto, Casa Marta (Milan, 2009), pp. 163–8 Vasari, Giorgio, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere (London, 1996) Welch, Evelyn, ‘Naming Names: The Transience of Individual Identity in Fifteenth-century Italian Portraiture’, in The Image of the Individual: Portraits in the Renaissance, ed. Nicholas Mann and Luke Syson, exh. cat., London, British Museum (London, 1998), pp. 91–104 Wilde, Johannes, ‘Röntgenaufnahmen der Drei Philosophen Giorgiones und der Zigeunermadonna Tizians’, Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, vi (1932), pp. 141–54 Wind, Edgar, Giorgione’s ‘Tempesta’ with Comments on Giorgione’s Poetic Allegories (Oxford, 1969) Wivel, Matthias, Michelangelo and Sebastiano (London, 2017)

acknowledgements

Many thanks go to Michael Leaman and François Quiviger for inviting me to contribute to the Renaissance Lives series. I began working on this book while I was a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at Washington, dc, and I would like to thank Peter Lukehart and Elisabeth Cropper for their very kind hospitality. I continued to work on it during a prolonged stay in Venice in 2018, funded in part by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation of New York. I was grateful for the opportunity to try out some ideas at a World Art Research Seminar at the University of East Anglia and would like to thank Jack Hartnell and Simon Dell for inviting me to speak on that occasion. I would also like to thank Philip Cottrell, David Hopkins and Elisabetta Torreno for kindly reading drafts of the book and for their very helpful comments. My discussions with Giulio Bono, Matteo Casini, Melissa Conn, John Richards and Giorgio Tagliaferro were also significant, as were those carried on in a more familial way with my sister Tessa Hadley and mother Mary Nichols, especially those we enjoyed so much in front of La vecchia and the Tempest at the Accademia in Venice. The book could not have been written without the amazing love and support of my wife, Kerry.

photo acknowledgements

The author and publishers wish to express their thanks to the below sources of illustrative material and/or permission to reproduce it. Some locations of artworks are also given below, in the interest of brevity: © Archivio fotografico G.A.VE – su concessione del Ministero dei beni e delle attività culturali e del turismo – Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia: 28, 30, 41; The British Museum, London: 40, 56; from Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili . . . (Venice, 1499), photo courtesy Boston Public Library: 54; Duomo di Castelfranco Veneto, photos Mondadori Portfolio/Electa/Cameraphoto Arte/Bridgeman Images: 18, 19; The Frick Collection, New York: 34; Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon: 16; Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence: 32, 33; Gallerie dell’ Accademia, Venice: 11, 17, 45; Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice, photo akgimages/Cameraphoto: 10; Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence: 58, 61; Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin: 6, 20; Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden: 51, 52; Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge, ma: 42; Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig: 2; History and Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo: 43; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna: 24, 29, 60; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna/Bridgeman Images: 25, 27, 38 (photo Luisa Ricciarini); Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung, Frankfurt: 49; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: 12; Musée du Louvre, Paris: 59; Musei di Strada Nuova, Palazzo Rosso, Genoa: 23; Musei Vaticani, Vatican City: 50, 55; Museo Civico, Padua: 21; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam: 39; photos © The National Gallery, London: 13, 14, National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc: 7, 15, 35; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh and The National Gallery, London: 44; Palazzo Altemps, Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome/photo

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Marie-Lan Nguyen: 53; Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco, Milan: 26; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam: 3, 9; The San Diego Museum of Art, ca/ photo Bridgeman Images: 22; Slovenská národná galéria, Bratislava: 1; Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden: 57; The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg/photo Bridgeman Images: 5, 8; from Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ piv eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori, part iii, vol. i (Florence, 1568): 4; from Anton Maria Zanetti, Le varie pitture a fresco de’ principali maestri veneziani (Venice, 1760), photos Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History, Rome: 46, 47, 48. M0tty, the copyright holder of image 31, has published it online under conditions imposed by a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Readers are free to: share – copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. adapt – remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially. Under the following terms: attribution – You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. share alike – If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.

index

Illustration numbers are indicated by italics Abioso, Giovan Battista 23 Aeschylus 147 Albano, Taddeo 22, 130, 208 Alberti, Leon Battista, De pictura 13, 48, 66–7, 76, 79–80, 118, 205 Aldus Manutius (and the Aldine press) 25, 159, 163, 184, 205 Altdorfer, Albrecht 164 Antonello da Messina 77, 84, 96 Anthony, St 133 Antico, Apollo 177, 49 Apelles 163 Aphrodite Ourania 42–3 Apollo 97 Apollo Belvedere 177 Arcadia 135, 143, 199 Asolo 24, 71 Athens 147 Augustine, St 119 Bakhtin, Mikhail 182 banderoles 111–13 Barbarella, Altadona 20–21, 27, 109 Beccario, Vittorio 22, 25, 130 Bellini, Gentile 77

Procession in St Mark’s Square 45–6, 63–5, 10 Bellini, Giovanni 16, 21–2, 38, 48–52, 57–8, 105, 110–11, 124–7 Drunkenness of Noah 200 Feast of the Gods 200 Lady with a Mirror 200, 60 Portrait of a Humanist 94–6, 98, 26 Portrait of a Man 80–82, 84, 21 San Giobbe Altarpiece 58, 65–7, 72–3, 170, 17 San Zaccaria Altarpiece 137 St Francis in the Desert 50–51, 125–6, 130, 134, 136–8, 34 Virgin and Child 48–50, 110, 12 see also Giorgione and Giovanni Bellini Bellini, Jacopo 63 City Walls with Well 146–7, 40 Bembo, Pietro 24 Gli Asolani 23–4 Boccaccio, Giovanni 156 Bordone, Paris 193 Bosch, Hieronymus 133 Boschini, Marco 209

giorgione’s ambig uity

Camelio (Vittore di Antonio Gambello), Portrait Medal of Giovanni Bellini 38, 7 Campagnola, Giulio 144 Venus or Nymph 191–2, 56 Carrara family 161 Caravaggio 27, 43, 206 Carpaccio, Vittore 55, 104–5 Castelfranco 16, 19–20, 24, 38, 69, 72 allegorical frieze at 24 documents 20, 23–4 Catena, Vincenzo 21 Cima da Conegliano, Rest on the Flight into Egypt 58–60, 62–3, 16 Clark, Kenneth 178, 181 Compagnie della Calza 55–6, 153 Contarini, Taddeo 22–3, 25, 125, 137 Cornaro, Caterina 23, 71 Costanzo, Matteo 73 Costanzo, Tuzio 24, 69–75, 161 Cranach, Lucas 164 Cyprus 24 Da Lodi, Giovanni Agostino 88–9 Dante, Divine Comedy 19 David 30, 35, 37, 40 De’Barbari, Jacopo, Map of Venice 65 Della Vecchia, Pietro 208 D’Este, Isabella 22, 208 Donà, Laura 100 Donatello, David (bronze) 37, 42

248

Dürer, Albrecht 43, 92 Avarice 107–9, 114, 29 Christ Among the Doctors 103 Portrait of a Man 86–9, 23 see also Giorgione and Albrecht Dürer Elijah 147–8 Eros 97 Erythrean Sybil 112 Freud, Sigmund 44 Gauricus, Pomponius, De sculptura 67 George, St 74 Giorgione and Albrecht Dürer 85–9, 103, 107–9, 114 and Giovanni Bellini 58–60, 68–9, 130, 134–5, 137–8, 143, 162, 199–201 and Leonardo da Vinci 12, 19, 60, 85, 88–91, 102–4, 122, 134 and poetry 135, 143, 199, 205, 208 and Republican culture in Venice 16, 37, 210 and Venetian painting 16, 43, 45–51, 63–7, 81–2, 202, 204 as outsider and imagery of outsiders in 26–7, 101, 105–6, 114, 144, 148, 154–5, 206 as teenage delinquent 27

249

Index

clarifying alterations or responses to works by 30–32, 76, 84, 109, 132–3, 164, 195–8 cultural background of 27, 71–2 dates of birth and death 18–20 dexter manus (right hand) in 38, 81–2, 84, 115 diminution in 204–6 drapery style of 59–61, 109–10 drawings of 143–7 early religious paintings of 12, 51–63, 76, 126–7 eroticism and homoeroticism in 43–4, 56, 97–8, 100–101, 181–96 family of 20–21, 109, 150 influence of north European prints and paintings on 60, 164 influence of 18, 102, 182, 191–3, 199–200, 206–8 introspection, isolation and melancholy in 35, 53, 92–3, 142, 148, 211 inventory of possessions of 18, 20 landscapes in works by 12–13, 74, 123–65, 174, 210 limits to vision and visibility in work of 8, 11–12, 62–3, 68–9, 83, 89–91, 163, 187 music in 19, 39, 43, 119–22

nudes and naked figures in 166–96 painting technique of 14–15, 56, 83, 162–3 paintings as open templates 9, 11, 150, 208 paragone (painting versus sculpture, painting versus music) in 96, 121–2, 175 patrons of 15, 21–6, 29, 69–75 personae of 39–41 portraiture of 12–13, 33–5, 41, 76–122, 174 professional ambition/ anxiety of 16, 29, 35, 37–40 paintings and the spectator 106, 114–17, 128, 134, 155, 180, 190, 210 scopophilia in paintings of 189–90 sensuousness and corporality in paintings of 11, 44, 101, 113–14, 163–4, 166–7, 180, 209–11 sonic allusions in 39, 119–20, 163–4, 210 special accommodation of the interests of individual patrons in 11, 69–75, 128–30, 133, 155–7, 161–4 synaesthesia in 11–12 technique and pigments of 11–12, 14–15, 60–61, 89–90, 119, 138, 190, 209 time in the paintings of 117–22, 138–9

giorgione’s ambig uity

touch in 44, 82, 187, 210 x-rays and infrared reflectography of works by 15, 108, 132, 134, 139–40, 156, 43 Giorgione, works by Adoration of the Magi 12, 51, 53–6, 73, 129, 154, 13, 14 Adoration of the Shepherds (Washington) 22, 25, 126– 30, 136, 155–6, 35 Adoration of the Shepherds (Vienna) 22, 25 Castelfranco Altarpiece 12, 67–76, 83, 119, 153–4, 156, 161, 18–19 Concert/Three Ages of Man 25, 120–22, 32 Finding of the Infant Paris (lost) 25 Fondaco dei Tedeschi frescos 14, 21–2, 72, 166–80, 183, 191, 205 Hell with Aeneas and Anchises (lost) 25 Holy Family (‘The Benson Madonna’) 12, 26, 51, 56–63, 73, 129, 15 Judith 35–7, 42–5, 53, 84, 127, 179, 5, 8 Laura 13, 21, 98–106, 108, 117, 178, 203, 27 La vecchia (‘Col tempo’) 13, 25, 88, 103–19, 122, 203, 28, 30 Man in a Landscape 143–8, 155, 161–2, 39 Portrait of Caterina Cornaro (lost) 24 Portrait of Girolamo Marcello (lost) 25

250

Portrait of a Young Man (‘The Giustiniani Portrait’) 13, 77–85, 93, 117, 20 Portrait of a Man (‘The Terris Portrait’) 13, 85–94, 97, 22 Self-portrait as David, 26–45, 84, 97–8, 113, 115, 118–19, 2 Self-portrait as Orpheus (lost) see Lucas Vorsterman print after a copy by David Teniers the Younger 6, 39, 43, 1 St Jerome Reading (lost) 25 Standing Woman 45 Tempest 7–9, 13, 119, 135, 148–65, 179, 193, 41 Three Philosophers 7–9, 13, 50–51, 123, 130, 135–44, 203–4, 38 Tramonto (‘The Sunset Landscape’) 26, 119, 130–38, 143, 155, 162, 36–7 Young Man with an Arrow 13, 25, 93–9, 100, 102, 178, 25 Venus 14, 159, 180–96, 200, 204, 207, 51, 52 Giorgionesque works 9, 144, 191–201, 207–9 Archer 197 Portrait of a Young Man 197 Shepherd with a Flute 197 Grimani, Domenico 26, 29–30, 133 Grimani, Marino 26 Hesiod, Theogony 159 Hippocrates 118 Hollar, Wenceslaus, print after

251

Giorgione’s Self-portrait as David, 30, 32–3, 38, 84, 3, 9 Huber, Wolf 164 Hypnerotomachia Polifili (Francesco Colonna?) 158–9, 193 woodcut illustration from 184–6, 192, 54 imprese 163–4 istorie (‘histories’) 13, 45, 48, 66–7, 76, 80, 205 Jacobello del Fiore, Justice Enthroned Between Michael and Gabriel 47, 111, 11 Job, St 170 Joseph 54–5, 62 Laocoön 115 Leonardo da Vinci 19, 60, 88–92, 138 sfumato 12, 90, 96 see also Giorgione and Leonardo Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 187 Liberalis, St 74 Lombardo, Antonio 21 Lombardo, Tullio 21, 170 Longhi, Roberto 53 Lucretius, De rerum natura 159 Manet, Edouard, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe 207 Olympia 207 Mantegna, Andrea 43 Marca Trevigiana 23, 74

Index

Marcello, Girolamo 25, 189–91 Michelangelo 201 David 35–7 ignudo 177–8, 50 Michiel, Marcantonio 24–5, 67, 94, 139–40, 153–4, 190 Michiel, Zuan 137 Milan 103 Montagnana, Castel Zan Zeno 143, 146–7, 161 Naples 77 Nicasius, St 74 Orpheus 39, 43 Pacioli, Luca 65 Padua and the Padovano 161–2 Palazzo Grimani 30 Palma Vecchio, Venus 192–3, 57 Panofsky, Erwin 113–14, 118 Pater, Walter 39 Petrarca (Petrarch), Francesco 100, 104, 162 Pisani, Morosina 189 Plato, Republic 141 Pliny the Elder, Natural History 163, 184 Poliziano, Agnolo (Angelo) Orfeo 43 Praxiteles, Roman copy of 182–3 Venus 53 Venus of Cnidos 184 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 207 Ram, Giovanni 25 Raphael 201

giorgione’s ambig uity

Renaissance art facial expression in 76 fantasia in 123 figural definition and linear perspective in 62–3, 65–7, 179–80, 209 Florentine and Roman disegno in 15, 17, 48, 166–7, 209–10 life-drawing in 179 progression in 201–2, 205–6 visual and semantic clarity in 10, 13, 63–7 Ridolfi, Carlo 68, 150, 197 Rizzo, Antonio 170 Sebastian, St 97, 170 Sebastiano del Piombo 9, 140, 202 Death of Adonis 200–201, 61 Judgement of Solomon 197 Siege of Padua 160 Sleeping Ariadne 186–7, 55 Stevens, Wallace 194 Stokes, Adrian 51 Sybils 112 Teniers the Younger, David 25 Tintoretto, Jacopo 204 Titian 9, 38, 77, 113, 190, 193, 199–200, 202 Christ and the Adulterous Woman 197 Christ Carrying the Cross 197 Concert 120, 33 Concert Champêtre 197–9, 207, 59

252

Diana and Actaeon 157–8, 199, 44 Portrait of Gian Giacomo Bartolotti da Parma 93, 24 Self-portrait 38, 6 Venus of Urbino 194–6, 207, 58 Titian(?), A Mother and Soldier in a Landscape 153, 42 Vasari, Giorgio 17–21, 27, 39, 48, 67, 96, 145, 150 ‘Life of Giorgione’ and woodcut of ‘Giorgione da Castelfranco’ from the Lives of the Artists (1568) 31–2, 76, 166–7, 201–2, 4 Vendramin, Gabriele 25, 39, 88, 115, 156, 161–3 Vendramin inventories of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 109 Venetian art belle donne paintings in 102, 104 devotional paintings in 48 facade fresco paintings in 169 group portraits in 80 Netherlandish influence on 77, 96, 125 nudes in 170 portraiture in 43, 77, 117–18 sacred or desert landscapes in 134 speaking pictures in 116–17 tomb sculpture in 122 votive paintings in 75

253

Venice as entrepôt 211 , bocche di leone in 115, 31 Ducal Palace of 115, 170 gerontocracy in 38, 80 Great Council of 80–81 Manfrin Gallery 150 position of artists in 29 Venus Genetrix 102, 108, 203 Venus pudica 183–4 Veronese, Paolo 204 Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum 139 Watteau, Antoine 206–7 Zaffetta, Angela 194 Zanetti, Anton Maria, Le varie pitture a fresco de’principali maestri veneziani, engravings after Giorgione’s Standing Woman, Seated Woman and Seated Man 174–80, 46, 47, 48

Index