^
Died in 1510 on or before 06 November:
Giorgio Zorzo da Castelfranco “Giorgione”,
Italian painter born in 1477 or 1478.
— He is generally and justifiably regarded as the founder of Venetian
painting of the 16th century. Within a brief career of no more than 15 years
he created a radically innovative style based on a novel pictorial technique,
which provided the starting-point for the art of Titian, the dominant personality
of the 16th century in Venice. Although he apparently enjoyed a certain
fame as a painter of external frescoes, Giorgione specialized above all
in relatively small-scale pictures, painted for private use in the home.
A high proportion of his subjects were drawn from, or inspired by, mythology
and secular literature. Landscape played an important role in many of his
compositions, and particular attention was often paid to the representation
of storms, sunsets and other such natural phenomena. Giorgione was evidently
also prized as a painter of portraits, many of them ‘fancy’ portraits, or
views in close-up of the kind of poetic or mythological figure also seen
in his narratives. His exploitation of a taste for such works within a circle
of aesthetically sophisticated Venetian patricians in turn provided the
context for the creation of an entirely novel range of pictorial images.
— Francesco Torbido, and Giovanni Udine were students of Giogione.
— Giorgione invigorated the Venetian
school of painting. His art was unrivaled in the portrayal of mood.
Details of Giorgione's life and career are sparse and unreliable, but it
appears that he was born in Castelfranco and that he studied under the Venetian
painter Giovanni
Bellini. His original name was probably Giorgio Barbarelli. No signed
and dated works of his remain; most scholars accept a small core of works
as his, including the Castelfranco Altarpiece (1504), Three
Philosophers, and Tempest. Other works are attributed to him
on the basis of indirect evidence, although many of these attributions are
still debated.
Most of Giorgione's paintings consist of
a figure or group of figures integrated in a broad surrounding landscape.
Unlike earlier pictures in this mode, these works exhibit a new and highly
lyrical use of light: The lighting is soft and hazy and is used to create
mood rather than to define sharply the objects in the scene. He deliberately
refused to make preparatory drawings, preferring instead to compose directly
on the canvas; he felt that this led to a more atmospheric rendering and
to more striking color effects.
Giorgione's innovations in subject matter
were especially important in two areas: the landscape and the female nude.
Prior to Giorgione, landscape scenes were taken from biblical, classical,
or allegorical stories, but The Tempest appears to have no such
source and stands on its own as a purely imaginative work. It gave birth
to a revolution against the storytelling element in landscape painting and
paved the way for later masters such as Claude
Lorrain and Rembrandt.
The Sleeping Venus (1510), attributed to Giorgione, pictures a
reclining nude and is one of the first modern works of art in which the
female figure is the principal and only subject of the picture. It inaugurated
the nude in a landscape setting as one of the great themes of European art
and led directly to the work of artists such as Titian
and Rubens.
— Giorgione or Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco was born in 1477
or 1478 in Castelfranco. He probably studied art under Giovanni
Bellini. Although only some 20 paintings are generally associated with
him, of which only about six are attributed to him without doubt, his originality
was so powerful that these few works have come to represent not only the
first stage in the Venice High Renaissance, but a new trend in Italian art
as well. Surviving documentation of his life and work is sparse. He was
associated with the humanist circle of the poet Bembo, and with a sophisticated
group of private patrons, for whom he painted generally small-scale pictures.
Giorgione's only public commission in Venice were paintings, now lost, in
the Doge's palace, and frescoes, which are now almost completely destroyed
by nature, on the exterior of the Fondaco sei Tedeschi, an important trading
center, in Venice. The frescoes were painted with the assistance of Titian,
who was working in Giorgione's workshop at the time. Among his best surviving
works are Judith
(1504), Castelfranco Madonna (1506), The Three Philosophers
(1508), Sleeping Venus (1508) which were the inspiration for many
more female nudes, particularly by Titian, and The Tempest (1510),
the most famous of his works. The authorship of some of his works was disputed
for years. The Concert Champêtre (1511) is still considered
by some to be painted by Giorgione and not by Titian. Girgione died untimely
in his early thirties of plague during the outbreak of this lethal disease
in Venice in 1510.
— Portrait
of Giorgione (engraving, 41x29cm; 2/3 size) by Cornelis van Dalen
Sr. [1602-1665]
— LINKS
— Self-Portrait
(32x22cm; 970x868pix, 151kb)
— Tempest
(1505, 82x73cm; 900x798pix, 187kb)
_ detail 1
(22x18cm; 800x646pix, 119kb) trees and partly hidden building at upper right
_ detail 2
(22x18cm; 820x665pix, 130kb) the storm, upper center
_ detail 3
(22x18cm; 860x709pix, 172kb) the soldier
_ detail 4
(22x18cm; 820x682pix, 163kb) buildings center right, and lightning
_ detail 5
(22x18cm; 860x715pix, 177kb) the gypsy and baby
_ detail 6
(22x18cm; 800x652pix, 105kb) center: well, stream, bridge.
_ It was already in 1530 described simply as "the little landscape on canvas
with a tempest, a gypsy woman and a soldier..." This painting, the meaning
of which has been greatly debated, marks a moment of capital importance
in the renovation of the Venetian style painting, and perhaps is the most
representative of the very few genuine surviving works of Giorgione. The
vigor of cultural life at the beginning of the sixteenth century provided
exactly the right fertile ground for the personality of Giorgione. With
Giovanni Bellini and Vittore Carpaccio as examples in his early training
and with his attentive interest in Northern European painting of Belgium
he soon decided to attempt a naturalistic language. Color attains to new
all-important powers of expression of the poetic equivalence of man and
nature in a single, fearful apprehension o,f the cosmos. The finest of all
expressions of this new vision of the world is the Tempest, commissioned
from the artist by Gabriele Vendramin, one of the leading lights in intellectual
circles in the Venice of the day.
Though many interpretations of the subject
of this small painting have been suggested, none of them is totally convincing.
Thus the mystery remains of what exactly the significance is of the fascinating
landscape caught at this particular atmospheric moment, the breaking of
a storm. Anxious waiting seems to characterize the mood of both the human
figures, absorbed in private reveries, and every other detail, from the
little town half-hidden behind the luxuriant vegetation and the lazy, tortuous
course of the stream to the ancient ruins, the houses, the towers and the
buildings in the distance which pale against the blue of the sky. The fascination
of the painting arises from the pictorial realization of the illustrative
elements. In the vibrant brightness which immediately precedes the breaking
of the storm the chromatic values follow one another in fluid gradations
achieved by the modulation of the tones in the fused dialectic of light
and shadow in an airy perspective of atmospheric value within a definite
space. Completely liberated from any subjection to drawing or perspective,
color is the dominant value in a new spacial-atmospheric synthesis which
is fundamental to the art of painting in its modern sense.
— Adoration
by the Shepherds (1510, 578x800pix, 162kb)
_ detail 1
(390x520pix, 71kb) Mary and Joseph
_ detail 2
(390x520pix, 79kb) the baby Jesus
_ detail 3
(390x520pix, 85kb) shepherds
_ The Adoration by the Shepherds or the Allendale Nativity,
as it is commonly known after one of the previous owners, is now generally
accepted as by Giorgione. Bellini and the young Titian were considered as
possible authors. This important work had an immediate impact on Venetian
painting. The composition is divided into two parts, the dark cave on the
right and a luminous Venetian landscape on the left. The shimmering draperies
of Joseph and Mary are set off by the darkness behind them, and are also
contrasted with the tattered dress of the shepherds. The scene is one of
intense meditation; the rustic shepherds are the first to recognize Christ's
divinity and they kneel accordingly. Mary and Joseph also participate in
the adoration, creating an atmosphere of intimacy.
— Judith
(1504, 144x66cm, 1100x500pix, 87kb) _ detail
(900x668pix, 131kb) leg _ In the 17-18th century it was attributed to Raphael,
later to Moretto da Brescia. Originally it was probably a panel of an altarpiece.
— Il
Tramonto (1510, 73x91cm, 778x981pix, 133kb) _ Very little is known about
Giorgione: only a handful of contemporary documents refer to him, and only
some six or seven surviving paintings are now considered 'almost certainly'
by him. Yet he is universally accepted as one of the most influential of
Western artists. Probably trained by Giovanni Bellini, he originated a poetic
painting of mood, based on color, light and a new vision of landscape, which
we still call 'Giorgionesque'. Although we attribute to him an altarpiece
in his native town of Castelfranco, a ruined nude figure in fresco detached
from a building in Venice which he and Titian decorated, and two portraits
inscribed with his name in the sixteenth century, he seems to have specialized
in small, enigmatic 'subject' pictures like this one for private collectors.
Whether or not the picture, which was rediscovered, badly damaged, in 1933
in a sixteenth-century villa in Poste Casale, south of Venice, is by Giorgione
himself is not very important to us as viewers; it is certainly 'Giorgionesque'.
The title, Il Tramonto, captures
the painting's special temper for the sun sets literally 'beyond the mountain'.
Within a deep landscape meeting the horizon in a startling band of blue,
two travelers halt besides a pool, from whose murky waters a little beaked
monster emerges. A hermit inhabits the dark cave on the far side. The mounted
Saint George in the middle distance is a restorer's reconstruction, added
in 1934 to cover an area of flaking paint, and to account for what appears,
in a photograph of the period, to be the vestigial tail of a dragon. Other
reconstructed areas include the larger monster in the water. The modern
additions make unsafe any reading of the picture's intended meaning. If
Saint George was originally present, the hermit may be Anthony Abbot a saint
distressed with sores, protector against epidemics — of whom it was
told that demons in the shape of monsters came at nightfall to 'tear his
body with teeth, with horns, and with claws'. The two men in the foreground
may be Saint Roch, a medieval French pilgrim who caught the plague while
nursing the sick, and his companion Gothardus tending the ulcer on the saint's
leg. The body of Saint Roch, one of the main protectors against pestilence,
is one of Venice's great relics.
If we compare II Tramonto with,
for example, Patenier's landscape painted a few years later , it is possible
to understand the great impact of Giorgione's work. For all its artificiality,
this landscape invites us to enter it in imagination; the construction,
in wedge-shaped planes alternately light and dark, stresses continuity from
foreground through well-defined intervening space to the blue horizon. The
wispy tree in the center, like the cliff and foliage on either side, pushes
back the far from the near. Soft gradations from shadow into light, contours
and reflections blurred as if by haze, the isolated and mysterious figures,
the barely visible, perhaps imaginary monsters, the alpine town in the distance,
combine to create a sense of profound yet indefinable emotion, as 'Brightness
falls from the air...' Thomas Nashe's haunting line may be more than visually
apt: it comes from a poem entitled In Time of Pestilence.
— La
Vecchia (1508, 68x59cm, 850x744pix, 99kb) _ The presentation of reality
by means of a luminous medium which decants the subtlest gradations of color
with extraordinary fidelity and assembles them with immediacy into images
of lyrical purity is a feature also of the extremely rare portraits by Giorgione.
As with other pictures attributed with certainty to Giorgione hidden meanings
have been searched for in this painting, though the words “col tiempo”
on the scroll held by the woman would seem to suggest that its subject is
the fading of beauty over the years. Despite the damage suffered by the
painting, it is still possible to admire the freedom of touch, the mellow
transparency of the medium with which the half figure of the woman is realized
and the extraordinary realism with which her lost beauty is explored. The
description of the shrivelled flesh, the aged eyelids, the toothless mouth,
retains nothing at all of the Nordic prototypes and uses color alone to
create an objectively naturalistic image with consummate skill.
— Portrait
of a Youth (Antonio Broccardo?) (1510, 72x54cm, 1026x742pix, 97kb) _
This beautiful painting is one of the most problematical pictures in the
history of art and a constant subject of debate. The identity of the painter
is still in question and, while the majority of experts ascribe it to Giorgione,
there are some who believe it was painted by Giovanni Cariani (an artist
much influenced by Giorgione) or by some other Venetian painter active about
1510. The painting is in a very bad condition: the window-opening on the
left and the landscape in the background, for example, are so faded that
they are scarcely visible to the naked eye. X-ray photographs reveal alterations
to both the eyes and the hands, made while the picture was being painted,
similar to modifications in other paintings by Giorgione. Certainly there
are several features — the extraordinarily fine painterly approach,
the intimacy of the expression, the inclusion of the parapet and the window-opening
— which support the belief that Portrait of a Man was painted by Giorgione
himself, possibly not long before his death in 1510. The emblems on the
parapet — the small hat with a V on it, the female triple head, the
tiny tablet and the inscription — have been variously interpreted.
One explanation, the most frequent and perhaps the most acceptable, is that
this picture is a portrait of the poet Antonio Broccardo.
— The
Impassioned Singer (1510, 102x78cm, 873x643pix, 75kb) _ The Impassioned
Singer and its companion-piece, The Singer with Flute, were
attributed to Giorgione. This attribution is strongly debated. Some think
that it is of Domenico Capriolo [1494-1528], others assume that it was painted
after the death of Giorgione. The singers sing with an air of Baroque pathos
surrounded by strong chiaroscuro effects, which have induced many experts
today to date them to the beginning of the 17th century.
— Sleeping
Venus (1510, 108x175cm) _ main detail (732x1028pix, 148kb)
— A Venitian
Gentleman (1582x1344pix; 107kb), with long black hair
and a slight moustache, on a staircase (?), with right fist clenched on
(a money bag?) over a closed book, with a bit of landscape seen through
part of a window at his right.
— Portrait
of Warrior with his Equerry (1509, 90x73cm, 810x656pix, 100kb) _ A sense
of calm and expressiveness as well as light effects are outstanding in this
canvas, with the beautiful helmet and pieces of armor on foreground. Thought
to be the portrait of Gattamelata, a famous Italian captain [1370-1443],
the picture has been ascribed to the last activity of Giorgione, dead in
1510, although some critics attributed it to other artists such as Paolo
Morando “il Cavazzola”.
— A
Young Man (69x53cm, 956x702pix, 88kb) _ The attribution to Giorgione
is debated, some experts think it is the work of Palma Vecchio. The identity
of the sitter is also doubtful, he was a Fugger, or perhaps Buffalmaco the
painter.
— Concert
Champêtre (1511; 1236x1608pix, 590kb) _ It was formerly attributed
to Giorgione, but is more probably by Titian. |
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