Giorgione

The Italian painter Giorgione (1477-1510) was one of the first masters of the Venetian High Renaissance. His works are notable for their poetic qualities.

Although the career of Giorgione occupies a very short period of time, his creation of mood through color, light, and atmosphere, giving a dreamlike character to his paintings, established a style of poetic romanticism that influenced numerous Venetian contemporaries, particularly Titian and Palma Vecchio, but also secondary masters such as Cariani, Vincenzo Catena, and II Romanino. Because of the paucity of documents and of signed pictures by these masters, many attributions are difficult to establish, and various critics differ radically in assigning works to Giorgione himself and to the so-called Giorgionesque painters who followed him.

The painter called Giorgione, whose name was Giorgio (Zorzi) da Castelfranco, was born in the town of Castelfranco near Venice in 1477. No information exists as to his family or his early years. Because of his early death of the plague in Venice at the age of 33 and because of the poetic nature of his pictures, the legend grew that he was handsome, a fine musician, and an ardent lover. The name Giorgione ("Big George") implies that he was a tall man.

Giorgione became a pupil of the greatest Venetian artist of the day, Giovanni Bellini, entering his studio about 1490. Bellini himself began to develop the effects of light and atmosphere, suggesting the warmth of a late summer afternoon and establishing a tranquil contemplative mood in such late works as the Religious Allegory (ca. 1490) and the Madonna of the Meadow.

Early Works

Two cassone panels, the Judgment of Solomon and the Judgment of the Baby Moses by Fire, are generally accepted as Giorgione's early works (ca. 1495-1500). In them the landscape backgrounds are already developed, but the figures retain a rather rigid archaistic stance reminiscent of the works of Vittore Carpaccio. More mature are Giorgione's Adoration of the Kings, the little Holy Family, and the Adoration of the Shepherds, in the last of which the deep landscape corridor to the left and the group of figures to the right establish a formula for Venetian composition that survived throughout the century.

Mature Works

The brevity of Giorgione's career limits the importance of chronology, since his mature production fell within one decade. The Madonna with Saints Francis and Liberale can be reasonably placed about 1500-1504. Here the artist elongated the high throne to a much greater degree than usual in northern and central Italian painting in order to establish an equilateral triangle, thus revealing his Renaissance feeling for strong geometric relations in formal structure. The mellow landscape distance and the dreamlike contemplative attitude of the figures provide a notable example of the Giorgionesque mood.

The Tempest is Giorgione's most personal excursion into the realm of idyllic landscape, an evocation of the pastoralism of ancient Greece and Rome, represented in ancient literature by the poetry of Theocritus and Virgil and comparable with the Renaissance poetry of Pietro Bembo in I Asolani (1505) and Jacopo Sannazzaro in Arcadia (1502). The enigma of the precise literary meaning of the picture has invited a variety of explanations, none of which has been universally accepted. The latest is Edgar Wind's book Giorgione's Tempest (1969), which interprets the male figure as Fortitude and the female as Charity, but this is inconsistent with the very poetic nature of the composition.

The pictures by Giorgione that are mentioned by a near contemporary, Marcantonio Michiel (ca. 1532), include the Tempest, the Boy with an Arrow, the Three Philosophers, the Sleeping Venus, and possibly the Shepherd with Pipe. Michiel says that after Giorgione's death Titian completed the landscape of the Venus, this most admired of all evocations of the ideally beautiful goddess, and that Sebastiano del Piombo finished the Three Philosophers. Giorgione's hand in the Judith has not been challenged, although undocumented. The Christ and the Adulteress, the Madonna and Saints, and the Pastoral Concert seem to most Anglo-Saxon writers to belong to Giorgione, but recent Italian critics have preferred to transfer them to the young Titian.

The Frescoes

The close relationship between Giorgione and Titian is epitomized by the lost frescoes, dated 1507-1508, on the exterior of the German Merchants' Exchange (Fondaco dei Tedeschi) in Venice, where the two artists collaborated. Titian, presumed to be the younger man, appears to have worked under Giorgione's direction at this time. Lodovico Dolce (1557), a friend of Titian, records that Titian painted the Allegory of Justice over the side portal and Giorgione the nude figures on the main facade. Known today through 18th-century prints and a few archeological fragments, these frescoes only increase the problem of distinguishing between the work of the two men at this period.

The Portraits

Giorgione's portraits provide the greatest problems in the matter of attribution since none is signed or documented. By general agreement he is assigned several half-length portraits: the Young Man (Berlin), the so-called Antonio Broccardo, the Laura, dated by an old inscription on the back 1506, and La Vecchia. The more doubtful Portrait of a Man (San Diego, Calif.) has an old attribution to Giorgione on the back of the panel, and the Self-portrait (Brunswick, Germany) is probably a damaged original, much reduced in size. The famous group portrait The Concert, formerly given to Giorgione, is now generally accepted as a youthful work by Titian.

Further Reading

There are two excellent accounts of Giorgione in English. Terisio Pignatti, Giorgione (trans. 1971), is a documented study of his career and examines the complexities of Giorgione attributions. George Martin Richter, Giorgio da Castelfranco, Called Giorgione (1937), is a scholarly work in which all important documents and original sources are reprinted, including the accounts of Marcantonio Michiel (1532), Giorgio Vasari (1568), and Carlo Ridolfi (1648). A brief, more popular book is Duncan Phillips, The Leadership of Giorgione (1937). There is an excellent appreciation of Giorgione in A. Richard Turner, The Vision of Landscape in Renaissance Italy (1966). □

Giorgione ( Giorgio da Castelfranco) (b Castelfranco [now Castelfranco Veneto], c.1477; d Venice, Oct. 1510). Venetian painter. Almost nothing is known of his life and only a handful of paintings can be confidently attributed to him, but he holds a momentous place in the history of art. He had achieved legendary status soon after his early death (evidently from plague) and through succeeding centuries he has continued to excite the imagination in a way that few other painters can match. The extraordinary discrepancy between his enormous fame and the tiny size of his oeuvre is explained by the fact that he initiated a new conception of painting. He was one of the earliest artists to specialize in cabinet pictures for private collectors rather than works for public or ecclesiastical patrons, and he was the first painter who subordinated subject matter to the evocation of mood—it is clear that his contemporaries sometimes did not know what was represented in his pictures. Vasari, who says that Giorgione earned his nickname—meaning ‘big George’—‘because of his physical appearance and his moral and intellectual stature’, ranked him alongside Leonardo as one of the founders of ‘modern’ painting.

Giorgione's home town is about 40 km (25 miles) north-west of Venice, where as far as is known he spent all his career. According to Vasari he trained with Giovanni Bellini (although it has also been suggested that Carpaccio may have been his teacher). He had two important public commissions in Venice: in 1507–8 he worked on a canvas (now lost without trace) for the audience chamber of the Doges' Palace; and in 1508 (together with Titian) he painted frescos on the exterior of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi (the German warehouse), now known only through engravings and ruinous fragments. Apart from this, the only certain contemporary documentation on any of his surviving paintings is an inscription on the back of a female portrait known as Laura (KH Mus., Vienna), which says it was painted by ‘Master Zorzi da Castelfranco’ in 1506; it also records that Giorgione was a colleague of Vincenzo Catena, a partnership about which nothing else is known. (An inscription on Portrait of a Man in the San Diego Museum of Art is more doubtful.)

The main document for reconstructing Giorgione's oeuvre is a series of notes by the Venetian collector and connoisseur Marcantonio Michiel (c.1484–1552), written intermittently between 1521 and 1543. Michiel, who is a scrupulous and reliable source, mentions a number of paintings by Giorgione, four or five of which can be plausibly identified with extant works: The Tempest (Accademia, Venice), The Three Philosophers (KH Mus.), Sleeping Venus (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden), Boy with an Arrow (a copy?, KH Mus.), and (an oblique and less explicit reference than the others) Christ Carrying the Cross (S. Rocco, Venice). He says that The Three Philosophers was finished by Sebastiano del Piombo and that the Sleeping Venus (the work that founded the tradition of the reclining female nude) was finished by Titian. The problem of attribution was, then, complicated from the start by the fact that some of Giorgione's paintings were completed after his death by other hands, and confusion soon arose; in the first edition of his Lives (1550) Vasari attributed the S. Rocco painting to Giorgione, but in the second edition (1568) he gave it in one place to Giorgione and in another to Titian, even though ‘many people believed it was by Giorgione’. Distinguishing between the work of Giorgione and the young Titian continues to be one of the knottiest problems in connoisseurship, the celebrated Concert champêtre in the Louvre being the picture most hotly disputed between them.

Among the other paintings given to Giorgione are the Castelfranco Madonna, in the cathedral of his home town (first mentioned by Ridolfi in 1648 and accepted by almost all critics), and several male portraits, including a self-portrait in the Herzog-Anton-Ulrich Museum in Brunswick (perhaps a copy). Giorgione is said to have been handsome and amorous, and he initiated a type of dreamily romantic portrait that became immensely popular in Venice. The powerful influence that his work exerted in the generation after his death (even the venerable Bellini succumbed to it) is one of the main factors in making the construction of a catalogue of his work so difficult, for there are scores of paintings of the period, particularly pastoral landscapes, that can be described as Giorgionesque, and many are of high quality.

The problems of iconography that Giorgione's paintings present are sometimes every bit as difficult as those of attribution. The most famous instance is The Tempest, one of his most enigmatic and poetic creations. Michiel saw it in 1530 and described it as a ‘little landscape with the tempest with the gipsy and soldier’, so he evidently did not know what subject, if any, was represented. X-rays have shown that Giorgione radically altered the figures in a way that suggests he was here indulging his imagination rather than illustrating a particular theme, although many ingenious attempts have been made to unravel a subject. This creation of the ‘landscape of mood’, in which he used colour and atmosphere with great subtlety, was, indeed, his most momentous contribution to the history of art—an innovation of great originality and influence. Apart from the artists already mentioned, Palma Vecchio and Dosso Dossi were among the contemporaries who fell under Giorgione's spell, and among later artists Watteau was his most sensitive heir. See also paragone.

Giorgione ( Giorgio da Castelfranco) (c.1477–1510). Venetian painter. Almost nothing is known of his life and only a handful of paintings can be confidently attributed to him, but he holds a momentous place in the history of art. He had achieved legendary status soon after his early death (evidently from plague) and through succeeding centuries he has continued to excite the imagination in a way that few other painters can match. The extraordinary discrepancy between his enormous fame and the tiny size of his oeuvre is explained by the fact that he initiated a new conception of painting. He was one of the earliest artists to specialize in cabinet pictures for private collectors rather than works for public or ecclesiastical patrons, and he was the first painter who subordinated subject matter to the evocation of mood—it is clear that his contemporaries sometimes did not know what was represented in his pictures. Vasari, who says that Giorgione earned his nickname—meaning ‘Big George’—‘because of his physical appearance and his moral and intellectual stature’, ranked him alongside Leonardo as one of the founders of ‘modern’ painting.

Giorgione was born in Castelfranco, about 40 km (25 miles) north-west of Venice, and according to Vasari he trained with Giovanni Bellini (although it has also been suggested that Carpaccio may have been his teacher). He had two important public commissions in Venice: in 1507–8 he painted a canvas (now lost without trace) for the audience chamber of the Doges' Palace; and in 1508 (together with Titian) he painted frescos on the exterior of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi (the German warehouse), now known only through engravings and ruinous fragments. Apart from this, the only certain contemporary documentation on any of his surviving paintings is an inscription on the back of a female portrait known as Laura (KH Mus., Vienna), which says it was painted by ‘Master Zorzi da Castelfranco’ in 1506; it also records that Giorgione was a colleague of Vincenzo Catena, a partnership about which nothing else is known. (An inscription on Portrait of a Man in the San Diego Museum of Art is more doubtful.) The main document for reconstructing Giorgione's oeuvre is a series of notes by the Venetian collector and connoisseur Marcantonio Michiel (c.1484–1552), written intermittently between 1521 and 1543. Michiel, who is a scrupulous and reliable source, mentions a number of paintings by Giorgione, four or five of which can be plausibly identified with extant works: The Tempest (Accademia, Venice), The Three Philosophers (KH Mus.), Sleeping Venus (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden), Boy with an Arrow (a copy?, KH Mus.), and (an oblique and less explicit reference than the others) Christ Carrying the Cross (S. Rocco, Venice). Michiel says that The Three Philosophers was finished by Sebastiano del Piombo and that the Sleeping Venus (the work that founded the tradition of the reclining female nude) was finished by Titian. The problem of attribution was, then, complicated from the start by the fact that some of Giorgione's paintings were completed after his death by other hands, and confusion soon arose; in the first edition of his Lives (1550) Vasari attributed the S. Rocco painting to Giorgione, but in the second edition (1568) he gave it in one place to Giorgione and in another to Titian, even though ‘many people believed it was by Giorgione’. Distinguishing between the work of Giorgione and the young Titian continues to be one of the knottiest problems in connoisseurship, the celebrated Concert Champêtre in the Louvre being the picture most hotly disputed between them.

Among the other paintings given to Giorgione are the Castelfranco Madonna, in the cathedral of his home town (first mentioned by Ridolfi in 1648 and accepted by almost all critics), and several male portraits, including a self-portrait in the Herzog-Anton-Ulrich Museum in Brunswick (perhaps a copy). Giorgione is said to have been handsome and amorous, and he initiated a type of dreamily romantic portrait that became immensely popular in Venice. The powerful influence that his work exerted in the generation after his death (even the venerable Bellini succumbed to it) is one of the main factors in making the construction of a catalogue of his work so difficult, for there are scores of paintings of the period, particularly pastoral landscapes, that can be described as Giorgionesque, and many are of high quality. The problems of iconography that Giorgione's paintings present are sometimes every bit as difficult as those of attribution. The most famous instance is The Tempest, one of his most enigmatic and poetic creations. Michiel saw it in 1530 and described it as a ‘little landscape with the tempest with the gipsy and soldier’, so he evidently did not know what subject, if any, was represented. X-rays have shown that Giorgione radically altered the figures in a way that suggests he was here indulging his imagination rather than illustrating a particular theme, although many ingenious attempts have been made to unravel a subject. This creation of the ‘landscape of mood’, in which he used colour and atmosphere with great subtlety, was, indeed, his most momentous contribution to the history of art—an innovation of great originality and influence. Apart from the artists already mentioned, Palma Vecchio and Dosso Dossi were among the contemporaries who fell under Giorgione's spell, and among later artists Watteau was his most sensitive heir.

Giorgione (1477–1510)

Venetian painter of the High Renaissance, known as a master for the handful of his paintings that have survived. Born as Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco in the small town of Castelfranco Veneto, he apprenticed in the workshop of Giovanni Bellini, who was at that time one of the most respected painters in Venice. His talent was recognized from an early age; he was commissioned to paint a portrait of Doge Agostino Barberigo and, in 1504, an altarpiece commemorating Matteo Constanzo for a church in Castelfranco. He also worked on frescoes for the walls of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the Hall of German Merchants that served as a warehouse. These frescoes were painted in collaboration with Titian, another major Venetian painter, but were later destroyed. Giorgione specialized in paintings commissioned from private individuals, with whom he had a much greater range of possible subject matter and style than he would have in works commissioned by the church or public officials. Historians have disagreed on works attributed to Giorgione, with only about six definitely by his hand. Only one of his paintings, a portrait entitled Laura, was signed. Others include the Three Philosophers, Portrait of a Young Man, the Pastoral Concert, and Sleeping Venus, in which a nude figure is placed in a natural background, and which directly inspired the Venus of Urbino of Titian. The most famous Giorgione painting, The Tempest, is a startling landscape that shows a seated woman, who is breast-feeding an infant, near the figure of a standing soldier. In the background a storm approaches over the ruins of a city. The Tempest challenges the viewer to decipher the meaning of the figures, the storm, and other symbols, which originate completely in the artist's imagination.

In this and other works Giorgione was the first to place figures in a landscape setting. Possibly under the influence of Leonardo da Vinci, Giorgione also adopted the sfumato technique of soft, shaded contours, a sharp break from the clear lines and brighter colors of early Renaissance paintings. In several of his works, he ignored traditional subjects of the Christian religion or classical mythology, and created personal allegories, set in symbol-rich landscapes that give his works an air of mystery and poetic charm. By the time of his death of the plague at the age of thirty-three, his works had a strong influence on many Venetian painters, including Bellini and Titian, and Venetian painting of the next two centuries, notably in the Baroque works of Palma Vecchio and Dosso Dossi, who borrowed many of the techniques that Giorgione pioneered.

See Also: painting; Titian; Venice

Giorgione , c.1478-1510, Venetian painter, b. Castelfranco Veneto; fellow student of Titian under Giovanni Bellini in Venice. Giorgione was known also as Zorgo or Zorgi da Castelfranco and as Giorgio Barbarelli. Almost nothing is known of his life except that he worked in Venice, undertook various important commissions in oil and fresco, and died of the plague in his early 30s. Legend concedes him great personal charm. A major innovator, he is credited with having been the formative influence in the lives of Titian, Pordenone, Sebastiano del Piombo, and Jacopo Palma il Vecchio. Thus, in a sense, 16th-century Venetian painting stems from him. So absolute was his domination that it is impossible to separate with certainty his work from that of his imitators. His frescoes are practically obliterated. The list of his extant works in oil is computed variously at from 4 to 70. But if Giorgione himself is an unknown quantity, his style is not. It was new to Venetian painting both in technique and in spirit. Technically it introduced a greater fusion of all forms and a subordination of local color to the pervading tone, used to emphasize forms in space. This revolution was accomplished simultaneously by Leonardo, but whereas Leonardo tended to suppress color in his opaque shadows, the colors of Giorgione were luminous and warm. The Giorgionesque style was liberating. The ostensible subject no longer limited the artist but became a pretext for self-expression. The specific works associated with Giorgione have the poetic quality of a bucolic dreamworld never recaptured by his famous followers. Among the best authenticated are Madonna with SS. Francis and Liberale (cathedral, Castelfranco Veneto); The Three Philosophers (Vienna); and the puzzling seminude woman with child set in a stormy landscape known as the Tempesta (Academy, Venice). Also celebrated, if more dubious are Concert Champêtre (Louvre); Laura (Vienna); Judith (St. Petersburg); Adoration of the Shepherds (National Gall. of Art, Washington, D.C.); the Concert (Pitti Palace); and Judgment of Solomon and Trial of Moses (Uffizi). His pastoral Sleeping Venus (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden) was finished by Titian.

Bibliography: See complete ed. of his works by T. Pignatti (1971); studies by G. M. Richter (1937), L. Baldass (1965), and T. Pignatti (1971).

Giorgione (c.1478–1510) Italian painter, b. Giorgio da Castlefranco. A pupil of Bellini, he became one of the major painters of the Venetian High Renaissance. He had an enigmatic romantic style, as in Tempest (c.1505). His Sleeping Venus was probably completed (c.1510) by Titian.

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