Painter, born in Castelfranco Veneto, NE Italy. He studied under Giovanni Bellini in Venice, where he painted frescoes, though few have survived. A great innovator, he created the small, intimate easel picture and a new treatment of figures in landscape, the landscape of mood. Among the paintings reliably attributed to him are The Tempest (c.1505, Venice) and The Sleeping Venus (c.1510, Dresden).
Giorgione (c. Giorgione is known for the elusive poetic quality of his work, and for the fact that only very few (around six) paintings are known for certain to be his work. The resulting uncertainty about the identity and meaning of his art has made Giorgione one of the most mysterious figures in European painting.
Life
Giorgione's life is described in Giorgio Vasari's Vite. In 1500, when he was only twenty-three (that is, if Vasari gives rightly the age at which he died), he was chosen to paint portraits of the Doge Agostino Barberigo and the condottiere Consalvo Ferrante. In 1504 he was commissioned to paint an altarpiece in memory of Matteo Costanzo in the cathedral of his native town, Castelfranco.
Vasari gives also as an important event in Giorgione's life, and one which had influence on his work, his meeting with Leonardo da Vinci on the occasion of the Tuscan master's visit to Venice in 1500.
All accounts agree in representing Giorgione as a person of distinguished and romantic charm, a great lover and musician, given to express in art the sensuous and imaginative grace, touched with poetic melancholy, of the Venetian existence of his time. They represent him further as having made in Venetian painting an advance analogous to that made in Tuscan painting by Leonardo more than twenty years before;
Giorgione also introduced a new range of subjects. Besides altarpieces and portraits he painted pictures that told no story, whether biblical or classical, or if they professed to tell such, neglected the action and simply embodied in form and color moods of lyrical or romantic feeling, much as a musician might embody them in sounds.
His name and work have exercised, and continue to exercise, no less a spell on posterity. There are inclusive critics who still claim for Giorgione nearly every painting of the time that at all resembles his manner, and there are exclusive critics who pare down to half a dozen the list of extant pictures which they will admit to be actually his.
Works
While still in Castelfranco, Giorgione painted the Castelfranco Madonna, a fairly conventional sacra conversazione piece — Madonna enthroned, with saints on either side forming an equilateral triangle. His delicate color modulations result from the tiny disconnected spots of paint that he probably derived from manuscript illumination techniques and first brought into oil painting.
Most entirely central and typical of all Giorgione's extant works is the Sleeping Venus at Dresden, first recognized by Morelli, and now universally accepted, as being the same as the picture seen by the Anonimo and later by Ridolfi in the Casa Marcello at Venice.
It is recorded that the master left this piece unfinished and that the landscape, with a Cupid which subsequent restoration has removed, were completed after his death by Titian. The picture is the prototype of Titian's own Venus of Urbino and of many more by other painters of the school; The same concept of idealized beauty is evoked in a virginally pensive Judith from the Hermitage Museum, a large painting which exhibits Giorgione's special qualities of color richness and landscape romance, while demonstrating that life and death are each other's companions rather than foes.
The Tempest has been called the first landscape in the history of Western painting. Theories that the painting is about duality (city and country, male and female) have been dismissed since radiography has shown that in the earlier stages of the painting the soldier to the left was a seated female nude.
The Three Philosophers is equally enigmatic and its attribution to Giorgione is still disputed. The painting is devoid of harsh contours and its treatment of landscape has been frequently compared to pastoral poetry, hence the title.
Giorgione and young Titian revolutionized the genre of the portrait as well. The only signed and dated work by Giorgione is his portrait of Laura (1 June 1506), one of the first to be painted in the "modern manner", distinguished by dignity, clarity, and sophisticated characterization.
Assessment
Though he died at the young age of 33, the precocious and versatile painter left a lasting legacy to be developed by Titian and 17th-century artists. He was the first to paint landscapes with figures, the first to paint genre — movable pictures in their own frames with no devotional, allegorical, or historical purpose — and the first whose colours possessed that ardent, glowing, and melting intensity which was so soon to typify the work of all the Venetian School.
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