On this page
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia:
Giorgione |
For more information on Giorgione, visit Britannica.com.
|
Featured Videos:
|
Oxford Grove Art:
Giorgione |
(b Castelfranco Veneto, ?1477-8; d Venice, before 7 Nov 1510). Italian painter. 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.
See the Abbreviations for further details.
Gale Encyclopedia of Biography:
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).
Columbia Encyclopedia:
Giorgione |
Bibliography
See complete ed. of his works by T. Pignatti (1971); studies by G. M. Richter (1937), L. Baldass (1965), and T. Pignatti (1971).
Gale Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World:
Giorgione |
Giorgione (Giorgo da Castelfranco; 1477–1510), Italian painter, master of the Venetian school. Although little is known about Giorgione, it is clear that in the course of a brief career curtailed by the plague in the autumn of 1510 he transformed the field of painting in Renaissance Venice. In a number of small-scale devotional works (e.g., the Allendale Nativity, c. 1500, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), the young artist responded in brilliant fashion to the pictorial innovations of his master, Giovanni Bellini (c. 1438–1516). In these paintings, Giorgione demonstrated his understanding of Bellini's tonal and atmospheric approach to pictorial composition in which individual forms are loosely bound together through the unifying play of warm golden light. Also derived from Bellini is the placement of human and sacred protagonists within a broadly articulated natural landscape.
Giorgione broadly relied on the established painting types and iconographies of late-fifteenth-century Venice in his earlier work. But his uniquely expressive artistic personality is already very evident in the dreamlike atmosphere that pervades each painting. This air of moody introspection is most noticeable in the Castelfranco altarpiece (c. 1500–1502, Castelfranco, Duomo), Giorgione's first and only monumental religious commission. Here, the rigorously defined rational space of the early Renaissance altarpiece is undermined by a perspective scheme that makes little logical sense. Works such as two well-known male portraits (both c. 1500–1502, one at the Staatliche Museum, Berlin, the other at the San Diego Museum of Art) are undoubtedly commissioned portraits, but their lack of reference to the trappings of social rank makes them very unlike the average fifteenth-century painting of this type. Col Tempo (c. 1505, Accademia, Venice), Laura (1506, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), and the Boy with an Arrow (c. 1505–1507, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) cannot really be understood as "portraits" at all, although the artist very deliberately drew on the conventions of the genre. In each painting, Giorgione presents a strongly lit form emerging out of dark shadow, indicating his awareness of the art of Leonardo da Vinci, who had briefly visited Venice in 1500. But Giorgione's fluid and varied application of paint goes beyond Leonardo's smooth blending, pushing the limits of the malleable oil medium. In Col Tempo, it is the realization of the woman's weathered skin through the use of broadly applied impasto touches that breathes life into the vanitas theme. Both Laura and the Boy are more conceptually ambiguous. Despite the portraitlike arrangement, we are shown a real individual in neither case. These works are characterized by a simmering (yet understated) eroticism wholly unprecedented in Italian Renaissance art. Texture and touch are the means by which Giorgione creates the sensual mood: in Laura by the juxtaposition of fingers, fur, and secret flesh; in the Boy by the softly melting treatment of one physical substance into another.
Paintings such as these set the tone for much of Giorgione's later work, which is typically intimate and secular in tone, as well as boldly original in style, technique, and exposition of subject. Little is known of the circumstances in which these paintings were commissioned. But in the 1520s and 1530s The Three Philosophers (c. 1508–1510, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) was owned by Taddeo Contarini, The Tempest (c. 1509–1510, Accademia, Venice) by Gabriele Vendramin, and the Sleeping Venus (c. 1510, Gemäldegalerie, Dresden) by Girolamo Marcello. These men are likely to have been the original patrons, and recent studies have revealed that they formed an intimate and sophisticated private circle of Venetian patricians. Giorgione's artistic response to the primarily poetic and esoteric interests of this circle may help to explain both the formal originality and the iconographic ambiguity characteristic of his work for them.
The subject matter of both The Three Philosophers and The Tempest has been hotly disputed by scholars, but such arguments may have been anticipated by the painter who, conceiving his paintings as complex visual and iconographic "puzzles," intended to stimulate interpretation. X-rays of The Three Philosophers, for example, indicate that details revealing the subject as that of the three Magi were concealed in the final version. Technical examination of The Tempest suggests a less deliberate procedure altogether: rather than veiling a preconceived subject, Giorgione seems to have invented the picture as he went along, his final composition being radically different from that revealed by the x-ray. The many modern attempts to read the painting in terms of a specific mythological, biblical, or allegorical subject seem to sell the painting short. It might be better to think of The Tempest as a pictorial attempt to rival the open-ended associative power of the pastoral poetry then so in vogue with Gabriele Vendramin and his select circle.
The vastly influential Sleeping Venus, completed by Titian following Giorgione's death, brings together many of the themes and qualities of his art. The subject matter, so typical in its combination of classical and erotic elements, is not on this occasion in doubt. But the Venus once again suggests Giorgione's fundamental conception of painting as a kind of "poetry," which works its magic less through the "logical" or scientific description of the object observed than through its ability to encourage the free association of ideas. It is perhaps for this reason that the anatomical impossibility of Giorgione's goddess has failed to disturb the many who have found in her fluid form the perfect realization of an aesthetic ideal.
Bibliography
Anderson, Jaynie. Giorgione: The Painter of "Poetic Brevity." Paris and New York, 1997.
Lucco, Mauro. Giorgione. Milan, 1995.
Pignatti, Terisio. Giorgione. Venice, 1969.
Settis, Salvatore. Giorgione's Tempest: Interpreting the Hidden Subject. Cambridge, U.K., 1990.
—TOM NICHOLS
Rhymes:
Giorgione |
Wikipedia on Answers.com:
Giorgione |
| Giorgione | |
|---|---|
 A purported self-portrait, represented as David |
|
| Birth name | Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco |
| Born | c. 1477-1478 Castelfranco Veneto, Italy |
| Died | 1510 (age 32-33) Venice, Italy |
| Nationality | Venetian |
| Field | Painting |
| Training | Giovanni Bellini |
| Movement | High Renaissance |
| Works | The Tempest Sleeping Venus Castelfranco Madonna The Three Philosophers |
Giorgione (born Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco; c. 1477/8 – 1510[1]) was a Venetian painter of the High Renaissance in Venice, whose career was cut off by his death at a little over thirty. Giorgione is known for the elusive poetic quality of his work, though only about six surviving paintings are acknowledged 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.
Together with Titian, who was slightly younger, he is the founder of the distinctive Venetian school of Italian Renaissance painting, which achieves much of its effect through colour and mood, and is traditionally contrasted with the reliance on a more linear disegno of Florentine painting.
|
Contents
|
The little known of Giorgione's life is given in Giorgio Vasari's Vite. The painter came from the small town of Castelfranco Veneto, 40 km inland from Venice. His name sometimes appears as Zorzo. The variant Giorgione (or Zorzon) may be translated "Big George". How early in boyhood he went to Venice we do not know, but stylistic evidence supports the statement of Carlo Ridolfi that he served his apprenticeship there under Giovanni Bellini; there he settled and made his fame.
Contemporary documents record that his gifts were recognized early. In 1500, when he was only twenty-three (that is, if Vasari is correct about his age when he died), he was chosen to paint portraits of the Doge Agostino Barbarigo and the condottiere Consalvo Ferrante. In 1504 he was commissioned to paint an altarpiece in memory of another condottiere, Matteo Costanzo, in the cathedral of his native town, Castelfranco. In 1507 he received at the order of the Council of Ten part payment for a picture (subject not mentioned) on which he was engaged for the Hall of the Audience in the Doge's Palace. In 1507-1508 he was employed, with other artists of his generation, to decorate with frescoes the exterior of the newly rebuilt Fondaco dei Tedeschi (or German Merchants' Hall) at Venice, having already done similar work on the exterior of the Casa Soranzo, the Casa Grimani alli Servi and other Venetian palaces. Very little of this work survives today.
Vasari mentions 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 a musician, given to express in his 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; that is, as having released the art from the last shackles of archaic rigidity and placed it in possession of full freedom and the full mastery of its means.
He was very closely associated with Titian; Vasari says Giorgione was Titian's master, while Ridolfi says they both were pupils of Bellini, and lived in his house. They worked together on the Fondaco dei Tedeschi frescoes, and Titian finished at least some paintings of Giorgione after his death, although which ones remains very controversial.
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 a story, 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. Innovating with the courage and felicity of genius, he had for a time an overwhelming influence on his contemporaries and immediate successors in the Venetian school, including Titian, Sebastiano del Piombo, Palma il Vecchio, il Cariani, Giulio Campagnola (and his brother), and even on his already eminent master, Giovanni Bellini. In the Venetian mainland, Giorgionismo strongly influenced Morto da Feltre, Domenico Capriolo, and Domenico Mancini.
Giorgione died, probably of the plague then raging, by October, 1510. October 1510 is also the date of a letter by Isabella d'Este to a Venetian friend; asking him to buy a painting by Giorgione; in the letter she is aware he is already dead. Significantly, the reply a month later said the painting was not to be had at any price.
His name and work continue to exercise a spell on posterity. But to identify and define, among the relics of his age and school, precisely what that work is, and to distinguish it from the similar work of other men whom his influence inspired, is a very difficult matter. Though there are no longer any supporters of the "Pan Giorgionismus"[2] which a century ago claimed for Giorgione nearly every painting of the time that at all resembles his manner, there are still, as then, exclusive critics who reduce to half a dozen the list of extant pictures which they will admit to be actually by this master.
For his home town of Castelfranco, Giorgione painted the Castelfranco Madonna, an altarpiece in sacra conversazione form — Madonna enthroned, with saints on either side forming an equilateral triangle. This gave the landscape background an importance which marks an innovation in Venetian art, and was quickly followed by his master Giovanni Bellini and others.[3] Giorgione began to use the very refined chiaroscuro called sfumato — the delicate use of shades of color to depict light and perspective — around the same time as Leonardo. Whether Vasari is correct in saying he learned it from Leonardo's works is unclear — he is always keen to ascribe all advances to Florentine sources. Leonardo's delicate color modulations result from the tiny disconnected spots of paint that he probably derived from Illuminated manuscript techniques and first brought into oil painting. These gave Giorgione's works the magical glow of light for which they are celebrated.
Most central and typical of all of Giorgione's extant works is the Sleeping Venus now in Dresden. It was first recognized by Giovanni Morelli, and is now universally accepted, as being the same as the picture seen by Marcantonio Michiel and later by Ridolfi (his 17th century biographer) in the Casa Marcello at Venice. An exquisitely pure and severe rhythm of line and contour chastens the sensuous richness of the painting. The sweep of white drapery on which the goddess lies; and the glowing landscape that fills the space behind her; most harmoniously frame her divinity. The use of an external landscape to frame a nude is innovative; but in addition, to add to her mystery, she is shrouded in sleep, spirited away from accessibility to any conscious expression.
It is recorded by Michiel that Giorgione 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; but none of them attained the fame of the first exemplar. 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.
Apart from the altarpiece and the frescoes, all Giorgione's surviving works are small paintings designed for the wealthy Venetian collector to keep in his home; most are under two feet (60 cm) in either dimension. This market had been emerging over the last half of the 15th century in Italy, and was much better established in the Netherlands, but Giorgione was the first major Italian painter to concentrate his work on it to such an extent — indeed soon after his death the size of paintings began to increase with the prosperity and palaces of the patrons.
The Tempest has been called the first landscape in the history of Western painting. The subject of this painting is unclear, but its artistic mastery is apparent. The Tempest portrays a soldier and a breast-feeding woman on either side of a stream, amid a city's rubble and an incoming storm. The multitude of symbols in The Tempest offer many interpretations, but none is wholly satisfying. 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.[4]
The Three Philosophers is equally enigmatic and its attribution to Giorgione is still disputed. The three figures stand near a dark empty cave. Sometimes interpreted as symbols of Plato's cave or the Three Magi, they seem lost in a typical Giorgionesque dreamy mood, reinforced by a hazy light characteristic of his other landscapes, such as the Pastoral Concert, now in the Louvre. The latter "reveals the Venetians' love of textures", because the painter "renders almost palpable the appearance of flesh, fabric, wood, stone, and foliage".[5] The painting is devoid of harsh contours and its treatment of landscape has been frequently compared to pastoral poetry, hence the title.
Giorgione and the young Titian revolutionized the genre of the portrait as well. It is exceedingly difficult and sometimes simply impossible to differentiate Titian's early works from those of Giorgione. None of Giorgione's paintings are signed and only one bears a reliable date:[6] 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. Even more striking is the Portrait of a Young Man now in Berlin, acclaimed by art historians for "the indescribably subtle expression of serenity and the immobile features, added to the chiseled effect of the silhouette and modeling".[5]
Few of the portraits attributed to Giorgione appear as straightforward records of the appearance of a commissioning individual, although it is entirely possible that many are. Many can be read as types designed to express a mood or atmosphere, and certainly many of the examples of the portrait tradition Giorgione initiated appear to have had this purpose, and not to have been sold to the sitter. The subjects of his non-religious figure paintings are equally hard to discern. Perhaps the first question to ask is whether there was intended to be a specific meaning to these paintings that ingenious research can hope to recover. Many art historians argue that there is not: "The best evidence, perhaps, that Giorgione's pictures were not particularly esoteric in their meaning is provided by the fact that while his stylistic innovations were widely adopted, the distinguishing feature of virtually all Venetian non-religious painting in the first half of the 16th century is the lack of learned or literary content".[7]
The difficulty in making secure attributions of work by Giorgione's hand dates from soon after his death, when some of his paintings were completed by other artists, and his considerable reputation also led to very early erroneous claims of attribution. The vast bulk of documentation for paintings in this period relates to large commissions for Church or government; the small domestic panels that make up the bulk of Giorgione's oeuvre are always far less likely to be recorded. Other artists continued to work in his style for some years, and probably by the mid-century deliberately deceptive work had started.[8]
Primary documentation for attributions comes from the Venetian collector Marcantonio Michiel. In notes dating from 1525 to 1543 he identifies twelve paintings and one drawing as by Giorgione, of which five of the paintings are identified virtually unanimously with surviving works by art historians[9]: The Tempest, The Three Philosophers, Sleeping Venus, Boy with an Arrow,[10] and Shepherd with a Flute (not all accept the last as by Giorgione however). Michiel describes the Philosophers as having been completed by Sebastiano del Piombo, and the Venus as finished by Titian (it is now generally agreed that Titian did the landscape). Some recent art historians also involve Titian in the Three Philosophers. The Tempest is therefore the only one of the group universally accepted as wholly by Giorgione. In addition, the Castelfranco Altarpiece in his home-town has rarely, if ever, been doubted, nor have the wrecked fresco fragments from the German warehouse. The Vienna Laura is the only work signed and dated by Giorgione (on the back). The early pair of paintings in the Uffizi are usually accepted.
After that, things become more complicated, as exemplified by Vasari. In the first edition of the Vite (1550), he attributed a Christ Carrying the Cross to Giorgione; in the second edition completed in 1568 he ascribed authorship, variously, to Giorgione in his biography, which was printed in 1565, and to Titian in his, printed in 1567. He had visited Venice in between these dates, and may have obtained different information.[12] The uncertainty in distinguishing between the painting of Giorgione and the young Titian is most apparent in the case of the Louvre's Pastoral Concert, described in 2003 as "perhaps the most contentious problem of attribution in the whole of Italian Renaissance art",[13] but affects a large number of paintings possibly from Giorgione's last years.
The Pastoral Concert is one of a small group of paintings, also including the Virgin and Child with Saint Anthony and Saint Roch in the Prado,[14] which are very close in style and, according to Charles Hope, have been "more and more frequently given to Titian, not so much because of any very compelling resemblance to his undisputed early works - which would surely have been noted before - as because he seemed a less implausible candidate than Giorgione. But no one has been able to create a coherent sequence of Titian's early works that includes these ones, in a way that commands general support, and fits the known facts of his career. An alternative proposal is to assign the Pastoral Concert and the other pictures like it to a third artist, the very obscure Domenico Mancini..".[15]
Giulio Campagnola, well-known as the engraver who translated the Giorgionesque style into prints, but none of whose paintings are securely identified, is also sometimes also brought into consideration. For example, the late W.R. Rearick gave him Il Tramonte (see Gallery) and he is an alternative choice for a number of drawings that might be by Titian or Giorgione, and both are sometimes credited with the design of some of his engravings.[16]
At an earlier period in Giorgione's short career, a group of paintings is sometimes described as the "Allendale group", after the Allendale Nativity (or Allendale Adoration of the Shepherds, rather more correctly) in the National Gallery of Art, Washington. This group includes another Washington painting, the Holy Family, and an Adoration of the Magi predella panel in the National Gallery, London.[17] This group, now often expanded to include a very similar Adoration of the Shepherds in Vienna,[18] and sometimes further, are usually included (increasingly) or excluded together from Giorgione's oeuvre. Ironically, the Allendale Nativity caused the rupture in the 1930s between Lord Duveen, who sold it to Andrew Mellon as a Giorgione, and his expert Bernard Berenson, who insisted it was an early Titian. Berenson had played a significant part in reducing the Giorgione catalogue, recognising fewer than twenty paintings.[19]
Matters are further complicated because no drawing can be certainly identified as by Giorgione (although one in Rotterdam is widely accepted), and a number of aspects of the arguments over the defining of Giorgione's late style involve drawings.
Despite being greatly praised by all contemporary writers, and remaining a great name in Italy, Giorgione became less known to the wider world, and many of his (probable) paintings were assigned to others. The Hermitage Judith for example, was long regarded as a Raphael, and the Dresden Venus a Titian. In the late 19th century a great Giorgione revival began, and the fashion ran the other way. Despite well over a century of dispute, controversy remains active. Large numbers of pictures attributed to Giorgione a century ago, in particular portraits, are now firmly excluded from his oeuvre, but debate is, if anything, more fierce now than then.[20] There are effectively two fronts on which the battles are fought: paintings with figures and landscape, and portraits. According to David Rosand in 1997, "The situation has been thrown into new critical confusion by Alessandro Ballarin's radical revision of the corpus ...[Paris exhibition catalogue, 1993, increasing it] ... as well as Mauro Lucco ..[Milan book, 1996]." [21] Recent major exhibitions at Vienna and Venice in 2004 and Washington in 2006, have given art historians further opportunities to see disputed works side by side (see External links below).
Though he died at 33, Giorgione left a lasting legacy to be developed by Titian and 17th-century artists. Giorgione never subordinated line and colour to architecture, nor an artistic effect to a sentimental presentation. He was arguably the first Italian to paint landscapes with figures as 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.
The Castelfranco Madonna, before recent cleaning. Giorgione's only altarpiece
One of the "Allendale group", the small Adoration of the Magi predella, London
La Vecchia, "The Old Woman", Accademia. "Col tempo",or "With age" reads the paper.
Il Tramonte, London. Little known until the middle of the 20th century, and still a controversial attribution.
The Berlin Portrait of a Man, one of the most frequently attributed portraits
The San Diego Portrait of a Man, another of the more frequently attributed portraits
The Budapest Portrait of a Young Man, very beautiful, but damaged.
Portrait of a Venetian Gentleman, by Giorgione and Titian 1510 - National Gallery of Art
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. |
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Giorgione |
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
 | Giulio Campagnola (Italian painter) |
| Bonifazio de'Pitati (art) |
| Gordon Bottomley (English poet & dramatist) |
 | How many paintings did Giorgione have? |
| What material are giorgione\'s paintings? |
| Why is giorgione so important? |
Copyrights:
 |
 | Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 1994-2012 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more |
 |
| Oxford Grove Art. The Concise Grove Dictionary of Art. Copyright © 2002 by Oxford University Press, Inc.. All rights reserved. Read more |
 |
| Gale Encyclopedia of Biography. Gale Encyclopedia of Biography. © 2006 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more |
 |
| Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/. Read more |
|
| Gale Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World. Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World. Copyright © 2004 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more |
|
Rhymes. Oxford University Press. © 2006, 2007 All rights reserved. Read more | |
 |
| Wikipedia on Answers.com. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Giorgione. Read more |
Mentioned in
