GIORGIONE, Giorgio da Castelfranco detto Il. - Painter, b. at Castelfranco Veneto probably in 1477 or 1478, d. at Venice shortly before 25 Oct. 1510; one of the greatest artists of humanity. He is the first free interpreter of nature; his creations are the fruit of a lyrical sentiment that lies at the basis of modern art.
Nothing is known with certainty about his birth and his beginnings, and some data of his existence can be reconstructed only with difficulty. That G. was born of a very humble lineage, as Vasari affirms, seems quite probable. Ridolfi (1648) says that he was called Barbarella; but this is the name of the family that perhaps adopted him. He was probably a foundling, and his predilection for the myth of Paris seems to confirm this. In the documents of the time he is called Zorzi or Zorzo da Castelfranco; Zorzon or G. is a form that appears after his death, and is written for the first time in Pino (1548).
Concerning G.'s artistic education, Vasari's reports are contradictory, because in the first edition of his Vite he affirms that he was placed in the school of Gentile and Giovanni Bellini; whereas in the second (which is the more reliable, since he had obtained information about G. from the living voice of Titian) he makes no mention of that teaching, limiting himself to affirming that he far surpassed the Bellinis. It is known, from the inscription on the back of the painting of Laura in the Museum of Vienna, that he was a "colleague" of Vincenzo Catena in 1506, and was called "master"; that in 1507 he received the coveted commission for a canvas to be placed in the hall of the Council of Ten in the Doge's Palace; and that he was certainly a master who had attained great fame in 1508, when he was entrusted with frescoing the Fondaco dei Tedeschi facing the Grand Canal (while the less important walls, facing the Mercerie, were commissioned from Titian). Unfortunately, the canvas of the Doge's Palace has been lost, and of the frescoes of the Fondaco there remains only a ghost of a female figure, transferred to the Galleria dell'Accademia a few years ago (an iconographic record of those paintings exists in the engravings of Zanetti, 1760).
Vasari's reports on the life and works of G. are scanty, and not all reliable. He recalls him through tradition, especially that of Titian, as "gentle and of good morals, who delighted continually in the things of love and was wonderfully pleased by the sound of the lute, and so much so, that he sang and played in his time so divinely, that he was often for that reason employed at various musical performances and honors and gatherings of noble persons": hints, these, that are also clarifying as regards G.'s "pictorial musicality." For the reconstruction of G.'s activity there assists, besides Vasari, the Venetian nobleman Marcantonio Michiel, who noted in the private houses of Venice and Padua, from 1525 to 1543, various paintings and drawings of the master, which constitute the principal sources for the knowledge of his art. The chronology of G.'s works can be defined as only approximate.
Among his first works are generally recognized the panels of the Uffizi with the Ordeal by Fire and the Judgment of Solomon; but they are not entirely autograph, being rather executed in collaboration with another, today unknown, master. To the beginning of his career are also to be assigned the two small panels of the Museo civico of Padua, one of Leda with the Swan, the other of a Country Idyll; to which is to be added, as an integral part of a complex later dismembered, a third small panel depicting an Old Man with the Hourglass, formerly in the Pulszky collection of Budapest, now in America. In the number of G.'s first works is to be considered as probable the frieze frescoed in the Pellizzari house in Castelfranco, composed with musical and astronomical instruments, symbols of the liberal arts and of warlike life; in which is to be recognized almost a projection of G.'s ideological world, rather than his hand, because it is a work of decorative intent.
The first important work, in order of time, on which the judgment of criticism appears concordant, is the Judith of the Hermitage in Leningrad: a work to be dated probably ca. 1500-1502, of an extreme exquisiteness of execution, and of that "sweetness of united colors" that Vasari considers as a particular requisite of the "modern manner" established by G. To his youthful period are to be ascribed furthermore the following paintings, which form a stylistically homogeneous group: the Epiphany, of the National Gallery of London, in which Bellinian and Carpaccesque reminiscences echo; the Holy Family, formerly in the Benson collection of London and now at the Duveen art house of New York, inspired, both in composition and in the Gothicizing style of the drapery, by the prints of Schongauer; the Madonna of the Landscape, at the Hermitage of Leningrad, an interpretation of exquisite humanity and naturalness; and the Sacra Conversazione (formerly attributed to the school of Bellini) at the Accademia of Venice, the latter a work still unrecognized.
This "first period" concludes with the celebrated Madonna of Castelfranco, executed ca. 1504-1505, a creation of admirable beauty especially in the upper part, where the dreaming Virgin with the Child reigns in a sweet landscape of sunset, which is all of a gilded luminosity, diffused through the atmosphere. And if, measured by the standard of Tuscan mathematical perspective, one notes in it on the whole some forcing due to a point of view too close to the figures; the new poetic world that is revealed in it through a lyrical tonal interpretation of colors surpasses any restrictive judgment in the face of so lofty a masterpiece.
To G.'s maturity (and it is a relative maturity, since it extends from ca. his twenty-seventh year to his thirty-third, in which he died) belong with certainty: the Ideal Portrait of Laura (1506) mentioned above, of the Museum of Vienna; the Portrait of a Young Man, of the Kaiser Friedrich-Museum of Berlin, which in turn embodies an ideal of beauty of the Renaissance; the portrait of the Old Woman "with time", of the Accademia of Venice, on the contrary, of a surprising verism inspired by the Northerners, a work formerly ascribed to Torbido, and, to tell the truth, still unjustly controversial; as, unfortunately, is still debated the evocative panel with The Three Ages of the Pitti Gallery of Florence. To these are added the universally celebrated works, that is, the aforementioned fragment of fresco of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi (1508) and the Tempest, both at the Venetian Accademia, as well as the Three Philosophers at the Museum of Vienna. The Tempest is the work that better than any other of G. expresses, for the first time in the history of art, that panicky sentiment of nature, that living and throbbing of man in unison with creation, that intimate "revelation," by which he is part of the cosmos and subject to its supreme laws. The descriptive, "optical" landscape of the Flemings and the Northerners is surpassed in a sublimely poetic transfiguration: so poetic, that the figural subject (probably referring to the myth of the child Paris) passes almost unnoticed, and already Michiel does not know it exactly but cites it only as "the little landscape with the tempest, with the gypsy and soldier." More mysterious is the "theme," when one considers that in the first draft of the work, G. had painted, in place of the "soldier," a figure of a nude woman seated at the edge of the stream, bathing her feet in the water, as has been revealed recently by the radiographic examination of the painting.
The "subject" of the Three Philosophers is likewise rather hermetic; it has been interpreted also as Three Mathematicians or Three Astronomers or Three Magi, or else referred to Roman mythology, and even to the occultism of secret societies; but it most likely represents the three stages of philosophy, personified for antiquity by Aristotle, for the Middle Ages by Averroes, for the Renaissance by the young observer and measurer, a follower of the new ideas of naturalism then taught at the University of Padua. The philosophical theme (or in any case mythological and otherwise) has been transformed into pure lyric, into a musical contemplation; and the painting is of such a deep chromatic intensity that it finds no parallel except in a few works of G. himself. According to Michiel, the painting was finished by Sebastiano del Piombo; but it is certain that the latter's intervention was limited to a few non-essential parts.
A painting that is moving toward universal recognition by critics is the Adoration of the Shepherds, formerly in the Allendale collection in London, now in the National Gallery in Washington; one of G.'s most important paintings, in which the master's highest pictorial qualities are admirably summed up and synthesized. It is certainly to be identified with that "Nocte" which Isabella d'Este wished, but in vain, to acquire immediately after G.'s death. A masterpiece of the master's last years, it is particularly enchanting for its atmospheric interpretation of light, which anticipates the achievements of Vermeer. Critical judgment is moving toward agreement also on other little-known works, such as the Eros with the Arrow in the Vienna Museum; the Self-Portrait in the Guise of David in the Brunswick Gallery, which is unfortunately only a much deteriorated and restored fragment; as well as the Portrait of a Man, formerly in the Terris collection in London, now in the Museum of San Diego in California, bearing on the back a contemporary inscription that calls it "di man de m. Zorzi de Castel fr..." with the (not entirely clear) date of 1508. Its great resemblance to the aforementioned "self-portrait" in Brunswick makes it probable that in this admirable head, with its diffused luminosity and compact, thick chromatic paste, G. depicted himself.
To clarify G.'s "pictorial world," there also remain some copies of his paintings, made by Teniers the Younger, such as the Finding of Paris, in the Loeser collection in Florence, the Aggression, in the Gronau collection, also in Florence, or the half-length figure of Nero in the collection of Prof. Suida in New York. Other interesting copies from lost originals by G. are to be considered the Horoscope in the Dresden Gallery, the Shepherd with a Flute at Hampton Court, the David with the Head of Goliath in the Vienna Museum, the Page with the Golden Ball in the Ambrosiana in Milan; but for these last two it could also be a question of originals, damaged by old repaintings.
In the field of uncertain works there remains the much-discussed Judgment of Solomon, in the Bankes collection at Kingston Lacy in England, perhaps only begun by G. and finished by Sebastiano del Piombo, while other famous creations, such as the Pastoral Concert in the Louvre, the Concert in the Pitti, the Adulteress in the Glasgow Museum, the Madonna with Sts. Roch and Anthony in the Prado, must be restored, by now without any doubt, to the genius of the young Vecellio. As for the celebrated Sleeping Venus, formerly in the Dresden Gallery and now in the possession of the U.S.S.R., the current opinion is that the painting was begun by G. and finished by Titian, presuming it to be the same one that Michiel noted, in 1525, in the house of Gerolamo Marcello in Venice; but the identification with that one is highly debatable, while the free-flowing pictorial style, the monumental composition, the chromatic impasto and every element of form speak in favor of Titian alone; toward whom, moreover, criticism is decisively inclining.
Of the many drawings ascribed to G., only one is unanimously accepted as autograph: the Young Shepherd, with the view of the walls of Castelfranco in the background, in the Boymans Museum in Rotterdam; but the Violinist, in the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, must certainly also be considered from his hand. They are drawings of extreme refinement, conceived in a properly "pictorial" sense.
G.'s artistic development starts from the still fifteenth-century concepts of the Bellini and of Carpaccio, soon to detach itself from them in the search for a new pictorial world. And the revelation of this new world would have come to him, according to Vasari, from Leonardo's "sfumato": a hypothesis that has its share of truth, when one considers a certain analogy of intent between the "spatial and atmospheric depth" achieved by Leonardo through chiaroscuro and G.'s "tonal harmony," likewise understood as atmospheric fusion, but achieved exclusively through color. From his very first secure works G. rises above the distinction between form and color; for with him it is color that gives form to things. Therefore he soon abandoned, as Vasari well says with exaggeration, "the dry, crude and labored manner of the Bellini" and set himself to work "without making a drawing, holding it certain that painting only with the colors themselves, without any other study of drawing on paper, was the true and best way of doing." Thus G., from Leonardo's "sfumato," passed to painting by touch, itself in turn a consequence of tonal painting. It is precisely to the last phase of G.'s evolution that Vasari's passage must therefore refer, which moreover captures so vividly the novelty of Giorgionesque painting.
Naturally the premises for this painting were already in the air in Venice: both in the creations of the old Giambellino, in which there is a sweet chromatic fusion, and in the fairly numerous examples of Flemish paintings. The young man from Castelfranco initially underwent notable suggestions from Nordic Gothicism, and that swelling of the draperies in the Judith in Leningrad, in the ex-Benson Holy Family, in the Madonna of Castelfranco, which finds no parallel in the Venetian painting of the time, is clear proof of it. The prints of Schongauer, of Wohlgemut, of the Little Masters; the works of Dürer; the Stregozzi of Jerome Bosch in the Doge's Palace certainly served to leaven the flight of G.'s imagination toward the realms of a world until then mysterious (from Antonello he felt barely some iconographic influence in the framing of certain portraits; in reality G. works in antithesis to the closed plastic rigorism of the Sicilian, painting through soft transitions of light). Alongside the aforementioned suggestions, a weight in G.'s formation was had by the environment of classical studies, his frequentation of the world of culture, his contact with musicality and in short with all that fermenting life of the spirit, as pervaded by a breath of arcane euphoria, which characterized the Venice of the first decade of the sixteenth century: one of the happiest periods that painting has ever lived through. From these premises was born the very lofty ethos of beauty that pervades G.'s creatures.
To achieve the perfect fusion of his colors, G. made use of a painting technique by glazes, which was moreover already in use in Venetian painting, but which he developed further, conferring upon it capital importance. The exegesis of G.'s art is not, however, exhausted in the diagnostics of form, but requires a spiritual abandonment to its pure poetic values, without which his pictorial personality, exquisitely mysterious and ineffable, would remain a dead letter.
G. is not a myth, as some have claimed. Besides the aforementioned contemporary documents, G. is mentioned in the Diarii of Marin Sanudo, in which the latter recorded his death. But the most "living" documents on G.'s works are the letters that Isabella d'Este exchanged, immediately after the artist's death, with her agent in Venice, Taddeo Albano, in order to secure a Nocte by the great painter who had died prematurely. Albano replied on 7 November that of the "Notti" (that is, Adoration of the Shepherds) painted by G., one was with Taddeo Contarini, another, of better workmanship, with Vittorio Beccaro; but neither was willing to sell them "for any price; because they had them made in order to enjoy them for themselves": an edifying example of the love that patrons nurtured for the Master's works, whose greatness was already fully recognized by his contemporaries. - See plate XXXIV.
Bibliography9 works
Antonio Morassi