Giorgione

Italian painter

• Born: c. 1477
• Birthplace: Castelfranco, Republic of Venice (now in Italy)
• Died: 1510
• Place of death: Venice, Republic of Venice (now in Italy)

The Renaissance celebration of the ordinary human being enjoying the pleasures of natural life, depicted not in the great public paintings but in the intimacy of the small canvas suitable for the simple living room, found its painter in Giorgione, the master of the private moment.

Early Life

Giorgione (jyohr-JYOH-neh) is one of the great mysteries of art history. Little is known of his life, early or middle, and there is no late life since he died so young. Of that death, there is some certainty, since comment is made on it in a letter. He was born probably in the Veneto in the small town of Castelfranco, probably of humble parents. He was probably known originally in Venice as Giorgio da Castelfranco, although Giorgio seems to have given way to the Venetian version of the same name, Zorzo.

Given the extent of his career in Venice, it is likely that Giorgione came into the city sometime around 1500 and joined the workshop of Giovanni Bellini . He seems to have established a reputation for himself quickly, and in the decade left to him he established himself not only as a painter but also as a fresco artist, and several fresco facades on buildings throughout the city are supposed to have been painted by him, none of which is extant.

The source for any knowledge of him lies mainly with the painter and historian Giorgio Vasari, who presents a romantic picture of a handsome, diminutive, gregarious man, socially popular and eagerly sought after for his art. Yet Vasari wrote some thirty years or more after Giorgione’s death, and there was a tendency in biography at that time to romanticize subjects. Still in existence, however, is a 1507 document in which Giorgione is commissioned to do a painting for the doge’s palace; evidence of a quarrel over a fee for a fresco, which was settled by a panel of adjudicators, including Giovanni Bellini, in Giorgione’s favor; and a letter announcing his death.

It is likely that Bellini was Giorgione’s teacher as well as employer, since much of what would be seen as Giorgione’s style can be traced to certain aspects of Bellini’s own work. Whatever the facts, Giorgione was busily at work in the middle of the first decade of the sixteenth century. His was a short career, but he was to be mentioned as one of the great painters by Baldassare Castiglione in Il libro del cortegiano (1528; The Book of the Courtier , 1561), and Marcantonio Michiel, in Notizia d’opere di disegno (wr. 1525-1543, pb. 1800), lists sixteen paintings by Giorgione in Venetian collections and numerous fresco commissions. Hardly a handful of these paintings is extant.

Life’s Work

Vasari speaks confidently of Giorgione as one of the best painters in the “modern style,” linking him with Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Correggio. His modernity, however, is somewhat peculiar to himself, and he is best understood as being at once one of the innovators of the early Renaissance style in painting and an individual stylist of peculiar felicities, which made him so popular with Venetian collectors of paintings. His best work is not public; rather, it is private.

Painting during the Middle Ages was, in general, at the service of the church and state, recording high moments in the histories of those two mainstays of medieval society. In the fifteenth century, particularly in the later years, there was an inclination in the social and religious sensibility to put some emphasis on the life of the individual, to see life as not simply a vale of tears leading to eternal salvation or damnation but as a place of some pleasure in and of itself. This vague tendency to think about life as worth living began tentatively to reveal itself in the arts thematically, tonally, and technically. Bellini, for example, continued to paint Madonnas, but in his later work the modeling of the figures became less dry and stiff, and tended to dwell on the physical beauty of the human subjects with considerable tenderness. Occasionally, Bellini would explore the beauty of the human form even more. His Toilet of Venus (1515) is a quite magnificent painting per se; it is a painting clearly in the full flow of Renaissance enthusiasm for the human body and the richness of life at its best.

Two other aspects of Bellini’s work had influence on Giorgione. Tonally, Bellini brought to his Madonnas and to his altarpieces a kind of dreamy hush, a low-keyed softness that is perhaps best exemplified in what are called his sacra conversazione paintings, in which the Madonna and Child are adored quietly by a combination of contemplative saints and angels playing musical instruments. This “tonality” was taken out of the sacred realm with great success by Giorgione. Giorgione was also indebted to Bellini in part for his landscapes. Bellini used landscapes in the common tradition of the time as backgrounds for his enthroned Madonnas. These works tend to be somewhat stiffly idealized versions of the local landscapes, but they also tend to become softer and more natural as Bellini’s career progressed. Giorgione noticed Bellini’s idea of the softened natural scene and created his own version of it.

What is immediately apparent in Giorgione’s work is how felicitously he adopted the then-new ideas of allowing human feeling and pleasures onto the face of the work of art and how the use of oils and canvas, both relatively new elements in painting at the time, allowed Giorgione much greater ease in expressing himself. Bellini worked mainly in tempera on wood, and he stayed with the wood in his early oils. Yet younger artists such as Giorgione made the double jump to oils and to canvas, which allowed them to escape the dryness of tempera and the stiffness of modeling, and to achieve great subtlety in the use of color.

Giorgione proved to be the master of the new mode of wedding canvas and oil, and he developed the reputation for modeling through color rather than through line, a technique that was to become the touchstone of Venetian art. In a sense, modern art began with Giorgione. The ideas that art could be used for the simple purpose of enriching life by its very presence without necessarily illustrating some historical or religious act of importance and that the artist might make a living providing canvases of modest size, illustrating modest moments of common life, are obvious aspects of Giorgione’s career. He seems only occasionally to have done public commissions, and his patrons, so far as is known, were not the most important members of Venetian society. His patrons tended to be people of property but not of particularly imposing reputation or power, as had usually been the case of patrons prior to this time and would continue to be the case in the career of painters such as Titian.

What might have happened had Giorgione lived is another matter. Titian might have begun as Giorgione’s pupil, or both painters might have been with Bellini. What is known is that in the early years of his career, Titian, who was slightly younger than Giorgione, was closely associated with him. They often worked together, and, after Giorgione’s death, Titian finished some of Giorgione’s work. Indeed, they were so similar stylistically that some paintings, including the famous Concert Champětre, are sometimes credited to Giorgione and sometimes to Titian. Whatever the case, Titian went on to an international career, and it is presumable that, given his early reputation, Giorgione might have taken a similar road to wider reputation had he lived.

Giorgione left, however, a group of quite enchanting paintings, almost all of which have a worldwide reputation and at least two of which, the Concert Champětre (if it is his, or partly his) and The Tempest (c. 1505), are among the best-known paintings in the world. These paintings seem to say something about life, which, like poetry, is virtually untranslatable into rational concepts. The tender, soft sweetness of the painting, the colors, the posture of the participants, the opulent dreaminess, the hints of symbolism not quite fully formed, and the elegiac pastoral melancholy come together in surprisingly uncluttered masterpieces of very modest size. These qualities are the signature of Giorgione and can be seen to a slightly lesser extent in his altarpiece at Castelfranco and in The Three Philosophers (c. 1510) in Vienna. The paintings seem to say something beyond their content, while drawing the viewer to a kind of hypnotic conclusion that whatever the meaning may be matters little in the face of such glorious modeling, rich coloring, and consummate rendering, particularly of the human body. Giorgione did not live long enough to paint anything of a lesser order.

Significance

What Giorgione did was to free painting from the institutions that had fostered and dominated it through the Middle Ages. That dominance did not diminish immediately, but painters, and to a lesser extent sculptors, were to discover a new market for their work, a market that was to allow them the opportunity to experiment with new themes. Giorgione also helped to educate the public that art was not only a reminder of social, political, and religious responsibilities but also a medium of pure pleasure.

Giorgione’s popularity is an indication of the developing Renaissance sensibility. It was one thing for Giorgione to make paintings of simple, intimate moments of innocent encounter; it is the mark of the great artist to meet instinctively that inchoate appetite of society, vaguely struggling to understand its desire to celebrate and enjoy life rather than simply bear it with religious stoicism. A Giorgione painting, small enough to be hung in a living room, had nothing to do with religion, or history, or politics, or worldly success; it had to do with the beauty of nature and of human beings, and with the sympathetic connections of humanity with landscape. His paintings provided the example of a metaphysical tenderness, which was later pursued by painters such as Antoine Watteau, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, and Paul Cézanne. After Giorgione, paintings no longer had to stand for something but could be something, a center for contemplative pleasure by the individual.

It was more than the discovery of the innocent subject that made Giorgione important. He was one of the first and also one of the finest practitioners of oil on canvas, immediately capable of understanding how that combination made painting more lushly bright and how paint, used tonally, could be used as a medium for supple draftsmanship, which would be one of the distinguishing marks of Venetian painting. Art became part of ordinary life, not simply a record of its more glorious moments. With the intimate Giorgione, art entered the home and made way for the modern idea of the artist as the glory of humanity. The artist was to become as important as the art.

Bibliography

Anderson, Jaynie. Giorgione: The Painter of “Poetic Brevity.” New York: Flammarion, 1997. Reassessment of Giorgione based on original research and scholarship, focused on specific themes in the artist’s work. Looks at such issues as Giorgione’s representation of women and the effects of sixteenth century Venetian patronage on his art. Includes a complete catalogue raisonné and an index.

Beck, James. Italian Renaissance Painting. 2d ed. Cologne, Germany: Könemann, 1999. Places Giorgione’s contribution in relation to the evolution of artistic practice as it works its way out of the medieval period and into the early stages of the Renaissance. This sensible survey is easily understood. Includes color illustrations, color map, bibliographic references, and index.

Berenson, Bernhard. The Italian Painters of the Renaissance. Rev. ed. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980. Berenson, one of the great critics of Italian art, puts Giorgione in the context of Venetian painting and Venetian social history. Includes illustrations and index.

Carter, Paul. The Lie of the Land. London: Faber and Faber, 1996. Fascinating, original, and deeply idiosyncratic reading of Giorgione’s Tempest as an anti-linear, postcolonial countercultural representation of the world. Focuses on the use of reverse perspective in the work. Includes photographic plates, illustrations, facsimile reproductions, map, bibliographic references, and index.

Phillips, Duncan. The Leadership of Giorgione. Washington, D.C.: American Federation of Arts, 1937. A charming book, somewhat heavy on speculation, but wide-ranging in the associations it brings to the contemplation of the mystery of Giorgione’s career.

Pignati, Terisio. Giorgione. Translated by Clovis Whitfield. New York: Phaidon Press, 1971. A scholar’s text, dealing briskly, but with confident economy, with Giorgione’s life and the canon.

Pignati, Terisio, and Filippo Pedrocco. Giorgione. New York: Rizzoli, 1999. Pignati reconsiders his assessment of Giorgione in the light of new scholarship by Anderson. Pedrocco provides an analysis of every painting in the catalog. Makes a potentially controversial assessment of the relationship between Giorgione and Titian. The reproductions of the artist’s work are of extremely high quality.

Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Artists. Translated by George Bull. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1965. An inexpensive paperback in which the facts of Giorgione’s life and art are presented by a near contemporary. Other artists of the time are also represented and form a valuable frame for considering Giorgione.