Giorgione's Ambiguity by Tom Nichols

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g i o r g i o n e ’s a m b i g u i t y
Books in the renaissance lives series explore and illustrate the
life histories and achievements of significant artists, intellectuals
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Artemisia Gentileschi and Feminism in Early Modern Europe
Mary D. Garrard
Blaise Pascal: Miracles and Reason Mary Ann Caws
Caravaggio and the Creation of Modernity Troy Thomas
Giorgione’s Ambiguity Tom Nichols
Donatello and the Dawn of Renaissance Art A. Victor Coonin
Hans Holbein: The Artist in a Changing World Jeanne Nuechterlein
Hieronymus Bosch: Visions and Nightmares Nils Büttner
Isaac Newton and Natural Philosophy Niccolò Guicciardini
John Evelyn: A Life of Domesticity John Dixon Hunt
Leonardo da Vinci: Self, Art and Nature François Quiviger
Michelangelo and the Viewer in His Time Bernadine Barnes

Paracelsus: An Alchemical Life Bruce T. Moran
Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer Christopher S. Celenza
Piero della Francesca and the Invention of the Artist
Machtelt Brüggen Israëls
Pieter Bruegel and the Idea of Human Nature Elizabeth Alice Honig
Raphael and the Antique Claudia La Malfa
Rembrandt’s Holland Larry Silver
Titian’s Touch: Art, Magic and Philosophy Maria H. Loh
Tycho Brahe and the Measure of the Heavens John Robert Christianson
G IOR G ION E ’S
A M B IG U I T Y
to m n i c h o l s
R E A K T ION B O OK S
For my father Geoffrey Robert Nichols (1932–2019)
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First published 2020

Copyright © Tom Nichols 2020
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isbn 978 1 78914 297 6
cover: Giorgione, Young Man with an Arrow, c. 1506–7, oil on poplar.
contents
Introduction 7
1 Who Was Giorgione? 18
2 Artistic Context and Early Religious Paintings 45
3 Portraits and Portrait-types 76
4 Landscape and Figure 123
5 Nudes 166
Conclusion 197
References 215
bibliography 235
Acknowledgements 243
photo acknowledgements 245
Index 247
Introduction
M
any questions surround Giorgione, the painter
who died of the plague in Venice in 1510 in his
mid-thirties, probably having completed no more
than thirty or so works. Little is known about his artistic
training, about how his short career developed, or about what,
exactly, he painted. The original extent of his artistic output
has increasingly been put in doubt over the past century or
so, with a number of once canonical ‘Giorgiones’ being reat-
tributed to other artists. This has inevitably raised questions
about the painter’s wider importance, suggesting that he may
be one of art history’s great chimeras, always more of a myth
than a reality. To this extent Giorgione might appear to be an

old master in decline. Yet among those paintings that can still
be confidently attributed to him today are some of the most
original and fascinating of the entire Renaissance period.
And the present ambiguity surrounding this elusive master
might point up something more essential about his artistic
identity and his wider approach to painting.
The meaning of certain of the paintings for which Gior-
gione is now best known, such as the Three Philosophers (illus.
38) and the Tempest (illus. 41), remains obscure. Such works
certainly give the impression that they have a subject matter,
1 Lucas Vorsterman, print after a copy by David Teniers the Younger,

Giorgione’s lost Self-portrait as Orpheus, 1673, engraving.
giorgione’s ambig uity 8
like most other Renaissance paintings. But Giorgione then

withholds the kind of fuller visual information needed to
establish what this might be. Does the Three Philosophers fea-
ture the three biblical Magi waiting for a sign? Or is it a
secular work showing learned philosophers from different
periods of human history? Is the Tempest a scene from classical
mythology, a sacred painting, a moral or political allegory, or
a genre scene of everyday life? These images seem to invite
us to make an interpretation but do not provide sufficient
visual clues to confirm a precise or authoritative meaning.
Such ambiguous paintings are like visual traps set to capture
the viewer’s curiosity and speculation while at the same time
excluding the possibility of a comforting release into a final
conclusion.1 Perhaps, the paintings seem to suggest, the world
itself is a bit like that: an obscure outward reality that can
never be fully known or understood from our inevitably par-
tial or subjective standpoints. It is the process of ‘coming to
know’, rather than ‘knowing’ itself, that they point to. Many
have fallen into Giorgione’s clutches in their audacious
attempts to explain his paintings, taking the bait of the appar-

ent clues that are given before being reeled in by their own
ingenious theories. No one of these has succeeded in becom-
ing authoritative, however, each proving vulnerable to the
next attempt at a concluding explanation. For all the sugges-
tiveness of these efforts, Giorgione’s paintings themselves
remain somehow impervious, their power to stimulate fresh
attempts to interpret them undiminished.
Given this situation, this book will concentrate on
Giorgione’s ambiguous picture-making itself rather than
hatching further supposedly conclusive theories about the
9 Introduction
‘true’ subject matter or iconography of his works. Rather than

assuming that Giorgione’s paintings were once clearly under-
stood, and originally had a singular meaning that has since
been lost, it will be argued that such works were intended to
encourage overlapping interpretations. Many artworks are,
of course, open to differing interpretations and to this extent
are ‘ambiguous’. Perhaps ambiguity is even an innate quality
or property of the visual image, particularly when seen against
the apparent clarity of bounded or structured language, or of
the written word.2 Yet in Giorgione’s case, it appears that this
aspect is more pressingly to the fore, highlighted and made
explicit, or even performed to the viewer in an especially
insistent way. Ambiguity, it can be said, became Giorgione’s
hallmark, and is common to all his works, not just to famous
examples such as the Three Philosophers and the Tempest. And
Giorgione’s ambiguity is apparent as much in his blurring
pictorial technique, his casual treatment of human form and
pictorial space, as it is in his approach to subject matter. To
this extent, it becomes central to his mode of picture making.
The presence of ambiguity in all these aspects can help us

determine whether or not a given painting is by Giorgione,
especially as the ‘Giorgionesque’ works of even his most
immediate followers in Venice, such as Sebastiano del Piombo
(1485–1547) or the young Titian (c. 1488/90–1576), beat a
retreat from his approach towards great pictorial clarity in
one aspect or another. It would have been possible to write
a book about Giorgione almost entirely devoted to questions
of attribution, given that so many arguments about what he
painted, and in what order, continue to rage among art his-
torians. In the chapters that follow, I have instead focused on
those paintings which I consider to be by him, discussing them

in broadly (but not strictly) chronological fashion. There is
little explicit discussion of my underlying reasons for making
this selection, though I hope that this will become apparent
enough from what I have written. The works discussed have
in common an underlying effect of visual and semantic ambigu-
ity, indicating that this quality was key to Giorgione’s approach
as an artist, distinguishing him even from those who sought
to closely emulate his work.
If Giorgione was to this extent a great champion of the
ambiguousness of painting, then this also ran against the
mainstream tradition of Renaissance painting, which became
increasingly concerned to achieve greater illusionistic and
narrative clarity. Why, we must ask, did Giorgione move in
this obscuring direction when so many other painters of his
time were concerned with making their works more explicit
via new pictorial discoveries such as linear perspective, or
the quasi-scientific study of human proportion, anatomy
and expression? Asking this kind of question will allow us to
understand Giorgione’s ambiguity in its own time. Rather

than suggesting that his works can simply mean anything that
the viewer wants, it must be allowed that Giorgione’s specific
cultural milieu played a key role in shaping his works, with the
result that some interpretations of them will be more valid
than others. The limits or control of history in this way provide
an important boundary to our consideration of Giorgione’s
ambiguity, even if it remains true that he created works that
deliberately generate a plethora of significations.3
Giorgione’s ambiguity is certainly not just (or even pri-
marily) a matter of cerebral play. Too ready an attempt to
11 Introduction
interpret Giorgione’s paintings from a purely intellectual

point of view could lead to an underestimation of their wider
sensuous invitation, especially as these works seem always to
insist on establishing an intimate or even physical connection
with their viewers. To some extent, this was to further develop
an important strand in Italian Renaissance art, in which the
more naturalistic presentation engaged the spectator, antic-
ipating his or her active involvement with the image.4 In
Giorgione’s case this is particularly apparent from his employ-
ment of a fluid and unfinished technique that requires the
viewer to ‘read in’ beyond what is actually given in order to
complete the work. This beholder, whether understood as a
given patron or in much less specific terms, as a responsive
individual, is imagined by Giorgione as intensely subjective
and sensual, as well as eagerly projective: as one who experi-
ences the world in a way that goes beyond the merely rational.
The painted image appears as an extension of the spectator’s
own body rather than as something extraneous to it, or that
controls its capacities or desires. And to this extent too, Gior-
gione abandons rigorous sharp definition or ‘seeing through’,

exploring instead what can be described as the occlusions of
corporeality: that is, the obscuring primacy of the receptive
body, which never quite understands from a stable or abstracted
mental viewpoint.
Seeing in Giorgione’s unfixed way might also overlap
with touching or hearing, for example: one form, surface or
texture alluding to, or transposing itself onto, another. The
synaesthetic aspects of Giorgione’s approach do not mean
that what he shows us is any less real. Modern optical science
tells us that the kind of peripheral seeing that Giorgione
suggests is, in fact, truer to human experience than focused

vision.5 And there is good evidence that leading theorists
of optics in the painter’s own period had already begun to
understand the natural ‘inaccuracy’ or partiality of human
vision. It is an increasingly significant theme in the writings
of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), for example, whose pen-
chant for showing natural forms shrouded in obscuring sfumato
(‘smokiness’) has long been understood to have had a direct
impact on Giorgione’s paintings.6 Seen in the longer perspec-
tive, Giorgione’s new acknowledgement of an ambiguously
multi-sensual human reality may represent his greatest contri-
bution to the development of Western painting. His blurring
approach offered a pictorial or painterly alternative to the
ideal models of seeing that emerged in the illusionistic art of
the Renaissance. Giorgione’s suggestion of the intimate and
interrupted sensuality of vision offered a turning aside from
the intellectualized, didactic and ocularcentric idea of paint-
ing that took root in the period and that was destined to
dominate in the art academies of Europe for more than three
hundred years.7
Giorgione’s career apparently opened with his completion
of a small number of religious paintings of a conventional
type, in which he already showed signs of his originality, par-
ticularly regarding his free approach to perspective space and
figural definition (see illus. 13, 15 and 18). He soon became
especially attracted to portraiture and landscape, picture
types that offered an opportunity to explore non-narrative
visual possibilities and did not have a subject matter as such.
He only rarely completed commissioned portraits, but even
in these more formal works he focused on the elusive inward
13 Introduction
psychologies of his sitters rather than using his imagery to

confirm their place within the outward social order (see
illus. 20 and 22). In a number of other paintings, which take
on the appearance of portraits but are unlikely to have been
commissioned by their sitters or families, Giorgione depicted
social types with a more marginal role in society. He depicted
an alluring and beautiful young man who may or may not
be a real individual, but who nonetheless makes an intimate
sensual address to the viewer, challenging or transgressing
conventional gender roles and moral codes (see illus. 25).
In two further works of this kind Giorgione offered visually
powerful depictions of women that had little precedent in the
patriarchal visual art of Venice. A sensual semi-naked young
beauty opens her coat to reveal her breast; and an impover-
ished but disturbingly authoritative old woman speaks out in
admonishment (see illus. 27 and 28).
In subsequent works such as the Three Philosophers (see illus.
38) and the Tempest (see illus. 41) Giorgione greatly expanded
the role of landscape, challenging his viewer to identify the
human protagonists who remain. In these works the kind of

precise quasi-mathematical linear perspective advocated by
leading Renaissance theorists of painting, such as Leon
Battista Alberti (1404–1472), is nowhere to be seen.8 Instead
of following Alberti’s recommendation that the painter
should concentrate on moralizing narrative paintings known
as istorie (‘histories’), Giorgione typically focused on smaller
scaled and privately commissioned pictures that allowed him
more freedom for creative manoeuvre. In these works, the
depiction of events is avoided altogether, the consequent
stillness of the scene allowing the painter and also the viewer
to wander imaginatively beyond the control of the precise

externally derived meanings required in public subject-based
art. When Giorgione did work on a larger scale, as in the
fresco cycle he completed in 1508 on the facade of the
German Warehouse (Fondaco dei Tedeschi) in the heart of
Venice, he did not readily adapt his imagery to the open and
public environment, such that visitors to the city were con-
fused about what his imagery might mean (see illus. 45–8).
The freely painted figures that he depicted on the Fondaco
facade do, however, suggest his engagement with the nude,
one of the great themes of Renaissance art. In a further
ground-breaking depiction of the goddess Venus, which was
perhaps his final work, Giorgione depicted a reclining nude
figure that was destined to be of fundamental significance for
many European painters for centuries to come (see illus. 51).
But despite its apparent tone of reserved classical idealism,
this late work also includes a disturbing ambiguous detail that
radically sexualizes the imagery.
Giorgione has long been recognized as an early propo-
nent of the sixteenth-century tradition of oil painting in

Renaissance Venice that prioritized colour over form.9 An
increasingly wide range of intensely coloured pigments were
on sale in early sixteenth-century Venice, and Giorgione
sometimes used examples that had only recently become
available (see illus. 13 and 38). Giorgione did not work exclu-
sively with oil paint: the sources tell us that he often worked
in fresco (the facade paintings on the Fondaco were not the
only works of this type that he completed in Venice), while
he mixed oil with egg tempera in the Tempest, La vecchia and
in several other works. To some extent independently of the
15 Introduction
precise medium he used, his works seem to be characterized

by the complex combination of pigments together, rather
than the use of a wide range of different colours. The adverb
colorito or colouring, with its suggestion of mixing or active
manipulation, better describes Giorgione’s technique than
the more static or passive noun colore.10 Giorgione often, and
perhaps increasingly, used a narrow range of pigments close
to one another on the colour scale, and this tonal approach
distinguished his work from many paintings made elsewhere
in Renaissance Italy, in which powerfully contrasting areas
of local colour were juxtaposed in support of the three-
dimensionality of the given figure or object.
Technical analyses – x-rays and infrared reflectography
– have shown that Giorgione typically composed his paint-
ings as he went along, mixing colours at the painting stage to
achieve infinite gradations, and changing his mind about the
placement of this or that form or figure.11 Although Giorgione
might have made drawings, these were not typically prepara-
tory in kind. When he used oils, he seems to have particularly
exploited the opportunity for improvisation or composition

at the painting stage that this slow-drying medium allowed.
This approach was very different to that taken in Renaissance
Florence and Rome known as disegno, in which the application
of paint was understood only as the final stage in a wider
rational process that began with the defining idea in the mind
of the artist and was then worked out using preparatory draw-
ings before finally being realized on the picture surface. In
contrast Giorgione’s more fluid and simultaneous approach
allowed the idea for his work to evolve during the course of
his pictorial execution.
Giorgione’s approach was certainly founded on the exam-

ples of the older generation of painters active in Venice in the
later Quattrocento, especially, as we shall see, that of Giovanni
Bellini (c. 1431/5–1516). But in other ways Giorgione’s particu-
larly sensual approach offered a clear departure from the local
conventions of painting. He was an innovator in Venetian art,
whose explorations of a newly intimate and bodily engaged
kind of painting involved a retreat from the long-established
civic and sacred traditions that had long dominated in the city.
His short career was very probably dependent on the special
support of a small group of wealthy and socially progressive
noble patrons who had withdrawn to some extent from the
usual humdrum duties of public life in Venice.12 The support
of these high-ranking patrons for a young immigrant painter,
essentially non-patriotic and non-pious in his inclinations,
suggests that they shared Giorgione’s concern to explore a
newly independent, personalized and ‘embodied’ cultural
identity that offered an alternative to the time-honoured
communal and self-sacrificing ideal of public service to the
Republic.
It may be significant in this regard that Giorgione was
from the small town of Castelfranco in the countryside of
the Veneto and was thus an outsider to the tightly organized
society of the lagoon city itself, which had traditionally con-
sidered its painters as artisans or (at very best) civil servants.13
Giorgione’s ambiguous approach to painting, which took
liberties with precise or received meanings while laying new
emphasis on his own creative originality, indicates the extent
of his ambition from a professional point of view. This might
remind us of the negative but acute comment on Giorgione
17 Introduction
made in the amended account of the painter that Giorgio

Vasari (1511–1574) published in the second edition of his
Lives of the Artists of 1568. This painter, Vasari tells us, ‘thought
only of demonstrating his technique . . . by representing
various figures according to his own fancy’.14 Vasari recog-
nized that this more subjective approach was very different
from the rational and moral restraint of the central Italian
ideal of disegno that he so admired. But he also seems to have
understood that Giorgione’s paintings highlighted the inde-
pendent authority of their maker with a new kind of insistence.
Following ‘his own fancy’ rather than the established patterns,
models or iconographies laid down by tradition, Giorgione’s
painting became difficult to understand, its ambiguity contra-
dicting Vasari’s concern to promote the comprehensibility
of Renaissance art.
one
Who Was Giorgione?
G
iorgione received few large-scale public commis-
sions for State or Church during his short career,
and died in relative poverty in the terrible plague
of 1510, almost before his career had properly begun. A
recently discovered inventory of his possessions taken after
his death tells us that their total value was less than 90
ducats: a sum rather lower than that commanded for a single
work by a leading painter of the day. Yet there is good evi-
dence that Giorgione’s laconic and sensuous approach to
painting had an immediate and transformative impact on the
artistic culture of Venice. Even within the short span of his
lifetime many of the city’s leading painters, sculptors and

printmakers responded deeply to his innovations. And in the
decades immediately following his death, Giorgione’s influ-
ence quickly spread further across the Venetian territories on
the mainland and into other parts of northern Italy. It seems
that even within his brief lifetime he was known as ‘Giorgione’
or ‘Big George’: an epithet that at once suggested his large
physical stature and his great artistic significance.1
Giorgione’s importance was, as we have seen, also acknow-
ledged by the Tuscan writer Giorgio Vasari, the leading
authority on Italian Renaissance art of this period.2 Vasari’s
19 Who Was Giorgione?
account, first published in 1550, supplies some suggestive

details about the specifics of Giorgione’s life and character. He
was, we hear, born ‘at Castelfranco near Treviso’, and although
‘of humble origin’ was ‘gentle and courteous throughout his
life’. He was ‘always a very amorous man’ and ‘extremely fond
of the lute which he played beautifully to accompany his own
singing’. Giorgione’s origin in the small town of Castelfranco
Veneto, some 40 kilometres (25 mi.) northwest of Venice, is
confirmed by certain other documents discussed below; but
Vasari’s other comments on Giorgione’s character are more
difficult to verify. Some of them seem to be borrowed from
his ‘Life of Leonardo da Vinci’, in which, for example, we hear
of the artist’s fine musicianship. The patriotic Vasari seems
always to have understood Giorgione as a kind of Venetian
Leonardo, who was largely dependent on the Tuscan master’s
ideas about painting. This certainly does not do justice to
Giorgione’s independent kind of achievement in painting.
But certain of Vasari’s comments might feasibly have been
based on conversations the author had in Venice with people
who knew more about the painter than he did. If Giorgione

was, indeed, an accomplished musician, then this might be
plausibly reflected in a number of his surviving paintings
(including his self-portrait) in which music or musicianship
is an important theme (see illus. 2 and illus. 32).3
Some recent discoveries supply a little more information
about Giorgione’s short life. An inscription on a previously
unknown drawing, perhaps by Giorgione, appended to the
final page of an edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy published in
Venice in 1497, gives precise dates for the painter’s birth and
death, telling us that he died on 17 September 1510, at the
age of 36.4 This would mean that Giorgione was born at some
point between 18 September 1473 and 17 September 1474,
a few years earlier than had previous been thought (Vasari’s
dates of 1476 and 1478 in the two editions of his Lives had
previously been followed). The discovery of this inscription
follows the publication in 2011 of two new documents inven-
torying the goods in Giorgione’s house after his death.5 These
inventories, dating from 1511, confirm that the painter had
died of the plague, and list the items that remained in his
quarantined house. Reading between the lines, it seems very
likely that after falling sick, Giorgione was sent to the so-called
Lazzaretto Nuovo, the plague station near the mouth of the
Venetian lagoon reserved for those who had had contact with
carriers of the disease. He presumably died there, like many
others, and was most likely buried in a common grave.
The inventories also appeared to indicate that Giorgione
was not from the Barbarella family of Castelfranco, as had
long been assumed.6 But as was quickly pointed out, the idea
that Giorgione’s father was called ‘Giovanni Gasparini’ was
probably owed to a small scribal error; the inventory in fact

meant merely to identify Giorgione as the ‘son of Giovanni,
son of Gasparini’.7 Despite this the recurrence of certain names
between the new inventories and another series of documents
referring to ‘Georgius’ or ‘Zorzi’ held in the Castelfranco
archives, first published more than a century ago, lends new
credence to the possibility that these do indeed relate to the
painter.8 Dating between 1485 and 1500, the Castelfranco
documents name the widowed mother of ‘Georgius’ as
Altadona, while the inventories of 1511 were drawn up at the
behest of a second woman, ‘Alessandra’, who is also named as
Giovanni’s widow. This difference in names does not wholly

undermine the theory that the earlier documents also relate
to the painter and his family. It may be that Alessandra was an
earlier divorced wife of Giovanni who now, with the death of
Giorgione (and presumably of Altadona some years before),
revived her claim to his worldly possessions.
Another apparently contemporary inscription on the back
of Giorgione’s painting known as Laura (see illus. 27) gives a
date: 1 June 1506. The inscription, which may or may not have
been added by the painter himself, identifies Giorgione as a
‘colleague’ (‘Cholego’) of the painter Vincenzo Catena
(1470/80–1531), appearing to contradict Vasari’s indication
that he was a pupil of the leading painter in Venice, Giovanni
Bellini. But the phrasing of the inscription is odd and does
not quite make it clear that Giorgione was in a master/pupil
relationship with Catena.9 Given that Giorgione’s surviving
paintings certainly owe much more to Bellini than to Catena,
it may be that we should not read too much into the writing
on the back of the Laura. Another long-known Giorgione
document in the Venetian state archives dating from 1507

tells us that Giorgione received a commission to paint a
canvas (‘teler’) for a room in the Ducal Palace (the Sala dell’
Udienza) for which he received the substantial sum of 75
ducats.10 The identity of this work remains unknown. But it
is notable that the given Sala also contained sculptures by
the city’s leading sculptors Tullio (c. 1455–1532) and Antonio
Lombardo (c. 1458–c. 1516), some of whose surviving works
bear comparison with those of Giorgione.11 A further docu-
ment notes the formation of a commission of painters,
nominated by Giovanni Bellini, to evaluate Giorgione’s cycle
on the facade of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, mentioned in the

Introduction.12 These frescoes were Giorgione’s most prom-
inent public works in Venice, adorning a newly built official
building at the mercantile heart of Venice. Bellini’s commis-
sion allotted a fee of 150 ducats, although this was subsequently
reduced to 130 by his patrons.
A further indication of Giorgione’s fast-growing reputa-
tion is provided by two letters written shortly after his death
that reveal the interest of a leading north Italian court patron
in his work. Isabella d’Este, the Marchioness of Mantua,
wrote to her agent in Venice, Taddeo Albano, in late October
1510 asking him to enquire about the possibility of buying
a Giorgione for her studiolo in the Mantuan Ducal Palace.13
Isabella was especially interested in purchasing a depiction
of ‘Night’ (nocte) that she had evidently heard about. Albano
then replied confirming that Giorgione had recently died of
the plague, and that there were two versions of the ‘Night’: one
‘not so perfect’ in the house of the Venetian patrician Taddeo
Contarini; and a much more impressive painting, ‘better
designed and better finished’, in the collection of Vittorio

Beccario.14 Neither of the paintings was for sale, given the
special liking that their owners had for them. Given that the
epithet ‘Night’ or ‘Holy Night’ was often used to describe
the subject of the Adoration of the Shepherds, it may be that
the two works that Albani mentions are identifiable with
the paintings attributed to Giorgione now in Washington
(see illus. 35) and Vienna. The exchange of letters between
Isabella and her agent tells us that Giorgione’s name had
already spread beyond the Venetian Republic, and also that
his works were very much prized by private collectors in the
city itself, who were not willing to part with them. Taddeo
Contarini, in particular, was an extremely rich and well-
connected Venetian nobleman, who (as we will see) owned
other important works by Giorgione.
All this suggests that Giorgione was already an artist of
some repute both in Venice and beyond, and that his upward
trajectory would only have continued had he not succumbed
to the plague in September 1510. But we nonetheless know
relatively little about his precise movements and wider artistic
and cultural associations. If we take it that the Castelfranco
documents mentioned earlier do indeed refer to Giorgione,
then it would appear that he did not leave his home town to
settle in Venice before 30 September 1500. And this, taken
in tandem with the slightly earlier birth date now established,
might suggest a more lasting and formative engagement with
the distinct cultural world of Castelfranco and its surround-
ings than has previously been allowed. Perhaps Giorgione’s
refined and delicate approach to painting owed more to the
sophisticated and courtly culture that had grown up in the
so-called Marca Trevigiana region near Castelfranco, stimu-

lated in the 1490s by the presence of Caterina Cornaro, the
famous Venetian noblewoman and exiled queen of Cyprus.15
It is tempting to see Giorgione’s sensual and sophisticated art
as reflecting the refined tastes of the circle of humanist philos-
ophers and poets who gathered at Caterina’s so-called ‘Barco
Cornaro’ on her estate near Asolo. Caterina’s circle included
prominent intellectuals such as the astrologer Giovan Battista
Abioso, haunted by signs of the coming end of the world,
and the poet Pietro Bembo, whose sensuous all’antica pastoral
poem Gli Asolani (Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1505) was set on
the estate. This hypothesis of Giorgione’s close connection

with the courtly culture of the Castelfranco region gains
a little more credence from Vasari’s record of a now lost
Giorgione portrait of Caterina, as also from the report that
Bembo owned a painting by him. The Sicilian soldier Tuzio
Costanzo, a loyal follower of Caterina in both Cyprus and at
Asolo, is very likely to have commissioned an altarpiece from
Giorgione for the church of Santi Maria Assunta e Liberale
in nearby Castelfranco, which perhaps dates from the early
years of his career (see illus. 18).
Some doubts must remain about the exact nature of the
impact that Giorgione’s early association with the Cornaro
circle had on the young painter. The documents held in the
Castelfranco archives may or may not refer to Giorgione,
and in any case say nothing about his association with the
circle. And the attribution of the painted allegorical frieze
now displayed in the so-called ‘Casa Giorgione’ at Castel-
franco to Giorgione is very questionable.16 More significant
still, it is almost impossible to ascribe any works by the
painter to the period before his move to Venice around the

age of 26. However, it remains likely enough that the young
painter did know about the cultural activities of Cornaro
and her circle so near to his home town. And it is not too
far-fetched to suggest that Giorgione’s background on the
fringes of this elite coterie influenced his subsequent attach-
ment to a similarly select group of art patrons and collectors
in Venice itself. The main sources of information about
Giorgione’s supporters in the metropolis are the lists of
paintings in Venetian collections compiled by the patrician
Marcantonio Michiel.17 The learned Michiel, who is said to
have owned a Giorgione himself, recorded the presence of as

many as fourteen paintings by the master in Venetian art
collections between 1525 and 1543; and it is very likely that
some, at least, of these owners were also Giorgione’s original
patrons. Gabriele Vendramin then owned La vecchia (see illus.
28), the Tempest (see illus. 41), and probably the Concert/Three
Ages of Man (see illus. 32).18 Taddeo Contarini, Vendramin’s
brother-in-law who lived in a building adjacent to his pala-
zzo at Santa Fosca, could boast the Three Philosophers (see illus.
38); possibly the Vienna version of the Adoration of the Shepherds
mentioned earlier; and the paintings, now lost, of the Finding
of the Infant Paris (known only through a seventeenth-century
copy by David Teniers the Younger) and Hell with Aeneas and
Anchises. Another very wealthy patrician merchant, Girolamo
Marcello, owned the Venus (see illus. 51) in addition to a por-
trait of himself and a St Jerome Reading (both lost). Vendramin’s
palace, with its expansive art collection of as many as forty
paintings, was apparently a place of lavish entertainments
and musical gatherings.19 The extremely wealthy Contarini,
on the other hand, who may have focused more exclusively

on collecting paintings, was also an intellectual who bor-
rowed classical texts from the library at San Marco in 1524.20
The brothers-in-law were also part of the circle of Aldus
Manutius, the great humanist publisher whose books may
have helped to inspire Giorgione’s Tempest for Vendramin
and, more certainly, Marcello’s Venus.
It is true that non-noble Venetians such as Vittorio Beccario
(Adoration of the Shepherds, see illus. 35) and non-Venetians, such
as the Catalan merchant Giovanni Ram (Young Man with an
Arrow, see illus. 25), also owned Giorgione paintings. But it
nonetheless remains likely that a relatively narrow circle of

interconnected wealthy and erudite Venetian patricians did
much to support Giorgione’s nascent career, sharing a special
taste for his original and exquisitely wrought paintings. The
evidence of an inventory recording the contents of Marino
Grimani’s collection from 1528 only reconfirms Michiel’s evi-
dence in this regard. It reveals that two works by Giorgione,
the Self-portrait as David (see illus. 2) and probably the Benson
Holy Family (see illus. 15), were then in his possession. A third,
the so-called Tramonto (see illus. 36), might also have been in the
collection. Marino had almost certainly inherited these works
from his uncle, Domenico, the leading Venetian cardinal and
art collector, who may have originally commissioned them.21
Giorgione’s continuing association with the more private
world of such sophisticated art-loving clients also suggests
his distance from the wider culture of metropolitan Venice.
His focus on the creation of self-consciously original, bespoke
paintings differentiated him from many other painters in the
city, whose major concern was with the production of large-
scale patriotic or pious public works for State and Church.

The references to outsider culture that often surface in
Giorgione’s paintings may also have been a result of his dis-
tance from the artistic mainstream in Venice. Paradoxically,
Giorgione’s withdrawal into a more elite cultural domain may
also have made him especially sympathetic to other outsiders
who had fallen away from social normality in the opposite
direction. In his paintings, promiscuous courtesans and old
women, alluring young men and impoverished shepherds,
exiled hermit saints and unidentifiable individuals wandering
in lonely or threatening landscapes are allowed a new kind of
significance. Such works are interesting not only because of

their unusual subject matter, but because they offer a youthful
provocation to the more settled values and expectations of
the normative host society of Venice.
Intriguingly, in one of the Castelfranco documents dated
from 1489, ‘Georgium’ appears as a difficult teenage delin-
quent who had, on a visit to Venice, fallen foul of the law for
bad behaviour and spent time in the city’s prison.22 The boy’s
widowed mother Altadona had to sell a small piece of land
in Castelfranco in order to secure her son’s release. Giorgione
might have been only fifteen or sixteen at the time, but the
unruly and rebellious figure that this misbehaviour suggests
contradicts the image of anodyne compliance supplied by
Vasari, who presented the painter as a harmonious poetic being
devoted only to ‘the things of love’. Such early law-breaking
might seem to take Giorgione further away from the idea of
delicate poetic sophistication that has long attached itself to
his name. But delinquency or even violent criminality was not
so alien to the highly wrought aristocratic culture of Venice
and elsewhere in Italy in the period.23 About a century later, it

is evident enough in the troubled career of Caravaggio (1571–
1610) in Rome: another low-born, rule-breaking and short-
lived painter who attached himself to the highest-ranking
circles of noble patrons in his adopted city. An undertow of
violence haunts Giorgione’s self-portrait, to which we will now
turn: a work that was to stand as an important model for
Caravaggio’s own disturbing combination of self-portraiture
and decapitation.24
2 Giorgione, Self-portrait as David, c. 1503–4, oil on canvas.
the self-portr ait as david and the judith
We might reasonably have expected the question posed by

the title of this chapter to be answered, at least in part, by
Giorgione’s Self-portrait as David (illus. 2). But this damaged
fragment provokes more questions than it answers about who
Giorgione was, stubbornly refusing to yield the facts. Rather
than taking the opportunity to reveal himself, Giorgione used
his self-portrait to veil or obscure his identity, presenting an
image that is, for all its suggestiveness, deeply ambiguous.
Giorgione was young and it is possible that he might not have
known quite who he was when he made the picture. After all,
ambiguous identity can stand as one well-known manifesta-
tion of youth. And yet there is nonetheless an element of
wilful determination, or perhaps even of aggressive confron-
tation, in the backward tilt of the head in this painting, as also
in the way that the troubled eyes of the sitter readily meet our
own. Indeed, Giorgione expresses an extraordinary measure
of self-confidence in a work that appears as if intended to
stimulate his own myth as an all-powerful creative artist. It

may be that in this work he anticipates the interest of the most
forward-thinking art patrons in Venice: independently minded
nobles who harboured a new interest in the personalities or
identities of the visual artists whom their immediate ancestors
had considered mere craftsmen.
Giorgione’s self-portrait was to this extent a work of
audacious contemporaneity and suggests the extent of his
professional ambition. As mentioned above, it is likely to
have been commissioned by a leading member of the power-
ful Grimani family in Venice, perhaps even by Cardinal
Domenico himself.25 Vasari probably saw the work at the

Palazzo Grimani on a research visit to Venice in 1566, and
there is good evidence to suggest that it became the painter’s
most famous and influential painting in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, when it was often copied or repro-
duced in painted or printed variants.26 Despite its fame, the
suitability of Giorgione’s self-image as a commemorative
image of a famous Venetian old master was apparently ques-
tioned, and this may have led to its subsequent mutilation.
A woodcut by Wenceslaus Hollar tells us that the work orig-
inally included a parapet with the severed head of Goliath
(illus. 3). It is not known when the painting was cut down,
but this happened at some point after the publication of
Hollar’s print in 1650. Perhaps it was cut in order to create
two separate works; or perhaps the alteration was inspired
by the desire to establish an image of Giorgione for posterity
that was more respectable.
At issue was the perturbing detail of the severed and
bloody head: the sitter’s unpleasant attribute that suggests
that we must see him not only as the sixteenth-century painter

Giorgione, but as the Old Testament biblical hero David. It
was only by the violent mutilation of a painting of violent
mutilation that the unknown owner of the post-1650 period
could effectively secure Giorgione’s self-portrait as an accept-
able kind of secular image of a revered artist of the past. It is
true that the Braunschweig fragment still looks much less
respectable than the smartly dressed, bearded and thoroughly
grown-up gentlemanly figure of ‘Giorgio Barbarelli’ featured
in eighteenth-century prints.27 But the emphasis on reform-
ing Giorgione’s original strange and ambiguous youthful
self-image towards greater conventionality or orthodoxy in

these later re-castings is clear enough.
The concern to improve Giorgione’s self-portrait may have
emerged much earlier. In a woodcut appended to the ‘Life of
Giorgione’ in the 1568 edition of Vasari’s Lives, the painter’s
self-portrait has already been radically truncated (illus. 4).
Vasari was certainly at pains to recall something of the power
3 Wenceslaus Hollar, print after Giorgione’s Self-portrait, 1650, etching on

paper.
of the original painting in this print. But the gruesome and

bloody head has been conveniently removed in the transfer.
This initial excision undoubtedly accommodated the wider
schema of portrait heads used to illustrate Vasari’s new edi-
tion. But it may also indicate that the more troubling aspects
of Giorgione’s painting were deemed unsuitable for the gal-
lery of artist portraits, many of which confirmed the social
respectability and elevation of their sitters. Vasari recognized
that there was something off-putting or unseemly about such
a close association between an artist and a severed head; or
about the implied connection between creativity and violence.
Perhaps he particularly objected to the way in which Giorgione
made the blood of the artist’s mutilated victim ooze down the
viewer’s side of the parapet. To the founder of the prototype of
the European art academy, the Accademia del Disegno estab-
lished in Florence in 1563, Giorgione’s self-portrait may have
appeared too odd: as an affront to the aspirational culture of
social integration and improvement for visual artists that he
was so keen on promoting.
Judging from the evidence of both the painted fragment

and Hollar’s print, Giorgione made a display of his skill as a
naturalistic painter in his self-portrait, carefully contrasting
the hard metal of the armour glimpsed at the shoulder
with the diffuse treatment of the soft flesh and hair. We
can take it that the image makes an accurate enough por-
trayal of Giorgione’s appearance, with widely set eyes, a
long and slightly hooked nose, broad fleshy lips and thickly
layered brown hair worn loosely to the neck or shoulders.
Many other aspects of the work remain obscure or uncer-
tain. On the evidence of Hollar’s print, we can say that
Giorgione’s original work was presented as a portrait, espe-

cially given the inclusion of the kind of foreground parapet
so commonly used in fifteenth-century Venetian works of
this type. But this apparent suggestion of a picture type is
immediately undermined by the presence of the gory head,
4 Woodcut illustration of ‘Giorgione da Castelfranco’, from Giorgio Vasari,

Lives of the Artists (1568).
5 Giorgione, Judith, c. 1500–1501, oil on canvas transferred from panel.
which indicates that the work is, rather, a quasi-historical or

allegorical image. It may be that Giorgione’s painting reflects
a growing penchant for showing the ‘representation of some-
one in the guise of someone else’ in Renaissance portraiture.28
But in his work, the various visual clues presented do not
finally clarify the precise picture type, let alone how we are
meant to take the work: is this Giorgione that we see before
us; an imaginary figure from the biblical past; or Giorgione
dressed up as that figure?
Thinking of the sitter as the Old Testament boy hero
David, we might take it that the great physical effort of the
recent battle against Goliath is reflected in the exhaustion or
sadness expressed in his face: one young in years, but already
heavy with experience. But it is difficult to keep this historical
or narrative reading separate from one that refers back to the
painter Giorgione. If the young man’s mood is sad or reflective,
then this might equally be an allusion to Giorgione’s profes-
sion, given that painters were commonly associated with the
melancholic humour or temperament in the Renaissance.29
The identification with David was in any case a sugges-

tive one that offered elevating possibilities for an aspirant
young painter. David was a figure more usually associated
with Florence, where the young Michelangelo (1475–1564)
appears to have made a comparable self-identification with
this biblical hero in the process of work on the great marble
David from the very years when Giorgione made his self-
portrait: both lay emphasis on the anxious knitted brows of
their protagonist.30 And depictions of David in Florentine
sculpture were apparently already in Giorgione’s mind just
a few years earlier, when he painted another deceptively
weak young Jewish hero of the Old Testament: Judith, who

overturned all expectations by decapitating an enormously
more powerful older foe, Holofernes (illus. 5). Features in
this somewhat earlier work, such as Judith’s downward glance
to the left; the positioning of her arms with the right hand
delicately clasping an enormous sword pointing towards her
6 Titian, Self-portrait, c. 1550, oil on canvas.
victim’s head; and the left leg bent by its accommodation of

the body part beneath it, pointedly recall the bronze David by
Donatello (1386–1466) of the mid-fifteenth century.
The sculptures of Donatello and Michelangelo reflected
the political values of the Florentine Republic insofar as they
showed the weak overcoming the strong. Giorgione’s Judith
and Self-portrait as David had a similar potential to suggest the
republican values of Venice. Yet his more private and sensual
presentation characteristically shuts off this kind of public and
moral resonance. In the Self-portrait as David, Giorgione makes
the biblical association solely a matter of his professional and
personal identity, using it to meditate on his role as a modern
creative artist. As a direct antecedent of Christ himself, the
young David’s violent action was divinely inspired and sanc-
tioned. Merging his identity with such a sacred figure allowed
Giorgione to engage the well-known Renaissance topos of the
divino artista, and to suggest that his works are also inspired by
7 Camelio (Vittore di Antonio Gambello), Portrait Medal of Giovanni Bellini,

c. 1506, cast bronze (obverse).
the divine will. This point was probably reconfirmed by the

focus on the right hand (dexter manus) in the original painting,
as confirmed by Hollar’s print: an important locus of godly
righteousness in Renaissance art.31
Giorgione’s self-portrait is imaginatively bolder, but also
characteristically more obscuring, than the near-contemporary
portrait medal that Giovanni Bellini had cast: a visually
restrictive profile image that seems to confirm the painter’s
role as a proud servant of the Venetian Republic (illus. 7). It
differs, too, from Titian’s much later self-portrait as a courtly
aristocrat of about 1550 with its indications of worldly wealth
and position (illus. 6). The self-portraits of these other great
Venetian painters mark, albeit in very different ways, their
sitters’ exalted position in the outward social order in later
life.32 The more inflated but also more inward and notional
suggestion of equivalence between an unknown young
incomer and an exalted Judaeo-Christian biblical hero may
have been encouraged by Giorgione’s comparative lack of an
established professional position in gerontocratic Venice. He
could not, after all, show himself as a highly ranked citizen

(cittadino originario) painter like Bellini, given that he had no
formal status within the carefully defined Venetian social
hierarchy as an outsider from Castelfranco. Nor was he, like
Titian in his later career, the most famous and sought-after
painter in Europe, who had been knighted by the Holy
Roman Emperor himself, alluded to in the painting illustrated
here by the double-chain awarded by Charles v in 1533. On
the other hand, the victory of youthful obscurity over an older
and more powerful rival offered in the story of David made
Giorgione’s identification particularly apt. We are probably
intended to equate David’s victory with the painter’s own

over the ‘Goliath’ of nature, and perhaps also to see it as a
symbol of his defeat of older rivals in Venetian painting.
Vasari mentioned that the painter was an acclaimed singer
and musician, and Giorgione’s musicality became a favoured
theme in later appreciations, especially in the nineteenth
century when the aesthete Walter Pater commented in a
famous essay, ‘On the School of Giorgione’, that ‘all art con-
stantly aspires towards the condition of music.’33 Although
the self-portrait makes no overt reference to musicality, it
may be that the young David’s skill in consoling the aged king
Saul by his masterful playing of the lyre encouraged Giorgione’s
identification. In a surviving drawing ‘after zorzon’ that was
once displayed in the Vendramin collection alongside the
Tempest, a self-portrait as David appears with Saul and Jonathan.
An x-ray of another painting once attributed to Giorgione
has revealed that David was originally shown playing a lute.34
In yet another lost self-portrait, known through several
painted and printed copies from the seventeenth century (see
illus. 1), Giorgione presented himself in the guise of Orpheus,

whose beautiful playing prevailed over the infernal powers
to release his wife, Eurydice, from Hades.35 Sound, whether
music, a haunting broken voice or a sudden thunderclap, came
to be an important theme in Giorgione’s paintings, its myste-
rious non-visual power allowing a new kind of expressive
centrality.
Perhaps most characteristic of Giorgione’s self-portrait,
reflected in these other works too, is the way in which self-
disclosure is made the same thing as self-fashioning. The
visual self-image is seen as an opportunity for release into
other cultural identities and roles, rather than as the means to

fix a deciding one. Unpicking the possible associations of the
work in question does not lead us much closer to Giorgione
himself but suggests his readiness to assume a knowingly fic-

tive persona. Despite the positive or self-aggrandizing aspects
of identifying himself with David, this habit of deflection
might just as easily be understood as a result of professional
anxiety. The work that he offered was, after all, a new kind of
artistic production in Venice: perhaps the very first independ-
ent painted self-portrait ever made in the city. It valorized its
young sitter quite separately from any established position
granted to him from without or above.
Whether we take this as an indication of Giorgione’s
insecurity or ambition – or both – the kind of folding of one
8 Detail from Giorgione, Judith (illus. 5).
possible identity into another that it introduced was typical

of his approach to painting more widely. A portrait need not
necessarily tell an objective or singular truth about its sitter.
There is something inward, psychologically penetrating,
and yet finally more ambiguous in Giorgione’s self-portrait
than in many other such works from the Italian Renaissance.
Rather than assuming that the appearance of a human face
accurately reflects set or knowable character traits, drawing
on the moralizing late medieval tradition of physiognomics,
Giorgione gives himself a subtle and transient expression
somewhere between wilfulness and regret. The particular
allure of his self-image is reliant on its suggestion of the un -
certain or changing psychological make-up of the Giorgione-
David composite presented. Alertness to the play of fleeting
9 Wenceslaus Hollar, detail from print after Giorgione’s Self-portrait (illus. 3).
emotions across the face was key to Giorgione’s approach as

he developed a new art of ‘pathognomics’, which challenges
the usual kind of clarity or authority secured by the fixed
image of painting.36
In both the Self-portrait and the Judith, Giorgione character-
istically includes sensual details that seem almost inappropriate.
Delicate fingers and toes nestle among the still-soft hair of
the recently murdered victims, who seem, in their turn, and
despite their closed eyes, to smile up at those who have recently
dismembered them (illus. 8 and 9). In the Judith a fleshy thigh
is casually revealed by a young woman who might otherwise
be taken as a purified late medieval image of the virtue of
Justice. The Bible tells us that Judith took pains to make
herself alluring in order to tempt Holofernes into her tent
(Judith 10:4), and Giorgione’s concern to make her appear
physically attractive must (in part) be a response to this text.37
Yet the suspicion arises that this painting, probably made to
adorn a piece of furniture in a private bedroom, and thus with
a knowing and elite patron in mind, is not as morally edifying
as it might have been. Judith is shown in a softly painted

atmospheric landscape that contributes to our sense of her
bodily charms, as do other details of her appearance, such as
the fashionable jewellery adorning her head and chest. Delicate
strands of hair have alluringly escaped to either side of her
head, hanging loose across her bare neck and upper chest,
repeating the tactile combination of hair and flesh at the
bottom of the painting. Giorgione’s formal sources for her
figure also suggest its secularity: beyond Donatello’s libidinal
David, these might include an antique sculptural type of the
pagan goddess of love, Aphrodite Ourania, typically shown in a
similar contrapposto pose although with her raised left foot on

a tortoise.38 All this suggests that the conquered male head
serves more as a trophy of sexual conquest than as a symbol
of the victory of Good over Evil.
Giorgione’s self-portrait, with its fleshly, half-regretful
protagonist, plays between sacred and secular meanings in a
similar fashion, the androgynous sitter offering a provocation
to the tradition of masculinized patriotic portraiture that had
developed in later fifteenth-century Venice.39 David is some-
what older and his victim somewhat younger than we might
have expected, and their two heads are turned inwards towards
one another, as if to suggest knowing intimacy rather than
moral opposition. In his terrifying response to Giorgione’s
painting, Caravaggio apparently showed himself as the decap-
itated victim of the young boy, the defeated villain rather than
the triumphant hero. It has even been argued that in doing
so he followed Giorgione’s example.40 But while there is little
reason to believe that Giorgione’s self-portrait is contained in
the head of Goliath, the possibility of a concealed homoerotic
meaning cannot so easily be set aside. The painter’s self-

identification with Orpheus in the lost self-portrait mentioned
above might already hint at Giorgione’s sexual ambivalence,
given that this classical hero of music had rejected women in
favour of young boys after losing Eurydice (illus. 1). The later
homosexuality of Orpheus had recently been emphasized in
Poliziano’s play Orfeo, performed at the Mantuan court in the
1480s, as also in a related drawing by Giovanni Bellini’s brother-
in-law Andrea Mantegna (c. 1431–1506) that was copied by
Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) and supplied with an inscription
identifying the hero as ‘the first pederast’.41
In a famous essay of 1922 Freud suggested that decap-

itation symbolizes castration, and it is tempting to think
that Giorgione’s troubling self-portrait also refers to a sub-
limated sexual relationship with his victim, who is decapi-
tated/castrated by his unrequited passion.42 So much must
remain as supposition. What is more certain is that in both
the Self-portrait and the Judith, Giorgione’s caressing brushwork
foregrounds ‘lower’ somatic qualities, an approach that vis-
ually obscures our ready identification of the given religious
theme, and undermines the usual kind of hierarchical moral
freighting of such sacred subjects. Whether touching is
imagined as physical interaction within the image, or as a
projection of the viewer’s own responsive sensate body onto
what is seen, haptic sensation intervenes against the distanc-
ing objectivity of the eye, thwarting its abstracting quest for
intellectual clarification and rational completion.
two
Artistic Context and Early

Religious Paintings
G
iorgione’s Self-portrait and Judith are complexly inno-
vative works that undoubtedly break new ground
in Venetian art in the first years of the sixteenth
century. But it would nonetheless be a mistake to imagine
that the painter’s play between identities and meanings came
wholly out of the blue in the local context. A certain visual
ambiguity, at least insofar as this is understood as lack of nar-
rative clarity or deliberate slippage between discrete meanings
or iconographies, had long been familiar in Venetian paint-
ing. For example, in the narrative paintings known as ‘histories’
(istorie) the main event was frequently hidden away within
crowded multi-figure compositions that seem to lay more

stress on the detailed description of the surrounding city-
scape than on clear visual articulation of the given narrative
event. In the painting by Gentile Bellini (c. 1429–1507) illus-
trated here, commissioned by a leading lay confraternity
(Scuola) in 1496, a man called Jacopo de’Salis kneels before an
ancient relic carried through St Mark’s Square, and his pious
action secures the miraculous healing of his sick son in faraway
Brescia (illus. 10). But the viewer would be forgiven for miss-
ing this event, given the almost obsessively detailed elaboration
of the immediate context. This ‘eye-witness’ approach, as it
has been aptly described, relies on the visual dexterity and

curiosity of the viewer, who has to search out the precise
narrative, rather than being immediately presented with it in
the centre foreground of the composition.1
Toleration of inventive iconographic combinations or
hybrids, or of an associational approach that allowed figures
to possess more than one meaning or identity simultaneously,
is also apparent in many paintings and sculptures with over-
lapping patriotic and sacred meanings commissioned to adorn
47 Artistic Context and Early Religious Paintings
public state buildings in Venice.2 In a work of this kind by

Jacobello del Fiore (1370–1439), for example, an allegorical
image of the virtue of Justice with two archangels seems to
masquerade as an image of the Virgin enthroned between
two saints, without this iconographic doubling or slippage
being understood as in any way anachronistic (illus. 11). To
this extent, a certain latitude regarding precise clarity of
meaning was already a feature of Venetian painting, and may
be legitimately contrasted with the more tightly defined and
10 Gentile Bellini, Procession in St Mark’s Square, 1496, tempera on canvas.
intellectually bounded art of fifteenth-century Florence. In

the istorie made in that city, under the impact of new classi-
cizing or all’antica theories of painting expounded by humanist
writers such as Alberti, the key event was typically placed at
the front, with a greatly reduced supporting cast.3
The local tradition of painting in Venice was, to this extent,
fundamental to Giorgione’s development. The towering ex-
ample of Giovanni Bellini was of particular importance.
Given the stylistic similarities of their works, and the more
precise history of formal interchanges between them, there
seems every reason to believe Vasari’s indication that

Giorgione became Bellini’s pupil for a short time following
his arrival in the city around 1500. In his smaller-scaled devo-
tional paintings showing the Madonna and Child, the Man
of Sorrows or the Pietà, Bellini had already developed a subtly
allusive approach in works that were primarily intended to
hang in the private homes of his wealthy patrons. In these
works, Bellini generated associative meanings rather than
explicitly stated ones, using simple, natural objects to stim-
ulate interlinked ideas and emotions in the viewer’s mind. In
his many half-length depictions of the Madonna and Child,
11 Jacobello del Fiore, Justice Enthroned Between Michael and Gabriel, 1421, tempera
with gilded plaster on panel.
12 Giovanni Bellini, Virgin and Child, c. 1460–65, tempera on panel.
Bellini implied that we may be viewing a true likeness of the

sacred protagonists by the inclusion of a foreground parapet,
a feature often used in contemporary portraiture (illus. 12).
In such works, Bellini may also have implied that his paint-
ings were like the fabled portraits of the Virgin ‘taken from
the life’ by St Luke in biblical times. 4 But the appearance of
the parapet might equally suggest to the meditative viewer a
connection with Christ’s future tomb, or with the altar on
which his sacrifice was commemorated. Bellini anticipates
and actively encourages the projective imagination of the
pious beholder, suggesting a looping mental movement for-
wards along the temporal path towards Christ’s future death
and resurrection, and then back again to the present moment
of everyday intimacy between the young mother and infant
depicted. It is Bellini’s avoidance of explicit symbolism or
narrative action in stimulating these associative meanderings
that is most striking, and that appears most like a predecessor
to Giorgione’s pictorial mode. Bellini’s devotional works are
understated in visual terms, typically laying the burden of
response on the rich store of associative meanings already

present in the mind of his viewer.
In a small number of ambiguous allegories featuring pre-
dominant landscapes and human figures on a much reduced
scale that have been described as meditative poesie or ‘poetries’,
Bellini went even further.5 The most famous example is the
St Francis in the Desert (see illus. 34), a work which had a power-
ful impact on Giorgione’s Three Philosophers (see illus. 38) and
that has stimulated a wide range of differing interpretations
much in the way that the younger master’s paintings have. In
the St Francis, the extensiveness of the landscape is unusual,
its features given a new visual significance so that the precise

subject matter becomes harder to determine. In his Three
Philosophers, on the other hand, Giorgione made uncertainty the
main theme of his painting. And while we should remain very
suspicious of Vasari’s attempt to clearly distinguish Bellini’s
supposedly ‘crude, dry and forced’ Quattrocento manner from
Giorgione’s ‘blending of tones’ and general adherence to ‘the
modern style’ of the Cinquecento, it remains true that the
young painter’s ambiguous approach took him in a direction
that was not wholly anticipated in Bellini’s established mode.
ear ly r eligious paintings

While Bellini might remain as the presiding influence over
Giorgione’s earliest works such as the Adoration of the Magi and
the Benson Holy Family (illus. 13–15), these already indicate
the young painter’s different approach. Giorgione readily
adopted Bellini’s preferred tawny palette, as also his softened
oil-based approach to formal contours; and the warm sandy
browns and yellows of the buildings, earth and rocks also

suggest his influence. Giorgione’s tendency to avoid clear
narrative action or to reduce interaction between protagonists
to a minimum is also a continuation of his master’s approach.
Even the isolation of Giorgione’s figures, shown as if wrapped
in their own consciousness, ‘encased in separate thought’ as
Adrian Stokes put it, suggests a close affinity with Bellini’s
example, certainly when contrasted with the dynamic classi-
cizing art of the Cinquecento.6 To this extent Giorgione’s
paintings appear to be an extension of Bellini’s mode, in
which dramatic action is deferred and the passing of time is
measured only by slight gestures: an approach that lends an

allegorical air to paintings that might not, in fact, be allegor-

ical. But this effect of stillness and expressional reticence has
become more insistent, such that a rather un-Bellini-like
visual and thematic ambiguity emerges. If Bellini’s paintings
always seem consummately composed, robustly tailored to
deliver their given message, then in Giorgione’s the various
elements of the given composition are less closely or explicitly
combined, while the exact subject matter of the work is
thrown into question.
In these early works Giorgione can appear as a somewhat
tentative artist, although it would be easy to mistake this effect
of visual withholding for self-doubt. The famous Italian art

historian Roberto Longhi was surely mistaken when he char-

acterized Giorgione as the ‘grande timido’.7 Giorgione’s lack
of interest in details of human anatomy or in the creation of
a convincing illusion of three-dimensional space is evident
enough. Yet such apparent technical shortcomings also serve
to generate the powerful introspective mood of these paint-
ings: the characteristic Giorgione atmosphere of isolated
inwardness that was to become the hallmark of his style. In
a small horizontally shaped painting on panel that, like the
near-contemporary Judith, might once have decorated a piece
of furniture or the predella of an altarpiece, there is little
13 Giorgione, Adoration of the Magi, c. 1500, oil on wood.
doubt about the subject represented. We recognize the scene

as the Adoration of the Magi without too much difficulty,
noting the Holy Family in a stable to the left, with the usual
ox and ass, and the kneeling potentates with their train of
followers and horses to the right. But there are nonetheless
some noticeable oddities in Giorgione’s presentation of this
familiar theme.
At first, there seem to be only two kings, until one notices
that the third is almost completely hidden behind one of the
others. But this foremost kneeling figure has no gift, having
already given it to the figure of Joseph rather than to Christ
himself, as was more usual in depictions of this subject. Joseph
is, in this way, allowed an unusually prominent role, serving
as intercessor between the sacred figures to the left and the
worldly entourage to the right. Joseph’s special significance
is emphasized by his outsized form, the exaggerated com-
plexity of the fall of his robes and their intense and unworldly
golden-orange colouration. In this striking passage of drapery
painting, utilizing the realgar pigment that had become newly
available in Venice, colour is loosened from its merely descrip-

tive function. Giorgione’s use of this rich pigment might have
been encouraged by the fact that Joseph already holds the
king’s gift of gold in his hand. Joseph’s rapidly rising status as
an important intercessor between man and God had recently
been acknowledged by the papacy, who had adopted his feast
day into the Roman calendar.8 And it may be that in thus
colouring this figure, Giorgione offered a sophisticated visual
archaism, invoking the age-old visual tradition of Veneto-
Byzantine icon painting in which the sacred identity of a
figure was often marked out by the application of gold leaf.
But if Joseph’s depiction seems to establish a firm contrast

between the sacred world to the left and the secular one to
the right, then the rich colour of his robe is nonetheless picked
up again in the patterned breeches of the figure with a staff
at the far right, where it makes a similar kind of contrast with
the rich blue of his doublet, and that of his companion (illus.
14). These two young horsemen, whose appearance is closer
to the painting of Vittore Carpaccio than to Bellini, seem
especially calculated to capture our attention and interest.
Joseph’s remoteness is only intensified again in the depiction
of the Virgin and Child behind him, who appear wholly una-
ware of the arrival of the kings and their followers, removed
from their outward show of worldly reality, and secluded
within their own intensely private space.9 Yet the viewer’s eye
is also encouraged by the repetition of colours to move rest-
lessly between the left and right corners of the horizontal
picture space so that the sacred protagonists appear in an odd
juxtaposition with the corresponding secular figures of the
kings’ attendants.
The special care Giorgione takes with these marginal fig-

ures to the right is striking, their postures contrasting with one
another in a casually presented dance-like contrapposto rhythm
that reveals their mobile and sensuous forms simultaneously
from front and back. The provocative dandified appearance of
these two, richly attired with gold-edged doublets, ornately
decorated belts and coloured stockings or breeches, and soft
hair worn loose to the shoulders, might suggest that Giorgione
took his models from the Venetian societies of young patri-
cians known as the Compagnie della Calza (Companies of the
Hose) famed for the lavishness of their dress and sensual
habits of socializing, eating and drinking.10 It is hard to ignore

the enlarged codpiece of the rightmost figure, emphasized as
it is by his skin-tight golden hose, or the homoerotic visual
joke of the knife pointing towards the buttocks of his com-
panion. And yet Giorgione is characteristically coy about
allowing the contrast these flamboyant figures make with the
reserved figures of the Virgin and Child into a moral one,
between worldly show and rarefied spirit, for example. The
relationship between the secular figures at the right and the
sacred ones to the left remains ambiguous: Giorgione with-
draws from the hierarchical implications that his visual
contrast might so easily have suggested.
With its prioritization of colour as an expressive medium,
and its odd juxtaposition of abstracted sacred figures with
sensuous worldly elements drawn from contemporary life, the
little Adoration already bears certain of the underlying traits of
the painter’s approach familiar from his later works. Another
14 Giorgione, detail from Adoration of the Magi.
small-scale painting from Giorgione’s earliest period, the Holy

Family (‘The Benson Madonna’), features a very similar palette
to the Adoration but is still more restrained and undemonstra-

tive (illus. 15). Yet the very reticence in the statement of the
theme in this private work immediately places the burden of
interpretation onto the viewer with a new kind of insistence.
The Holy Family might immediately remind us of small-scale
devotional paintings by Giovanni Bellini. But despite his com-
pletion of many works of this kind showing the Madonna and
Child, sometimes with accompanying saints or donors to each
side, the older master never painted a Holy Family as such. In
this work, the young Giorgione very characteristically poses
an iconographic question. Are we shown the Nativity, set in
15 Giorgione, Holy Family (‘The Benson Madonna’), c. 1500, oil on panel.
the stable at Bethlehem; the later moment of the Rest on the

Flight into Egypt; or a more non-narrative kind of painting
altogether, abstracted from any given moment in the narrative
of Christ’s infancy? The setting might just about be taken as
a stable, but there is no supporting cast of animals, kings or
shepherds to firmly establish the place as Bethlehem. If the
panel depicts the Rest on the Flight, we would also expect
to see more in the way of apparatus: a donkey, some angels
and perhaps, as in a Bellinesque work by Cima da Conegliano
(1459–1517), some supportive saints (illus. 16).11 If, on the
other hand, Giorgione’s work is understood as an icon-like
presentation of the Holy Family – an iconography more famil-
iar in Northern prints than in Venetian painting – then why,
we might legitimately ask, are the protagonists so small, set
back from the picture plane? Their authority seems always to
be challenged by the emptiness of the physical setting that they
occupy and around which our eye is encouraged to wander.
While Giorgione and Cima were both deeply influenced
by Giovanni Bellini, they responded to the older master’s
works in rather different ways. A little later, Cima himself fell

under Giorgione’s sway: but in his Rest on the Flight into Egypt of
about 1496–8 he presented assertively solid and rounded
human figures, carefully grouped together in overlapping fash-
ion at the centre foreground to provide compositional stability.
The geometrical symmetry of the arrangement, with saints
and angels surrounding the Virgin and Child, who are raised
on a throne-like rock platform, pointedly recalls the upright
sacra conversazione type championed by Bellini in his monumen-
tal public works such as the San Giobbe altarpiece (illus. 17).
And the formal clarity and explicitness of the composition is
secured by Cima’s trademark handling of light: preternatu-

rally sharp, crystalline and hard-edged, illuminating each
surface in turn as if to cancel any possibility of visual doubt
or confusion about what is shown. By comparison, Giorgione’s

slightly indicated figures appear delicate and fragile, barely
achieving the base-line effect of three-dimensionality so com-
petently realized in Cima’s painting. In Giorgione’s Holy Family
the drapery is more arbitrary, yet also more extensive and
expressively significant. These fabrics spread out along the
ground beyond the figure group as if to compensate for the
very slight indication given of the exact position of their
bodies in space.
Giorgione’s draperies appear to develop an independ-
ent life of their own, beyond their more functional aspect as
16 Cima da Conegliano, Rest on the Flight into Egypt, c. 1496–8, tempera on

panel.
a covering for physical forms. It has been suggested that

Giorgione followed the Florentine drapery style of Leonardo
in this painting.12 But the complexly looping and overlapping
fabrics that are partially independent from the body do little
to create relief or to indicate the figure’s underlying anatomy,
as they typically do in the Leonardesque tradition. With their
sharp edges and arbitrary folds they are closer to the Gothic
approach commonly found in the woodcuts and engravings
by north European printmakers that were already very well
known in Venice. By 1500 the city had become a veritable
crossroads of mutual influence between north European and
more local approaches to art.13 And yet it is characteristic of
Giorgione’s approach that he responded less to the naturalistic
aspects of the northern European example than to its other
suggestion of a painterly, subjective and expressional visual
language: one responsive both to the internal demands of the
picture and to the beholder’s presence beyond the frame. The
visual freedom of northern drapery styles offered the young
master an escape from the muscular inductive naturalism of
Cima’s kind of Bellinesque painting. Giorgione’s complexly

extended drapes also served as the locus for a pictorial display
of audacious non-naturalistic colour combinations that reflect
the availability of a widening array of pigments in the shops
of the so-called colour-sellers or vendecolori in Venice.14 In the
Holy Family, carmine is boldly contrasted with cobalt blue, with
a supporting cast of violet and grey, offset by the resonance of
the dark olive green of Joseph’s robe: a colour that was to
become something of a Giorgione favourite, recurring shortly
afterwards, for example, in the Virgin’s un-canonically toned
garment in the Castelfranco altarpiece (illus. 18).
The visual tour de force in this little painting is, however,

the cangiantismo effect of the Virgin’s robe as it illogically turns
outwards to reveal its otherwise hidden inner side.15 If the
sacred protagonists appear to retreat from the viewer, then
this curving strip of fabric, with its rationally unexplained but
striking juxtaposition of lime and orange pigments to indicate,
respectively, shadow and light, offers a possible reconnection.
Giorgione’s expressive piece of drapery prefigures what was
to come in his subsequent paintings, in which form and colour
suddenly combine to move beyond the utilitarian demands
of naturalistic description, connecting spatially disparate parts
of the composition, while also seeming to respond to the pres-
ence of the viewer beyond the picture. In the Holy Family, the
pungent colour combination on the obverse side of the Virgin’s
robe can hardly be explained in naturalistic terms, given the
soft light falling elsewhere in the painting. And the stripe
appears arbitrary in terms of symbolic conventions, too, given
that its unusual tones contrast with the more expected com-
bination of red and blue used for the Virgin’s outer garments.
First indicated in a barely noticeable way encircling the Virgin’s

shoulder, it then reappears in front of her, suddenly expand-
ing forwards towards the picture surface to form a shape that
seems quite literally to point out the spectator standing before
the work.
This carefully worked detail does not finally clarify what we
see in the Holy Family. Looking with a more critical eye, we might
note that the complexities of the drapery and the liberties
taken with its colouration cannot conceal the shortcomings
of the underlying drawing. The problems of articulation
around the knees of Mary and Joseph are evident enough,
while the position of their forms in space vis-à-vis the low

wall remains wholly unclear. If Joseph is imagined as sitting
behind Mary, then perhaps he sits on this structure, while she
is placed further forward on the rocky outcrop to her left.
Clear spatial definition is not achieved and the entire work
might easily appear as the faulty or timid effort of a beginner
in painting, at least when considered alongside the illusionistic
competence of a work by a more established master such as
Cima. And yet Giorgione’s very tentativeness in the realization
of figure and space is arguably the source of the unusual atmos-
pheric power and expressivity of the work. By avoiding the
more usual Renaissance emphasis on clear figural definition,
with the forms firmly located within a fully articulated and
highly lit three-dimensional space, Giorgione opened up his
image to a different range of imaginative or projective possi-
bilities, encouraging the viewer’s eye to rove at will around
the shadowy surrounding ambient.
Using thinly applied wash-like browns and yellows,
Giorgione makes his strange setting a newly expressive ele-
ment within the image, even as he undermines its possible

function as a carrier of clearly defined symbolic meanings. A
thin twig grows out of a rock; ivy spreads over a wall surface;
and a tattered wicket fence appears at the margin of the pic-
ture: all potentially refer to the sacred significance of the holy
group and the coming of Christ. The arch to the right more
certainly does so, echoing the shape of the foreground figures.
But other non-figural features appear open-ended or even
obscurely non-meaning, stimulating vague associations or
feelings. The low ledge seems particularly significant, even if
its position vis-à-vis the figures remains unclear. And the
same is true of the oddly satisfying forward projection of

masonry from it to the left, which seems to indicate a pro-
tective armature for the delicate figure group. But how does
the wall relate to the obscure angled structure behind it? And
is that building articulated in any way with the arch at the
right? If all this painted architecture is meant to be under-
stood as representing the stable at Bethlehem, then why does
this place, conventionally depicted as a warm and homely
setting for the birth of Christ, appear like a wilderness, lonely
and isolated from the world?
the rise of illusionistic clarity in

venetian painting around 1500
As the brief comparison with Cima has already indicated,
the ambiguities in Giorgione’s early paintings ran against the
grain of more recent developments in Venetian painting,
even in smaller-scaled devotional works. In the domain of
large-scale public painting, the move towards a crystal-clear
and apparently objective representation of reality is still

more apparent. Responding to the example of their painter-
draughtsman father Jacopo (illus. 40), both Gentile and
Giovanni Bellini emerged as renowned masters of accurate
pictorial perspective, which they practised with particular
authority in their large-scale paintings for the city’s public
institutions. Gentile’s Procession (see illus. 10) may not be fully
‘Renaissance’ insofar as the narrative event remains buried
among the crowds in St Mark’s Square. Yet even this work is
a masterpiece of linear perspective, in which the meticulous
detailing of costumes and building facades lends an air of
17 Giovanni Bellini, San Giobbe Altarpiece, c. 1478–80, oil on panel.
close illusionistic veracity, making the work appear like a form

of painted cartography. A few years later, Jacopo de’Barbari
(c. 1460/70–before 1516) published his enormous woodcut
map of Venice, in which the minute details of the physical
appearances of the city were portrayed in an organizing bird’s-
eye perspective view to give an accurate street-by-street, or
even house-by-house, description of the city.16
This new Venetian taste for visual precision is evident
again in certain prominent sacred works made for Venetian
churches. In a sacra conversazione for the Franciscan church of
San Giobbe of about 1478–80, for example, Giovanni Bellini
had set exacting standards of illusionistic clarity in the field
of painted altarpiece design, using the medium of oil paint
to create a work that gave an almost tangible sense of reality
to the sacred figures gathered around the enthroned Virgin
and Child (illus. 17). Bellini deployed an impressive armoury
of Renaissance pictorial devices, carefully varying the appear-
ances and anatomies of his six saints (including contrasting
old and young male nudes), and placing them in a brilliantly
achieved naturalistic setting to demonstrate his mastery of

linear perspective. The entire scene is imagined as taking
place in an illusionary side chapel that opens directly off the
nave of the church of San Giobbe, with the receding lines
of the painted architectural mouldings appearing as painted
extensions of the stone frame. Such works won Giovanni high
renown as a master of pictorial illusionism in Venice, whose
achievement was seen as comparable with those of other
leading Renaissance masters across Italy. The two Bellinis
even met with the leading mathematician Luca Pacioli, to
share their common expertise in the matter of perspective.17
This was not just a matter of visual effect in painting.

In Giovanni’s hands, in particular, the tightly controlled
perspective served to make the sacred subject matter more
comprehensible. It is true that he mitigated the strictly linear
aspects of his compositions through his careful attention to
the softening effects of light, using admixtures of oil paint to
give a more subtle illusion of visual reality. But such adapta-
tions did not disrupt the underlying internal coherence of the
linear composition, serving rather to further enhance its effect
of illusionistic clarity. Such pictorial innovations worked to
intensify the symbolic meaning, so that everything depicted
can be understood as an expression of the sacred subject
matter. Thus in the San Giobbe altarpiece the low viewpoint
effectively fixes the position of a devout spectator before the
work, ascribing her/him a fittingly lowly place near to the feet
of the saints. The perspectival arrangement means that we
must look up into the picture space through these intermedi-
aries towards the still more elevated figures of the Virgin and
Child. For all its apparent optical accuracy, Bellini’s composi-
tion also articulates a symbolic sacred hierarchy between the

worldly viewer, the intercessory saints and the representatives
of the supernatural.
In his famous treatise, Alberti had argued that the cultural
and moral value of painting depended precisely on this kind
of close alliance between pictorial form and subject, making
the content of the image perfectly comprehensible to the
spectator. In De pictura he systematically explains how this
can be secured by the use of mathematically derived linear
perspective space into which anatomically correct and pro-
portionate figures are placed so as to best express the given
narrative or istoria. Despite what was said above about the

residual elements of visual and thematic ambiguity evident in
Quattrocento painting in Venice, by the end of the century,
and especially under the impact of the dominant example of
Giovanni Bellini, this new expectation of clarity in painting
had intensified. Within the given work, it was understood,
each form or object should conform to the underlying spatial
schema in terms of its scale and appearance, reflecting the
optical continuum established between the viewer’s eye, the
picture surface and the vanishing point. This demand for pic-
torial clarity diminished the independent power of individual
forms in favour of their meaningful position within a carefully
prearranged and objectivizing perspective composition. As
Pomponius Gauricus advised in a treatise published in nearby
Padua in 1504, ‘the place exists prior to the bodies brought to
that place, and therefore must be defined linearly’.18 And it
was through conformity to this kind of precise visual articu-
lation that painting could properly deliver its all-important
didactic message.
the castelfr anco altarpiece

Seen against the background of the wider Renaissance
achievement of a muscular illusionistic competence in paint-
ing, Giorgione’s Castelfranco altarpiece must appear as
something of a failure (illus. 18). Following its completion,
he was not asked to paint any further large-scale sacred works
of this kind, and the painting was apparently little known
beyond its immediate context. Sixteenth-century writers on
Giorgione such as Michiel and Vasari were unaware of its
existence (it was first mentioned in the literature by Carlo

Ridolfi in 1648), and the work appears to have had little or
no impact on contemporary painting in Venice. Admittedly,
the altarpiece was located in a little-known church away from
the metropolis. But it may be that its visual strangeness, or
failure to conform to the newly fashionable illusionistic
conventions for the altarpiece type, also played a role in its
early obscurity. Superficially, at least, Giorgione appears to
follow Bellini’s already canonical example in the San Giobbe
altarpiece. His painting is also an upright single-field altar-
piece, and it too features the Virgin and Child on a centrally
placed raised throne. The presence of the standing saints to
either side of this structure makes it appear to conform to the
familiar fifteenth-century altarpiece iconography of the sacra
conversazione. And as if to make his fundamental point of ref-
erence clear, Giorgione even went so far as to include a direct
visual quotation from the San Giobbe altarpiece, adopting
Bellini’s gesturing figure of St Francis in what was to be his
most overt figural quotation from a work by his master.
Giorgione also appears to closely emulate the perspectival

structure of the San Giobbe painting, laying emphasis on
receding linear features such as the tiled pavement and the
edges of the throne to suggest three-dimensionality. Such
features combine to establish a single vanishing point, in
apparently Albertian fashion. But this is improbably high (in
the area of the Virgin’s legs) and the horizontal intervals
between the foreground tiles appear stretched.19 These linear
indicators do not quite establish a consistent effect of spati-
ality, while the upper part of the painting, featuring a softly
painted landscape, dispenses with receding lines altogether
(illus. 19). Giorgione’s figures are larger than in his other early
religious paintings, but his two saints are oddly boneless and
extenuated by comparison with Bellini’s muscular anatomical
figures, while his Virgin and Child appear as isolated towards
the top of the painting and shrink in size, further undermin-
ing the shaky authority of the perspective scheme below.
Giorgione’s colours escape their apparent function as sup-
portive indicators of specific forms or of spatial recession,
linking up with one another to form new relationships along
the picture surface. Thus the uncanonical greens of the
Virgin’s garment resonate with the richly ornamental cloths
on the throne beneath her, but also with the smudgy colours
of the copses of trees in the far distance. And the soft greyish
reds of the flag pennant combine with the luscious colour of
the partition wall.
Why might Giorgione have taken this approach? Setting
aside the possibility of the young painter’s technical incom-
petence – that he did not yet have sufficient tools to manage
the basics of perspectival or illusionistic painting – we might
turn for an answer to questions of context: to picture type and

patronage. To what extent, we can ask, was Giorgione’s with-
drawal from the monumental articulated clarity of Bellini’s
San Giobbe altarpiece a response to the very different circum-
stances in which he created his painting? The work was very
probably commissioned by Tuzio Costanzo, a non-Venetian
condottiere who had once loyally served the Venetian state
in Cyprus, but now lived in a kind of permanent exile near
Castelfranco (he was prohibited from returning to the island,
probably for fear that he might foment trouble for the
Republic).20 Despite his service, Tuzio, originally from Sicily,
18 Giorgione, Castelfranco Altarpiece, c. 1501, oil on panel.
was an outsider to Venice, and was potentially perceived as a

threat to the Republic’s political ambitions. He had served as
a loyal knight to Caterina Cornaro, but she too was increas-
ingly removed from Venice itself, her ‘court’ at Asolo tolerated
by the state authorities, but nonetheless distinct in its cultural
assumptions and values. It seems likely that the commission
to Giorgione was a result of the painter’s early association
with Caterina’s circle. The painting he produced might be
seen as reflecting, to some extent, its more exclusive or courtly
19 Detail from Giorgione, Castelfranco Altarpiece (illus. 18).
values. Just as he was subsequently to do in his paintings on

the facade of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, Giorgione subjected
a public painting type to a more private and personal kind of
treatment, using it as a vehicle to extend the bespoke ambig-
uous approach he had already developed in small-scale private
commissions.
Giorgione’s painting was originally placed in the Costanzo
family chapel in the now destroyed church of Santa Maria
Assunta e San Liberale in Castelfranco. Although Tuzio
himself was not represented, Giorgione’s imagery constantly
acknowledges his subjective viewing presence. Thus the fam-
ily coat of arms, set on a fictive stone roundel, is placed in a
very prominent position at the lower centre foreground. The
receding perspective of the pavement tiles is at its firmest
here, leading the viewer directly to this all-significant object,
at the expense of both the saints to either side and of the
figures of Virgin and Child towards the top of the painting.
The sacred figures seem to stare fixedly down at this badge
of the Costanzo family honour, as if to acknowledge its
special significance. Bellini had been careful not to include

any such promotion of specific families in his San Giobbe
altarpiece, a work probably commissioned by a religious
confraternity, in which the Virgin and Child stare out of the
painting, as if towards the high altar of the church away to
their left. There was much more scope to personalize altar-
piece imagery in a cultural backwater such as Castelfranco,
where the Republic’s control over individualism was less
powerful. Making the family coat of arms such a significant
feature allowed Giorgione’s patron to identify with the image
in a more intimate way. And perhaps the particular depiction
of this heraldic device made this connection more immediate

still: it is presented as a circular object that might remind us
of the human eye, seeming to mirror those of Tuzio and his
family as they stood or knelt before the painting in the privacy
of their little chapel. If the grand but abstracted perspective
arrangement of Bellini’s San Giobbe altarpiece acknowledges
the shared gaze of the entire devotional community kneeling
before it at prayer, then Giorgione’s appears as an intimate
extension of the Costanzo family’s more exclusive concerns
and associations.
The exact date of the painting has been much disputed,
with many arguing for about 1504, suggesting that the work
was commissioned by the grieving father Tuzio following the
death of his son Matteo in that year.21 Matteo’s tomb, dated
August 1504, was originally placed in the chapel, and the
intense melancholy of the scene is seen as reflecting Giorgione’s
sensitivity to his patron’s recent bereavement. The strange
rectangular stone object, apparently made of porphyry, to
which the coat of arms is attached, has been seen as a repre-
sentation of Matteo’s sarcophagus.22 But there is little reason

to identify the lower part of the fantastical architecture of
the throne in this literal way. And on the question of dating,
the style of the entire altarpiece, featuring physically slight
and elongated figures, supported by a rich palette of reds and
greens, is close to works such as the Benson Holy Family and
the Adoration of the Magi, which probably date to about 1500–
1501. Nonetheless, the biographical reading of the painting
is fruitful enough. Giorgione was at pains to incorporate Tuzio
Costanzo’s own inner world of associations into the imagery.
The repeated references to military life tell us as much. In
addition to the elegant armoured saint in the foreground, we

glimpse two loafing soldiers in the landscape beyond, near to
what may be a ruined fort. It seems clear enough that this
sunlit landscape was intended to recall the region of the Marca
Trevigiana, near Castelfranco, where Tuzio currently lived.
Perhaps Giorgione deployed his developing open-ended
approach to standard iconographies by allowing that the
foreground soldier-saint could be taken as either St Nicasius,
a Sicilian saint with a special meaning for Tuzio and his family,
St George, to whom the Costanzo chapel was dedicated, or
St Liberalis, a patron saint of the church itself.23 However this
may be, the delicate contrapposto of the saint, achieved through
the inclusion of a playfully unlikely slight step on the pave-
ment, expresses an abstracted ideal of chivalric and aristocratic
knighthood rather than anything more robustly martial, again
in keeping with the elevated courtly identity of the patron.
In many ways the Castelfranco altarpiece continues the
mode of expression that Giorgione had developed in his early
private devotional paintings. Certain of its features reveal
that the more ambiguous small-scale picture type was still

uppermost in his thinking when approaching this larger-scale
commission. The velvet-clad partition, for example, recalls a
pictorial device often used in domestic devotional paintings
to divide an architectural and figural foreground from a land-
scape background. And landscapes themselves, while certainly
not unprecedented in Venetian altarpieces of the late fifteenth
century, were a still more familiar feature in such small-scale
private works. The inclusion of the ocular coat of arms,
around which the entire composition seems to revolve, makes
further reference to privately commissioned religious works,
more especially to the kind of family votive paintings made

to hang in aristocratic palaces, in which kneeling patricians
adore the Virgin and Child, with heraldic devices prominently
displayed nearby.
Giorgione’s altarpiece also conforms to his wider approach
insofar as it reveals his tendency to make the active projection
of a personalized viewer necessary to the imaginative com-
pletion of the work. This may have encouraged his development
of a more bespoke kind of altarpiece: one that made his imagery
less generally comprehensible than Bellini’s abstracted and
rationalized approach allowed. Whether or not Giorgione
imagined Tuzio Costanzo, in particular, praying before his
painting, the doubtful pictorial structures that he presented
– the curving pavement, the illogically vertical throne or the
unlikely dividing wall – introduced a new kind of subjectivity
into the domain of the Venetian altarpiece, seeming to allow
the beholder to make his or her own mind up about what pre-
cisely is depicted, and what it might finally mean. Giorgione’s
unstable forms, coexisting or coalescing with one another in a
shifting alliance within the painting, necessarily had a more

circumscribed social reach than the institutionalized communal
clarity proposed in Bellini’s prototype. But they might none-
theless appear much closer to the ever-changing and always
ambiguous inner world of an individualized beholder.
three
Portraits and Portrait-types
A
further aspect of the developing pictorial armoury
of illusionistic painting in the Renaissance was
the careful attention given to facial expression. In
constructing the ideal history or istoria, Alberti affirmed in De
pictura, the painter should make sure that faces clearly express
inner emotions in accordance with the figure’s role in the
given narrative.1 But in the religious paintings by Giorgione
discussed in the previous chapter, wash-like smoky smudges
of brownish paint tend to stand in for the precise details
of eyes, noses and mouths, so that the inner thoughts or
feelings of the figures remain obscure. It may be that later
overpainting, particularly in the Castelfranco altarpiece, has

exacerbated this ambiguous effect, but it nonetheless seems
that Giorgione deliberately made the exact expressions of
the actors in his early sacred works very difficult to read.
Faces, like the slightly defined bodies to which they belong,
play a secondary role in these works, in which Giorgione laid
much greater emphasis on the surrounding atmosphere or
environment. But Vasari noted in his ‘Life’ that Giorgione
was particularly interested in portraiture in his early career:
and it would appear that the painter was best known for his
works of this type for much of the sixteenth century.
77 Portraits and Portrait-types
portr ait of a young man
An example of an early work of this kind is the Portrait of a

Young Man now in Berlin, a painting sometimes attributed to
Titian, but which bears all the hallmarks of the early style of
Giorgione (illus. 20).2 Giorgione’s interest in this picture
type need not surprise us, given that it offered an escape from
the demands of large-scale multi-figural subject or narrative
painting. In the late fifteenth century portraiture had rapidly
developed in Venice, particularly in the hands of Gentile and
Giovanni Bellini. The brothers were powerfully influenced
by Netherlandish examples, especially as transmitted through
Antonello da Messina (1430–1479), who worked in Venice
in 1475–6 using a meticulously detailed oil technique derived
from the northern paintings he had previously seen in Naples.
Despite occasional depictions of contemporary sitters
dressed up as saints or as humanist poets, many of the Bellinis’
portraits remained closely tied to the expression of the public
and patriotic values of the Venetian Republic. This meant
that the sitter was typically presented as a representative of

the wider social order. The portrait recorded the outward
appearance of this or that person, often in some detail, plac-
ing particular value on the naturalistic depiction of fine
details of facial appearance.
This did not, however, imply anything further than was
necessary about the personhood of the figure depicted. The
sitter was typically presented as ‘good’, ‘patriotic’, ‘pious’ and
so on, as if the indication of these outwardly derived social
and religious virtues was sufficient to describe his entire per-
sonality. In this way characterization dominated over
20 Giorgione, Portrait of a Young Man, c. 1500–1501, oil on canvas.
individualization in these portraits. Their function was also

primarily commemorative, whether in a familial or official
context, preserving the outward appearance so that the sitter
would be remembered in the future. Alberti certainly had
portraiture in mind when he pointed out that the primary
21 Giovanni Bellini, Portrait of a Man, c. 1485–7, oil on panel.
value of lifelike paintings of this kind was to make the absent

present, and thus to defeat the depredations of time. There
was an inbuilt flaw to this claim for portraiture, given that
without the aid of supporting written inscriptions the iden-
tity of sitters would inevitably be forgotten over time.3 Yet the
claim to permanence that Quattrocento portraiture made is
evident enough from the formal connection these works
assert with antique sculptural busts. Many are represented as
cut just below the shoulders, as robustly three-dimensional,
and maintain a unidirectional alliance between upper body
and head, while avoiding altogether the potential distraction
of arms or hands.
Giovanni Bellini often depicted young patricians, perhaps
around the time of their entry into the ruling Great Council
of Venice aged 25 (illus. 21). Such paintings are likely to have
been commissioned by more senior members of the given sit-
ter’s family, recording an important rite of social passage into
the public life of the city. The elements of restraint evident
in Bellini’s approach make such portraits appear like visual
extracts from the corporate group portraits that so often fea-

tured in official large-scale istorie for the city’s public buildings.
Although Bellini’s sitter in the example illustrated here is
young, the portrait nonetheless expresses the values of the
official gerontocracy of Venice, cancelling rather than pro-
moting the possibility of independent youthful escape into
a more private or personal identity.4 Youth, this work seems
to proclaim, must inevitably yield to the wider social order
established by the old. By comparison, Giorgione’s Portrait of a
Young Man suggests the continued freedom of its young sitter
from a predetermined social role. It may be that Giorgione’s
sitter is a little younger than 25, and still remains detached

from the duties of Council membership. The richly tailored
mauve satin quilted fabric of his doublet suggests his pen-
chant for fine clothing rather than his conformity to the
kind of self-repression required of fully fledged male mem-
bers of the city’s ruling caste. Giorgione marks this kind of
difference in other ways too. If Bellini had maintained the
usual Quattrocento bust-like alliance of head and body, then
Giorgione allows his sitter to break the mould. His young
man makes direct eye contact and immediately suggests a new
possibility of intimacy with the viewer. This was to sacrifice
the permanence of the gaze for the momentariness of the
glance: but despite the suggestion of personal closeness it is
unclear whether we really will come to know anything more
about the sitter. Perhaps we will even know less.
The eyes of Giorgione’s Young Man turn in their sockets,
although this does not denote shiftiness, as in certain other
Renaissance portraits.5 This ocular decentring, with its impli-
cation of a sudden inward shift of attention or emotion, again
allows Giorgione to retreat from the Quattrocento-style anal-

ogy of the painted portrait with the monumental permanence
of the sculptural bust. In his new work the sideways shift of
pupils and irises secures an impression of direct (if fleeting)
connection. Giorgione undermines the air of timelessness
that governs Bellini’s portraits of young patricians, suggesting
in other ways too that we have suddenly encountered his sitter
in the present moment. Although a parapet is included, its
indication of a separation between viewer and sitter is under-
mined by the inclusion of the right hand, whose delicate digits
overlap this structure, suggesting continuity of the sitter’s
world with our own. Giorgione’s ground-breaking inclusion

of a hand challenges the exclusive focus on the head in most
fifteenth-century portraits.6 Rather than further emphasizing
the intellectual power or moral probity of the sitter’s charac-
ter, the hand serves as a new marker of the significance of his
body. It offers the idea of, or invitation to, touch. Such delicate
fingertips are, after all, loci of extreme or heightened sensi-
tivity. And the visual interplay between these nodes of haptic
feeling and the similarly coloured flesh of the sitter’s head
above serves to intensify our apprehension of the reality of the
sitter’s corporeal presence. The downward-curving fingers
reach over into the viewer’s realm, seeming to acknowledge
our own embodied presence before the painting. Giovanni
Bellini did not include a ‘sensitizing’ hand in his portraiture
until the very last years of his career, preferring to maintain
a more traditional reserve and formality.7
Giorgione’s collapse of the abstracted or fixed commem-
orative portrait into a present moment of close, though brief,
interaction is implied again by the casual way in which the
uppermost bow of the young man’s doublet is undone, as if

he had been caught unawares, not quite ready to sit for a for-
mal portrait. And this detail at the same time reveals the soft
white of his underclothing or camicia against his flesh, afford-
ing us a glimpse of something more private, physical or
perhaps even sexual. These indicators of the young man’s
bodily presence simultaneously make his personality less
knowable or quantifiable. Unlike the sitter’s official red toga
and black stole in Bellini’s portrait, they tell us nothing about
his place in the social hierarchy, or about his underlying com-
mitment to patriotic or pious duty as a young patrician. Even
as they appear to close the gap between viewer and sitter, they
generate new levels of ambiguity, encouraging us to speculate
rather than allowing us to know. The young man’s delicate
features suggest inner refinement, although the noncha-
lance of his pose, like the febrile momentariness of his glance,
might also indicate the intensity of his sensual life, rather
than his moral probity or unquestioned commitment to
public service. It has been said that Giorgione’s painting is
the earliest example of a modern kind of portrait in which
the ‘motions of the mind of an individual are laid bare’.8 And
yet quite what these inner ‘motions’ might be is made difficult
to determine, and must in great part be a matter of the view-
er’s projection onto the relatively sparse visual information
Giorgione actually supplies in paint. As in the other works by
Giorgione discussed so far, it is the diminution of what is
given in pictorial terms that provides space for possibilities
to grow in the mind of the spectator. The reduction of pic-
torial clues is simultaneous with withdrawal from the usual
more public functions of the picture type in a manner that
recalls Giorgione’s privatizing approach to altarpiece design

at Castelfranco. If the painter really does suggest the myste-
rious inner life of a modern individual, then he does so by
giving us less rather than more information about his sitter.
Our sense that this young man is exquisitely cultivated and
sensitive is created, above all, by the soft generalizing touch of
Giorgione’s brushwork. This is particularly evident in the fluid
handling of the doublet, which threatens to close the space
between the object and the observing eye almost entirely. But
this newly immediate visual effect also marks a further measure
of retreat from the detailed objectivity that characterized late
fifteenth-century portraits under the influence of Antonello’s

example. Giorgione’s Young Man also presents an alternative
to the robust male identity featured in Venetian portraiture
to this point (Bellini’s blond-haired sitter seems already to
have sacrificed something of his previous youthful beauty to
the manly cause of the Venetian state). The combination of
soft pale flesh and thick, centrally parted chocolate-brown hair
also features in Giorgione’s near-contemporary painting of
Judith (see illus. 5) and was soon to appear again in his Self-portrait
as David (see illus. 2). In Hollar’s print after this latter work, we
glimpse a very similar set of downward-facing fingers, with a
hint of the slightly separated thumb to their left (see illus. 3).
If Giorgione/David’s dexter manus suggests the sitter’s godly
probity, then maybe it already does in the Portrait of a Young Man.
This identification of his virtue appears to be supported by the
‘v v’ (‘Virtue Victorious’) inscription on the parapet. These
explanatory initials are, however, a nineteenth-century addi-
tion, and may represent another much later attempt to clarify
the meaning of an ambiguous Giorgione painting.9
In the Bellini portrait illustrated here from the later 1480s,

the young patrician appears against a blue sky, perhaps sug-
gesting that his commitment to the Venetian state has a sacred
foundation. The sitter in Giorgione’s painting appears, by
contrast, to be indoors, occupying his own more private space,
and this, in tandem with the details noted above, admits a new
ambiguity into portraiture, especially regarding who the given
person depicted may be or how he might be understood. Even
if we must assume that the Berlin portrait was a commissioned
work, and that the sitter’s name was well known around 1500,
Giorgione’s representation of him nonetheless seems to pose a
question: would the young man’s identity become any clearer

if we were in possession of this lost historical information?
Perhaps this question is not specific to Giorgione’s portrai-
ture, given that when ‘individualization’ gets the upper hand
over ‘characterization’ in works of this type, a new measure
of uncertainty must always be the result. Once the outwardly
derived armature of established social or moral qualities and
definitions is abandoned, then something much less definable,
fixed or understandable takes its place. ‘Individuals’ are almost
by definition more ambiguous than ‘characters’, and are not
generally given to emitting decipherable or translatable signs
regarding their true identity.
the ter ris portr ait

That Giorgione did not possess a wide clientele eager to
sit for commissioned portraits is evident enough from the
fact that so few other works of this kind can now be safely
attributed to him. One great example is the so-called Terris
Portrait in San Diego, a work that belongs to a later period of

Giorgione’s short career than the Berlin painting, given its
expressive power and less reticent approach to its sitter (illus.
22).10 Giorgione’s change of direction in this work reflects
the deepening impact upon him of two very innovative
non-Venetian artists, Albrecht Dürer and Leonardo da Vinci.
It is possible to make out three digits in an inscription on the
back of the painting as ‘150’, though tantalizingly the final
one remains difficult to decipher. If this were a ‘6’, then the
portrait would be more or less contemporary with Dürer’s
working visit to Venice, and would provide further support
for its often-noted closeness to the German painter’s Portrait

of a Man, which is dated to that year (illus. 23). The depiction
of the sitter’s mouth is particularly similar in both works,
as is the diaphanous fine treatment of the strands of wavy
brown hair, perhaps flecked with grey, to either side of the
face. The fluid treatment of their aquiline noses is also very
close, serving in each case to suggest that we view the fig-
ure from slightly to the right. The decentring of the sitters’
pupils serves to counteract the oblique viewpoint, insisting
22 Giorgione, Portrait of a Man (Terris Portrait), c. 1506, oil on panel.
on a more direct confrontation with the viewer. These men

are decidedly past their youth, and consciousness of ageing
might be taken as the cause of their haunted expressions,
although this effect of melancholy self-reflection is most
apparent in Giorgione’s painting. Even if it is very unlikely
that the two portraits represent the same sitter, as has been
suggested, such similarities remain striking enough.11 And
23 Albrecht Dürer, Portrait of a Man, 1506, oil on panel.
the fact that Dürer’s portrait was once in the collection of an

important Giorgione collector, Gabriele Vendramin, owner
of La vecchia and the Tempest, makes the apparent connection
between the paintings still more intriguing.
On the other hand, Dürer’s sitter wears a fashionable soft
hat, and is shown bust-length against a green background,
while Giorgione’s portrait dispenses with such outward acces-
sories, focusing solely on the man’s face. It is true that his jacket
was once green, a colour which might have allied Giorgione’s
portrait even more closely to Dürer’s. And yet in this work
we are moved much closer to the sitter, so that his physical
presence is very hard to ignore. The mournful intensity of his
returning gaze is unsettling, seeming to demand emotional
response and acknowledgement. This was a pictorial device
that Giorgione was soon to utilize again in works such as La
vecchia, in which intensely communicative painted eyes simi-
larly capture and hold those of the beholder, binding us to
the image and undermining our ability to separate ourselves
from it. It may be that Giorgione learned how to generate
this sense of close psychological interaction from the work of

the other great artistic influence on his portrait: Leonardo da
Vinci. Dürer himself had become very interested in Leonardo’s
work during the course of his visit to Italy in 1505–6.
Giorgione’s suddenly more Leonardesque paintings of these
years were, perhaps, an indirect response, mediated through
the Nuremberg painter’s example. Long before Dürer’s arrival,
however, a general sense of Leonardo’s approach had been
available to local painters in Venice through the example of
one-time followers such as Giovanni Agostino da Lodi (active
c. 1490–c. 1515), who had settled in the lagoon city in the
1490s. And the evidence of Giorgione’s own paintings sug-

gests that he had also gained more precise knowledge through
some drawings that Leonardo had brought with him on a brief
visit to the city in 1500.12
Comparison of Dürer’s Portrait of a Man with the Terris
Portrait makes it clear enough that the latter is more pro-
foundly Leonardesque. Abandoning the lively outlines and
local colours of Dürer’s painting, Giorgione unifies and sim-
plifies the form of his sitter by allowing the edges of his body
to disappear into a warmly toned darkness, and softly mod-
elling his flesh using varying admixtures of black and white
to generate an illusion of protruding and receding surfaces.
Leonardo had recommended in his notebooks that aspiring
portrait painters should observe how, in bad weather or in
the evening, when the distraction of local colours and formal
outlines is diminished, and lights and shadows exaggerated,
the faces of men and women appear with more ‘grace and
softness’.13 Less, he had thus suggested, was also more in paint-
ing, for such semi-hidden forms appeared more beautiful and
were imbued with a heightening sense of psychological

mystery. Giorgione ratchets up the drama of his portrait by
developing a similar equation between visual concealment
and expressive suggestion. If we are now moved uncomfort-
ably close to the sitter’s face, then this does not introduce the
kind of meticulously objective surface treatment so typical of
northern painting, and still evident in Dürer’s Portrait of a Man.
Drawing nearer to the body does not lead to anything more
precise or closely stated in Giorgione’s handling. A pool of
amorphous shadow creates the nostrils; a slight greying of the
pinker tones of the mouth makes the light stubble of his
potential beard appear over the upper lip, chin and lower jaw.
Fluid tonal variations between grey, light pink and cream are
enough to generate a sense of the bridge of the prominent
nose, the hooded brows and the high forehead. There is no
question that Giorgione’s ability to conjure a suggestion of a
three-dimensional head had greatly increased in the years
separating this work from the Berlin Portrait of a Man of about
1500. But it is also true that this illusionary quality involves a
further reduction of the amount of visual information actually
supplied by the paint. Softly blended shadows and lights rather
than sharp lines or contrasts suffice to give the impression of
a face. Our awareness of the sitter’s close physical presence
and pensive psychological mood is conjured using an oil tech-
nique built out of a series of painterly generalizations and
elisions.
Giorgione’s mature style insists more absolutely that we
must read into the image to make it properly appear, supply-
ing what is missing, for example, in the area of nebulous
shadow that conceals the edges of the sitter’s form. It would
be possible to misunderstand the nature of Leonardo’s

influence on Giorgione in this respect, given that the Floren-
tine’s approach was typically more inductive or empirical.
Leonardo indicates that the artist should carefully consider
the ‘disappearances’ of sight, but this always served his pri-
mary purpose of capturing the material realities (however
complex and fluid) of the natural world itself. Giorgione, on
the other hand, used Leonardesque sfumato to further develop
the expressive possibilities of visual generalization. Rather
than attempting to offer accurate calibrations of the com-
plex realities of natural appearance, Giorgione was most
responsive to the opportunities that Leonardo’s approach

offered for exploring the intersubjectivity of the viewer-
image relationship in painting. In the Terris Portrait, it is the
way in which the beholder’s eye, abhorring a vacuum, must
finish the image beyond what is actually given that Giorgione
highlights. But this completion remains ambiguous insofar
as it does not finally imply our arrival at an objectively accurate
image. Despite Giorgione’s presentation of his sitter in dra-
matic close-up, he appears, in part at least, to be a projection
of our own fantasy.
For all its apparent naturalism, the Terris Portrait is also a
knowing and self-conscious artistic construct, its alluring visual
drama created through the modulation of carefully selected
effects of light and shade. Giorgione’s own choice about this
dispersal of pictorial effects controls what we see and what we
do not. And this pictorial arrangement serves less to give a
clear idea about who the sitter is than to lend him an air of
mystery or enigma, while also creating a self-consciously orig-
inal, and highly collectable, work of art intended, perhaps, to
be of much interest in its own right. It remains an open ques-

tion whether or not the patron was, in fact, the sitter himself
or his family, or a patrician collector keen to possess a new
pictorial invention by Giorgione. In any case, Giorgione’s work
might remind us of Vasari’s sceptical commentary on the way
in which this painter always ‘represented figures according to
his own fancy’. In the Terris Portrait, the sitter does not fully
survive as an independent person beyond the control of the
master who depicts him. In this way, too, Giorgione’s approach
compromised the expectations of the commissioned portrait,
transforming it into an image that reveals his own artistic
procedures and choices. We will never know if his sitter really

was so poetically melancholic, or if he was haunted by a sense
of transience, although we do know that these were common
themes in many works by Giorgione. Indications of the sit-
ter’s physical reality and social status in the world still had a
fundamental part to play in the portraiture of Dürer and
Leonardo, for all the artfulness of their works. In Giorgione’s
painting, on the other hand, the man is further removed from
such outward factors and is shown secluded within a pictorial
24 Titian, Portrait of Gian Giacomo Bartolotti da Parma, c. 1516, oil on canvas.
space that is ultimately subject to the painter’s own expressive

interests and concerns.
The radically artistic quality of Giorgione’s approach
becomes more evident still when the Terris Portrait is compared
with a work by Titian, probably painted about a decade later
(illus. 24).14 Using a style that is at once more formally dynamic
and anatomically grounded, Titian returned his sitter to a
more objective reality, leaving little doubt as to his appear-
ance, while also hinting at his powerfully three-dimensional
body and inner self-confidence. Even if Titian’s painting does
not feature the same sitter, as has sometimes been argued, it
is clear enough that the younger master sought to sweep away
the shadowed melancholy and visual ambiguity of Giorgione’s
prototype.15 In Titian’s work, a consistent sense of the inde-
pendent physical presence of his patron/sitter reappears,
firmly establishing his character as a successful and dynamic
man of the world. This was also to return the Renaissance
portrait to its original moorings in outward empirical reality
and to make Giorgione’s divergence seem like an overly
subjective aberration.
young man with an ar row

Giorgione’s Portrait of a Man and Terris Portrait maintain certain
features – the presentation of their subjects in early sixteenth-
century dress and without symbolic attributes – indicating
their status as commissioned portraits. But other aspects of
these works push against the usual boundaries of this picture
type. To this extent, the expressive mode developed in these
‘portraits proper’ is not so different to a further small group
of paintings in which Giorgione asks us to question their

status as portraits in a more fundamental way. In a painting
originally described by Michiel in 1532 as a ‘Boy with an
Arrow’ but which seems to feature a post-pubescent young
man perhaps around the age of twenty, certain of the pictorial
devices that Giorgione had deployed in the Terris Portrait are
again in play, though they now serve as a vehicle for the
depiction of an ideal type of beautiful male youth (illus. 25).16
In making this transformation, Giorgione might have had
in mind local examples such as Giovanni Bellini’s so-called
25 Giorgione, Young Man with an Arrow, c. 1506–7, oil on poplar.
Portrait of a Humanist, a kind of fantasy portrait featuring a

young man in the guise of a classical scholar, crowned with
laurel leaves and wearing an antique mantle (illus. 26).17 The
idea that we see a contemporary individual dressed up or per-
forming in the role of an imaginary one lies behind Bellini’s
painting. If the man’s all’antica attire suggests that he is a figure
26 Giovanni Bellini, Portrait of a Humanist, c. 1475–80, oil on panel.
from the revered world of ancient Rome, then the close

Netherlandish-style detailing of his face, replete with realistic
Antonellesque stubble around the jaw, leaves us in little doubt
that this is a portrait of a living individual who is acting a part.
In Giorgione’s painting, on the other hand, the sitter is more
thoroughly disguised so that it becomes unclear whether we
are viewing a portrait at all. To this extent the real and the
imaginary are elided rather than being defined as opposing
entities. Giorgione retreats from Bellini’s firm individuation
of his sitter, so that this youth appears like a generic type whose
appearance is remodelled using a formal vocabulary familiar
from classical art.
Giorgione uses strong highlighting to emphasize the pale-
ness of his sitter’s flesh, while his facial features, with Roman
nose and rosebud lips set into a symmetrical ovoid-shaped
head, also insistently recall the ideal forms of antique marble
sculpture. Giorgione, as Vasari noted, had a long-lasting inter-
est in the Renaissance debate about the relative merits of
painting and sculpture known as the paragone.18 And in the
Young Man with an Arrow he deliberately invites a formalistic

comparison between visual media of this kind. If Giorgione
could closely imitate the conventions of antique sculpture in
his painting, then the softening of the surfaces and edges of
the form of his figure, using a delicate sfumato derived from
Leonardesque examples, indicates the final superiority of
painting in the imitation of nature.19 These self-consciously
formalistic aspects might also suggest that Giorgione sought
to create a generic or ideal pictorial image of a ‘handsome
man’ or bell’uomo, a kind of painting that would necessarily
involve the correction of more individualized features in
accordance with the classical canon of perfected forms. The

emphasis on the young man’s physical beauty would then serve
as a metaphorical figure of Giorgione’s own perfected work of
art. On the other hand, Giorgione does continue to suggest
that his work is, at least, portrait-like, drawing directly on cer-
tain of the pictorial devices he had introduced in the Terris
Portrait. We are once again positioned very close to the sitter,
who emerges out of the soft darkened background to be phys-
ically adjacent to us. And despite the elements of idealization
it remains possible that this young man is a contemporary
individual dressed up or performing the part of a figure from
the past.
If it is unlikely that he is playing St Sebastian, as has some-
times been suggested, then it may be that he performs as the
classical sun god Apollo or, more likely still, Eros.20 Male phys-
ical beauty and its power to generate sexual desire is, after all,
the obvious subtext of this painting. The combination of the
contemporary-looking camicia worn beneath the classicizing
red mantle might suggest that we see a contemporary youth
who role-plays a figure from the distant past, in a similar man-

ner to Giorgione’s self-portrait. The display of this subtly
extravagant undergarment, laced with gold embroidery, and
shown in immediate proximity to the similarly coloured ivory
flesh of the young man, suggests that we might enjoy imme-
diate access to his fleshy body. His slightly unfocused gaze out
towards us, as suffused with passion in his performance as the
young god of love, creates an effect of immediate connection
that threatens to make such role-playing seem irrelevant.
Meanwhile, his delicately elongated fingers caress the shaft
of his upwardly tilted arrow, which is turned into the picture
space towards his own body, as if it follows the beholder’s own

desire-infused sightlines. To this extent, it appears less like an
objective identifying attribute of the sitter than as a symbol of
our own feelings of amorous attraction to the beautiful figure.
The eroticization of the imagery in this painting pro-
vides, indeed, a fundamental point of contrast with Bellini’s
earnestly sober and masculine Humanist, whose depiction,
despite the play-acting, appears always more contained by
the external demands of a contemporary portrait sitter for
an accurate depiction. Giorgione takes greater pictorial lib-
erties, generating a newly independent kind of pictorial
space for his more intimate and sensual depiction. If the
sitter’s face has been radically remodelled according to the
classical repertoire, his flesh whitened and features evened
to suggest flawless marble, then these ‘improvements’ serve
only to heighten the sense of intimate physical connection
with an impassioned beholder. Here, we might recall again the
implicit homoeroticism of Giorgione’s Self-portrait as David,
which skilfully manipulates visual types and their associations
to create room for the expression of potentially transgressive

meanings. Both works are tellingly dependent for such effects
on their deliberate maintenance of visual ambiguity: on the
way in which they allow real and ideal to interpenetrate or
coalesce within a newly independent or self-determining
domain of art.
laur a
In the painting typically known as ‘Laura’ of 1506 Giorgione
retreats, to some extent, from the idealism of the Young Man
with an Arrow, but nonetheless presents a work that actively

challenges our ability to identify the precise kind of picture
we see, or what it might mean (illus. 27).21 In this work, as in
a further related painting of an old woman known as La vecchia
(illus. 28), Giorgione treads the line between portrait,
27 Giorgione, Laura, 1506, oil on wood.
portrait-like and non-portrait with even greater deftness.

The Laura emits pictorial signs that seem deliberately intended
to contradict one another. Close attention to the details of
her appearance immediately suggest that this is a portrait
of a contemporary woman, as does the careful alignment of
the sitter’s head and body in the manner of a portrait bust,
a typical arrangement, as we have seen, in fifteenth-century
portraiture. Such features have encouraged the idea that
Giorgione depicted a high-ranking named individual, such as
the Venetian noblewoman Laura Donà, who married in June
1506, the same month mentioned in the inscription on the
back of the painting.22 Others have argued that we are shown
a contemporary sitter as a personification of Poetry. Perhaps
we view a now unknown female poet in this guise, or in that
of Petrarch’s famous muse, Laura? In either case, the laurel
bush behind the sitter would symbolize poetry itself, rather
than the chastity or virtue of a recent bride.23
With her dark hair and rounded fleshly face, however,
‘Laura’ looks very unlike a noblewoman or poet. Her thick-
set and swarthy appearance, with just a hint of a developing

double chin, make her appear more like a contemporary
woman of the local Venetian popolo (‘populace’) than the ideal
blonde muse of Petrarch’s poetry. The ambiguous movement
of her right hand, whether this is taken as covering or reveal-
ing her breast, appears casual and commonplace, indicating
that ‘Laura’ coexists in a shared and intimate present with
the viewer, immediately bringing the work closer to the kind
of mise-en-scène presented in the Young Man with an Arrow.
Giorgione is at pains to suggest the physicality of the young
woman’s apparently naked body beneath the partial covering
of her garment, bringing her flesh into immediate proximity

with the luxuriant lining of her jacket. Fingertips, breast and
fur, it is suggested, share common qualities of extreme sensi-
tivity and softness. The radical blurring of the fluid red touches
that must stand in for the physical reality of her nipple in this
passage might suggest the kind of radical diminishment of
vision attendant upon intense physical desire: as if the clarity
of the painted description of the form must yield to the force
of the beholder’s projective passion.
The very intensity of Giorgione’s sensual presentation
militates against the idea that this painting is a portrait of a
respectable wife, just as it makes it difficult to see the work
as a lofty and abstract allegory. Perhaps, instead, Giorgione
depicted a Venetian courtesan, and of course this would go
some way towards explaining the eroticization of the imagery.
The name ‘Laura’ was understood as a euphemistic term for
courtesans in the sixteenth century, some of whom, at least,
became renowned as poets.24 Perhaps this identity also explains
the strangely oversized jacket that ‘Laura’ wears, which might
have the appearance of a man’s outdoor coat rather than a

delicate garment in a lady’s wardrobe.25 Reading the painting
as a genre work featuring a morally questionable social type,
we might think that this courtesan is naked beneath a jacket
owned by her current lover or client, who has asked her to put
it on for the sake of decorum, or perhaps to heighten the erotic
charge with an implication of cross-dressing. The inscription
tells us that the work was commissioned by a mysterious ‘messer
Giacomo’, perhaps suggesting that he was this man.26 Or maybe
the incongruous jacket was the painter’s own. Following the
publication of the inventories of Giorgione’s possessions in
2011, this garment was quickly identified with one of the

listed items: an expensive red jacket lined with fox fur, highly
valued at 12 ducats.27 But the identification of the jacket worn
by the sitter in Giorgione’s painting with the garment listed
in the inventory remains a matter of supposition. And it is
not at all certain that ‘Laura’ is dressed in a man’s clothing,
given that sixteenth-century women often wore such fur-
lined items as overcoats.28
The possibility that Giorgione’s Laura depicts a type of
feminine beauty modelled on the features of a contempo-
rary courtesan remains, though, plausible enough. This would
make the painting a kind of female equivalent to the Young
Man with an Arrow, suggesting that the woman also represents
someone play-acting a figure from the past or from the world
of poetry. The ready response of early sixteenth-century
Venetian painters to Giorgione’s Laura adds weight to this
possibility, given that they apparently took this painting as a
model on which to base their own sensuous images of semi-
clad ‘beautiful women’ or belle donne, often using courtesans
for their sitters.29 In these works, painters very often showed

young women with one breast revealed, thereby linking their
paintings directly to the imagery of Venus Genetrix familiar in
classical art. This, of course, was also to follow Giorgione’s
lead in his Laura, where the seemingly casual exposure of the
woman’s breast similarly serves to suggest that she is a con-
temporary type of the goddess of love. Giorgione’s adaptation
of this all’antica motif was pioneering in Venetian painting.
But it must again suggest his fascination with Leonardo, or
at least with the Leonardesque, given that the Venus Genetrix
reference had already been incorporated into an ideal image
of a young woman in a drawing from this master’s circle in

Milan that Giorgione might have known.30
When Giorgione’s Laura is considered alongside his La
vecchia (see illus. 28), a further broad connection with
Leonardo becomes apparent: this time with the Tuscan mas-
ter’s persistent interest in physiognomic contrasts, evident
from both his writings and drawings. If Giorgione’s Laura is
taken as an image of ideal youthful beauty of this kind, then
it might be tempting to see his depiction of La vecchia as a
similarly ideal antitype, providing a generalizable image of
ugliness and age. Although the two paintings were certainly
not pendants, or even commissioned to be seen together, the
fact that Giorgione completed them within the space of a year
or two nonetheless suggests that he was actively experiment-
ing with contrasting human types in a way that was analogous
to Leonardo’s interests in this area. The conduit was again
likely to have been Albrecht Dürer, whose Leonardesque Christ
Among the Doctors (Madrid, Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection)
was probably begun in Venice in 1506. In this work, Dürer
meticulously contrasts extremes of youth and age, juxtaposing

the beautiful face of the child Christ with the grotesquely
distorted visages of the old doctors, employing his knowledge
of Leonardo’s drawings featuring facial contrasts.
Dürer’s painting also suggests that he did not closely follow
or comprehend Leonardo’s implied critique of the supposedly
scientific late medieval tradition of physiognomics. Leonardo
had juxtaposed contrasting types in order to question simple
binary divisions between ideal and real, beauty and ugliness,
or youth and age in depictions of the human figure, and the
usual assumption that these outward appearances provided
adequate or reliable outward signs of inner moral qualities,

such as knowledge and ignorance, or good and evil.31 Giorgione’s
approach in both the Laura and La vecchia shows that he too
sought to challenge the traditional idea that outward appear-
ance could serve as an accurate index of inward moral identity.
The ravaged appearance of Giorgione’s old woman, as we will
see, is not allowed to serve as a visual indicator of her moral
status, while the fleshy brunette in the Laura does not conform
to the usual conventions of ideal feminine beauty. It is signif-
icant enough, in this regard, that Giorgione’s many followers
in the Venetian belle donne tradition quickly corrected their
prototype, showing their beautiful protagonists as Petrarchan
blondes. In both of Giorgione’s paintings the sitters are granted
a vital measure of independent personhood that complicates
the imagery. An implicit critique of the pseudoscience of phys-
iognomics probably lies behind the persistent implication that
these are individualized portraits rather than representative
character types.
It cannot be doubted that two living people sat for the
painter, even if it is unlikely that the paintings were commis-

sioned by themselves, their husbands or families. In imitating
the usual procedures of portraiture, Giorgione maintained
something of its objectivizing naturalism, and La vecchia is
easily the most realistic of his surviving works. The unusual-
ness of such works becomes evident when it is remembered
that women had featured relatively infrequently in Venetian
portraiture to this point. Admittedly, Vittore Carpaccio had
begun to include female portraits in his repertoire, and in the
late 1490s had also produced an unusual genre-like painting
featuring two fashionably dressed young women on a balcony
who may or may not be courtesans.32 But depictions of women

had featured very rarely, if at all, in the work of the leading
painter in the city, Giovanni Bellini.33 Giorgione’s specific, but
also monumental, representations of two contrasting contem-
porary women to this extent represents a highly original and
provocative artistic gesture that challenged the usual gender
exclusions of the painting type.
Quite apart from the natural fact of their gender, the
women that Giorgione depicts share a somewhat tangential
relationship with respectable society in Venice. Leading court-
esans, it has been well noted, could become renowned, owning
their own lavish houses and being granted the rights to burial
chapels in major Venetian churches.34 But if Giorgione’s ‘Laura’
is a woman pursuing this occupation, then her sale of sex for
money would nonetheless have put her in an ambiguous rela-
tionship to marriage and the family. The seemingly inevitable
corollary of agedness in La vecchia, on the other hand, is abject
poverty. Impoverished old street women were occasionally
depicted towards the margins of large-scale history paintings
in Venice, where they are outsiders to the busy scene, some-

times appearing like Fates that predict the course of tragic
future events. But such figures had not typically appeared
within the elite frame of portraiture, a picture type largely
reserved for the city’s ruling castes. Giorgione’s insistent sug-
gestion that his depiction of the old woman is a portrait must
have appeared as particularly provocative. It has been argued
that such images supplied a comforting sense of the ultimate
weakness of these women vis-à-vis their elite male viewers,
nullifying their potential threat as excluded people by setting
them into the safe fictive domain of the painted image.35 But
Giorgione’s particular way of representing them as significant

individuals, of great interest to their beholders, closed off the
possibility of easy cultural distancing or patronizing misogyny.
The characteristic intimacy of his sensual pictorial presentation
seems intended to suggest our unavoidably close connection
with them.
la vecchia
Giorgione seems always to have avoided the use of didacticism
in his paintings, even if this was the more established approach
taken in many works of the Renaissance. If the Laura does
feature a courtesan, it is evident enough that Giorgione was at
pains not to moralize over her as if she were venal or culpable.
His La vecchia might similarly have provided an opportunity
to sermonize on the subject of female vanity and the pass-
ing of time (illus. 28).36 In this painting, a singular and fixed
moral message appears to be made explicit by the two words
displayed near the sitter’s pointing hand reading ‘Col tempo’.
‘With time’, the woman’s appearance seems to tell us, we too

will become like her: physically deteriorated and materially
impoverished. Giorgione’s painting might easily be taken as
an example of the familiar medieval and Renaissance theme
of vanitas or as a memento mori. But the fastidious detailing of
her physical appearance goes beyond the express needs of a
mere moralizing depiction. The very insistence of Giorgione’s
portrait-like naturalism in this work occludes or interrupts
our ready comprehension of its potential symbolic content,
making this painting always something more than a visually
encoded didactic message against the woman depicted.37
Comparison with Dürer’s near-contemporary depiction

of the sin of Avarice as an old woman establishes this point
(illus. 29).38 In Dürer’s painting the old woman is represented
as the very embodiment of a deadly sin, her decayed and ugly
physical form narrowly expressing the picture’s governing
moral idea in strictly physiognomic fashion. Judgement
against the woman dictates every aspect of Dürer’s work and
28 Giorgione, La vecchia, c. 1506–7, tempera and oil on canvas.
its details allow for no ambiguity in this respect: we note the

leering smile, the offer of a sagging breast – a savagely ironic
reference to the Venus Genetrix type, and perhaps more specif-
ically to Giorgione’s recent Laura – and then, of course, there
is the telltale bag of gold coins.39 A comfortable masculine dig
at the avaricious old woman’s expense, as she offers to exchange
sex for money, secures the viewer’s sense of a superior and
distanced relationship to her. Technical examination carried
out in the mid-twentieth century suggested that Giorgione
originally showed his sitter in La vecchia in a way that was closer
to Dürer, in a revealing low-cut dress, and perhaps with one
breast bared.40 But as he worked on the painting, Giorgione
moved away from this distancing, satirical kind of representa-
tion: his old woman makes no equivalent sexual offer to the
viewer, but reaches out to us in an emotional sense across the
superficial barrier of the parapet. Her exchange with us will,
she seems to insist, always be personal, even if its precise nature
becomes uncertain.41
The most recent restoration of the painting in 2018–19
focused primarily on reversing some of the paint additions

made by earlier restorers, suggesting a new measure of ambi-
guity about the age of the sitter. Perhaps she is not quite so
old as she had seemed (sixty-ish?), and this more youthful
quality makes her more accessible, allowing her to emerge as
an individual rather than as a conventionalized type of aged-
ness. Giorgione secures our sense of her powerfully embodied
presence by making the picture type to which his image belongs
difficult to determine. If Dürer’s painting can comfortably
be identified as a mocking allegory, then in Giorgione’s we
appear to be presented with a secular portrait: a depiction of
a living being. Dürer’s work originally served as a cover for a

portrait of a young man; and in a Vendramin inventory of
1601, Giorgione’s painting is also listed as a timpano for a now
unknown portrait of a young man in furs, indicating that it
was then understood to make a misogynistic contrast to his
youthful power and wealth.42 But this later usage does not
establish the original function of the work, and might well
represent yet another posthumous attempt to clarify the
meaning of Giorgione’s originally more ambiguous and prob-
ing imagery; or perhaps it was even an attempt to diminish
or undermine its implication of independent feminine power.
There is a still older tradition going back to an inventory of
1567 that identifies the sitter as Giorgione’s mother: one that
deserves to be taken seriously given that the wording seems
to suggest that the painting features the artist’s parent in
particular, rather than a more generic image of a mother.43 But
the portrait-like features of La vecchia are, in Giorgione’s char-
acteristic manner, then countermanded by others. Even if
Altadona Barbarella did sit for the painting, it does not follow
that this is only a portrait of her. The inscription immediately

suggests that we must see her as more widely representative
of the trials of ageing.
Giorgione liked to take drapery for a walk. The woman’s
headdress might be attached to the fringed white garment
draped over her shoulder, but is more certainly distinct from
the similarly coloured undergarment glimpsed at her neck-
line, which might feasibly be understood as reappearing at
her sleeve. 44 The layers of pale cloth around her never quite
compose themselves into a winding cloth of the kind used to
enwrap the dead, but might nonetheless be another subtle
way of posing the formulation ‘Col tempo’. We might even

be tempted to see the parapet as the forward edge of a tomb,
as it sometimes appears in Giovanni Bellini’s devotional
works (see illus. 12), with the looming woman as an eerie
visitor from beyond the grave. But her inscription, visually
mirroring her pointing right hand, is not the familiar cartellino
or piece of stiff-edged folded paper often to be seen in
Bellini’s paintings, where it typically appears pinned to the
29 Albrecht Dürer, Avarice, c. 1507, oil on panel.
front of the parapet, its message stating the artist’s facture of

the work.45
Closer inspection reveals that Giorgione’s inscription is
presented as a further extension of the sitter’s undergarment:
an illogical (from a strictly functional point of view) extension
of her inner sleeve, made of linen rather than paper, its curling
form picking up the looped gathering of pale cloth at her
neckline (illus. 30).46 The careful presentation of this detail
recalls the tradition of painted banderoles or phylactery: rib-
bon-like scrolls with inscriptions often to be seen in religious
paintings, including many examples from Venice (see illus.
11). Although sometimes held in the hands of angels, they
were also especially connected with the idea of speaking,
sometimes appearing to issue directly from a figure’s mouth
in a manner analogous to a modern speech bubble. Giorgione’s
30 Giorgione, detail from La vecchia.
woman has her mouth open in mid-sentence, perhaps giving

us a more extended account of the deleterious effects of time
upon her. Banderoles, we should note, were most closely asso-
ciated with prophetic speech in visual art, especially that of
the pre-Christian Sybils, those often-aged female figures
whose oracular pronouncements about the future are con-
trasted with the fully literate book-carrying male prophets
or followers of Christ. The utterances of the Erythrean Sybil,
in particular, were understood to have a dark eschatological
significance, predicting the immanent coming of the end of
the world. In the sixteenth century, several earlier portraits
of contemporary women were posthumously associated with
these premonitory figures, probably as a result of the growing
popularity of half-length ‘portrait-like’ sets of the Sybils in
northern Europe. 47 Giorgione’s woman was perhaps also
intended to remind the viewer of such authoritative, though
sombre, female truth-tellers, whose message predicted a dark
future for a viewer imagined as still young and unknowing.
But do we really see a Sybil in Giorgione’s painting? And
is that really a banderole associated with the prophetic power

of speech that curls away from the old woman’s wrist? As with
so many other interpretative clues included in Giorgione’s
paintings, the apparent indication of a wider meaning is trun-
cated, curtailed or undermined even as it is suggested. After
all, pictorial banderoles are more typically featured as exten-
sive flag-like objects that flutter in the upper area of a sacred
composition, indicating that their lengthy inscriptions are
heavenly utterances. They serve a fundamentally explicatory
purpose within the image, revealing the precise underlying
meaning of the allegory.48 On the other hand, the apparently
clarifying inscription in Giorgione’s painting is placed low in

the picture field and is attached to her undergarment. The
suggestion that she has revealed this writing inadvertently
becomes significant. In the banderole tradition, the written
words appear as if predetermined and declamatory, flowing
away from the mouths or hands of the persons who emit them,
as if to supersede their merely physical bodies. In the figure
of Giorgione’s woman, the brief inscription remains closely
attached to her, as if to deny ‘the Word’ freedom from the
complicating experience of ‘the Flesh’.
In this way, too, Giorgione holds the more abstract alle-
gorical associations of the ‘Col tempo’ message at bay. It is
the illusion of La vecchia’s immediate bodily presence, in the
midst of an unfinished conversation with the viewer, that
he emphasizes. The observational intensity of Giorgione’s
treatment of the sagging flesh of her face, with its contra-
dictory indications of outer physical weakness and inner
strength, binds Giorgione’s old woman into the reality of
the present moment. Her puffy skin and wisps of thinning
grey hair cannot quite prepare us for the challenge of her eyes,
which burn with communicative intensity and emotion. Do
they express a settled and achieved wisdom, or something
much more terrible? Bitter resentment of pleasures lost, for
example, or fierce jealousy of the delights of the still young?
The famous art historian Erwin Panofsky acknowledged the
terribilità of the image, though he also made this the reason
for attributing the work to the young Titian instead, arguing
that the ‘gentle master from Castelfranco’ could not have
produced such a work. 49 Yet, as other Giorgiones such as
the Self-portrait as David (see illus. 2) indicate, this painter did
not always use a delicately retiring poetic mode. Many of his

works are much more provocative and disturbingly interactive
than Panofsky imagined.
As the old woman speaks, revealing a leathery tongue and
stumps of yellowing teeth, she breaks the gathering taboo of
European portraiture in the service of the educated courtly
elites, who understood that the mouth should be shown as
closed in order to demonstrate intellectual control over emo-
tions. As an impoverished member of the social underclass,
featured in a work that she probably did not commission,
condone or control, Giorgione’s sitter was exempted from
such rules of polite behaviour. But this does not mean that
she is depicted as the kind of posturing misogynistic car-
icature of Dürer’s imagining. Rather than offering a trite
message against carefree sensual pleasure, Giorgione forces
us to experience something of the sitter’s experience of loss
through the depredations of time, an emphasis that allows
her to appear more as a tragic figure than as a satirical one.
This old woman is surely not depicted in the positive light
imagined by some recent commentators, as an example of

virtuous old age, but neither is she made an example of.50 Still
very much present in her fleshly state, she goes on suffering
its inevitable tortures. Engaging the senses of her viewers,
the pain of her lived experience takes on an altogether more
bodily kind of connection with us. And her own attitude, it
is implied, is based less on pious Christian regret for former
pleasures taken, or on the related fear of God’s punishment
to come as she approaches death, than on the realities of her
painful physical experience in the present. She ‘regrets’, as it
were, in a secular rather than a spiritual way, and is tormented
more by the loss of her former beauty and confident self than
by any ethical lesson she has learned.
The depiction of open-mouthed figures, like those showing
eyes rolling in their sockets, was an increasingly well-known
visual trope borrowed from classical antiquity. It is tempting
to suggest a connection between Giorgione’s painting and
the rediscovery of the antique sculpture known as the Laocoön
just a year or so earlier in Rome, which also featured these
exaggerated facial indicators of inner emotion. Nearer to
home, the probable patron of La vecchia, Gabriele Vendramin,
exchanged an antique sculptural figure with bocca aperta with
another Venetian collector.51 Such figures were in any case
well known in Venice from the mounting of many relief
sculptures across the city, known as bocche di leone. In one such
work at the Ducal Palace from the Quattrocento those wish-
ing to make a private complaint against another citizen to
the state authorities were encouraged to post their defama-
tory messages through the open mouth of an old woman,
with the implication that her terrifying visage was the very
image of righteous moral denunciation (illus. 31). It would

probably be a mistake to tie these various visual sources too
closely to Giorgione’s La vecchia, even if his work shares certain
features with them. But his figure does, nonetheless, insist on
an unusually direct and intimate kind of communication with
us. As she speaks, the woman gestures towards herself with
her right hand, the so-called dexter manus that so often suggests
truth in Renaissance art and that Giorgione had already
employed in paintings such as his Self-portrait as David. And
this hand points towards her heart to suggest the verity of
what she is saying.
Speaking pictures were a common enough phenomenon

in Renaissance Venice, especially in the field of sacred art,
where they regularly caused redeeming miracles to happen,
sharing with, and actively responding to, the heightened
emotions and concerns of those who prayed before them.
But in Giorgione’s La vecchia such pictorial responsiveness is
transferred into a newly secularized pictorial domain that
persistently evokes the objectivizing conventions of portrai-
ture. And while the miracle-working religious images do not
31 A mid-15th-century bocca di leone in a wall of the Palazzo Ducale, Venice.
typically envision or make explicit the spoken interchange

between painting and spectator, Giorgione dramatized pre-
cisely this kind of verbal discourse, using modern illusionistic
conventions to make his picture quite literally appear to speak
to the beholder. Our uncomfortable discorso or conversation
with La vecchia threatens to close completely the gap between
painting and viewer. Rather than appearing as a fixed and
mute memorial to an individual’s past glory, as in the conven-
tional commissioned portrait, Giorgione’s sitter is presented
as unnervingly alive, sharing an ever-shifting present with
the countless myriad of succeeding viewers with whom she
demands to speak. And yet there is something always ongo-
ing and incomplete about this conversation. La vecchia must
always talk on, locked into the endlessness of the recurring
moment, paradoxically destined to voice her complaint about
the passing of time for all eternity.
time and the concert/thr ee ages of man

Small details in Giorgione’s portraits and portrait-like paint-

ings, such as the unbuttoned doublet in the Portrait of a Man,
or the woman’s slight hand movement in the Laura, have the
effect of making the sitter appear to occupy a shared moment
of intimacy with the viewer. In La vecchia the old woman speaks
directly to us in a conversation without end. She appears to
join us determinedly in the ongoing present, and this also
elucidates the theme of the painting, with its indication of all
prevalent temporality. This was to undo the monumentaliz-
ing and mnemonic functions of the Quattrocento portrait,
which had promised its sitter an escape from this onward
temporal flow insofar as it fixed or secured his or her appear-

ance and memory for posterity. As Alberti had noted,
undoubtedly with Hippocrates’ famous classical aphorism ‘ars
lunga vita brevis’ in mind, painting was god-like in its capacity
to defeat time, offering to make ‘the absent present’ and
allowing ‘the faces of the dead to go on living for a very long
time’.52
The idea of immortalizing people in painted portraits was
always over-optimistic, given that the mere depiction of their
faces did not, at least without the aid of written inscriptions,
secure an ongoing memory of their precise identities.53 In his
portraits and portrait-like paintings, Giorgione did not buy
into this idea of artistic preservation in the first place, re-
integrating his sitters into the moment, even if the price paid
for this was that they became more ambiguous. The radical
temporality developed in such works defaces, in this way,
the pictorial genre that they seem to engage, subjecting the
reserved time-defeating space of portraiture to a more radical
sense of contingency and transience. But this kind of submis-
sion of painting to time does not admit a diminution of its

power, as Alberti might have feared. If, in Giorgione’s hands,
art no longer maintains, fixes or monumentalizes, then it
instead gives a new sense of the ‘ongoing-ness’ of physical
existence in the world, and uncovers new possibilities of
emotional intimacy with the persons depicted.
Questions of time and transience are raised in many of
Giorgione’s works, linking La vecchia to the rest of his oeuvre
and indicating that it is, despite Panofsky’s doubts, one of his
most characteristic works. Time underlies the contrast
between youth and age, however mediated, in his Self-portrait
as David, and it underpins the contrast between the eternal

fixity of the monumental foreground of the Castelfranco
altarpiece and the indications of contemporary secular life in
the landscape beyond. As we shall see, in works such as the
Tramonto, the Three Philosophers and the Tempest, the distant sun
sets or a thunderbolt suddenly strikes, and considerations of
worldly temporality are again central to Giorgione’s concep-
tion. And this concern seems also to have been incorporated
into the visual elisions and disappearances of Giorgione’s
technique, which adumbrates forms rather than painstakingly
defining them. The reality of the world he depicts is made
dependent on the equally fleeting subjectivity of the eye that
beholds it. Meanings, in Giorgione’s conception, are also brief,
constantly truncated or obscured, rather than existing fully
or enduringly. And painting serves less to hold up or defeat
this human condition of transience than to acknowledge its
prevailing force.
If time had traditionally been understood in Augustinian
terms as a moral negative reflecting man’s fall from the grace
of God, its passing marking our ever-increasing distance from

the original state of paradise, then too much contemplation
of it could nonetheless appear as an invitation to the sin of
Acedia or sloth.54 But Giorgione’s concern was not primarily
moral or ethical in kind, and occurred as readily in his secular
works as in his sacred ones. His constant reminders of tem-
porality do not provide a lesson in Christian ethics, as our
analysis of La vecchia has already suggested, but lead instead
back to issues of human existential reality. Perhaps, too, a
heightened apprehension of time and its passing underpins
Giorgione’s special concern with music, given that it is a
specifically temporal medium, and that sound itself is the

most short-lived of the human senses.55 In a further painting,
traditionally known as the Concert or the Three Ages of Man, the

suggestion that we view a scene of music-making is made
slight, dependent on our very truncated angled view of a cou-
ple of staves of musical manuscript held by the boy (illus. 32).56
This characteristic visual reticence distinguishes Giorgione’s
painting from a concert scene by the young Titian, who leaves
us in no doubt that music-making is afoot, and includes two
penetrating portraits (illus. 33).57 Giorgione’s painting, on
the other hand, remains typically ‘portrait-like’, not quite
allowing us to believe that it is a triple portrait, let alone to
identify specific sitters. A concert is perhaps indicated again
32 Giorgione, Concert/Three Ages of Man, c. 1507–8, oil on panel.
by the raising of the young man’s finger, as if he is pointing

out the figure of musical time or ‘tactus’.58 There are no
instruments, however: if we are to see these three as making
music, then this is imagined as a matter of hearing alone
(notice the emphasis on the old man’s ear that visually answers
the pointing hand). Through hearing, the figures might share
a brief moment of harmony, appearing as unified by a regu-
larized and sequential rhythm. Music, Giorgione’s visual
elisions may suggest, cannot be seen, and to this extent is the
very opposite of painting, which engages precisely that which
is visible.
Developing the comparison or paragone between artistic
media, music is different from painting again insofar as it is
a sequential medium that unfolds through time, while its
33 Titian, Concert, c. 1511–12, oil on canvas.
linear progress is organized by melodic harmony and rhythm.

But to this extent, Giorgione might suggest, it is also inferior
to painting, which possesses a special capacity to present
effects of visual simultaneity. Painting surpasses music just
because of its openness to a more complex and nuanced sense
of temporality. It might have been expected that the other
kind of longer-stretch human time implied in Giorgione’s
Concert, that relating to the idea of the ‘Three Ages of Man’,
would merely support the idea of the regularized beat of the
musical tactus. Drawing on a sacred iconography familiar
from recent tomb sculpture in Venice, Giorgione here
appears about to reinforce a more conventional kind of har-
mony between the different generations.59 But then the old
man’s doleful, knowing gaze out of the painting is allowed to
meet our own, disturbing the comforting pattern. Once
again engaging Leonardesque ideas of physiognomic con-
trast, while also recalling something of the power of the aged
woman’s stare in La vecchia, this man’s wizened features form
a telling contrast with those of the beautiful boy and young
man to his left, one that speaks eloquently enough of time’s

inevitable depredations. Suddenly breaking the harmonious
spell of the intimate circle of listeners to look out over his
shoulder, the old man’s sadly knowing eyes catch our own, as
if to collude with us in our knowledge of something less com-
forting about time, beyond the short-lived illusions of
harmony.
four
Landscape and Figure
G
iorgione’s interest in individualized human beings
is evident enough in the portrait and portrait-like
paintings discussed in the previous chapter. But
he was also, and seemingly from the very outset of his career,
particularly concerned with the non-human appearances of
the landscape. Natural forms had, of course, always been
subject to symbolic interpretation in painting, as in many
other art forms. But they nonetheless offered special oppor-
tunities for the play of artistic invention or fantasia beyond
the control of text-based meanings or narratives.1 Unlike
portraiture, however, landscape painting had not yet prop-
erly emerged as an independent artistic genre around 1500.2

Among Giorgione’s works are one or two in which the natural
setting itself appears to be the primary carrier of meaning.
But in the majority of his paintings the exact relationship
between the landscape and the figures so carefully set within
it remains more ambiguous, appearing as the underlying ques-
tion posed to the viewer. In the Three Philosophers and the
Tempest, Giorgione keeps us guessing as to whether the human
figures, placed as if in a narrative painting or allegory in the
foreground of the picture space, will serve to explain the
theme of the painting; or whether they are to be understood
as expressions of the powerfully evoked natural environments

they inhabit.3
Giorgione’s special engagement with the landscape was
undoubtedly another aspect of his artistic inheritance from
Giovanni Bellini, in whose paintings it had long played an
important role. 4 For Bellini, the landscape was not just a
secondary natural setting or background to the sacred sub-
ject, but was centrally involved in the expression of the given
theme. Bellini typically drew on the countryside of the terra
ferma, Venice’s territory inland from the city, a place of great
affection for the lagoon city-dwellers, many of whom would
have been very familiar with its appearances, or have owned
34 Giovanni Bellini, St Francis in the Desert, c. 1476–8, oil and tempera on

panel.
125 Landscape and Figure
properties and land there. Bellini often included topographical

details of well-known landmark buildings in terra ferma towns
and cities in order to further remind his viewer of this or that
location.5 These buildings were, however, typically set within
landscape arrangements that Bellini himself had invented;
and to this extent his views of the countryside are also generic
or synthetic products of his own imagination. These carefully
constructed landscapes are also arranged to best express the
given sacred theme. Despite their familiar or worldly appear-
ance, they are always ‘landscapes of faith’, closely allied to the
visual realization of the given sacred subject matter.6 Natural
or ‘disguised’ symbols, sometimes bringing Bellini’s approach
close to that of fifteenth-century Netherlandish painters,
were also important, so that a rising sun might serve well to
express Christ’s Resurrection, or a battle between an egret
and a snake, the fight between Good and Evil.7 In Bellini’s St
Francis in the Desert, which once hung near to Giorgione’s Three
Philosophers in the Venetian palace of Taddeo Contarini at
Santa Fosca, the miraculous theological event of the Receiving
of the Stigmata is easily contained within the natural econ-

omy of the landscape, rather than dramatically overturning
its order (illus. 34).8
The sacred world is to this extent made intimate and
familiar by the inclusion of the landscape. Religious mean-
ings always remain at the level of disguised analogy, rather
than being more explicitly stated, so that naturalistic appear-
ances are not disturbed or undermined. Powerful effects of
light play a similar role in Bellini’s landscapes, suggesting at
once God’s divine radiance and the natural conditions of the
powerful sun on the terra ferma. In the St Francis, it is the way in
which the sudden intrusion of heavenly light at the top left

is not wholly distinguishable from that falling so intensely
across the entire shining landscape that best indicates Bellini’s
approach. Whether heavenly or earthly, Bellini’s light is always
clarifying and defining, allowing the precise details of a myr-
iad of natural objects, flora and fauna to stand out in plain
view. And the natural world that Bellini presents is a culti-
vated, humanized and comforting domain, well populated and
cancelling the potential of otherness or threat. Nature sup-
ports or accommodates, its tranquil mood encouraging serene
reflection and the contemplation of the eternal truths that
underpin its appearances. This is the case even when Bellini
depicts a saint in the wilderness, such as St Francis on Mount
Verna, who experiences a supernatural intervention. Bellini
lays out the landscape in order to facilitate our ready move-
ment through it, and this effect of easy accessibility is increased
by the provision of linking elements, such as man-made gates
and pathways, or natural features such as rivers and mountains.
Even the striated rocks seem ready to accommodate the needs
of St Francis, as if ready carved by nature to provide a natural

seat or arbour to facilitate his constant prayer and meditation.
Rather than providing a limit to human experience or know-
ledge, Bellini’s landscape is a domain that benignly overlaps
and supports the practical and spiritual activities of man and
his relationship with God.
the ador ation of the shepherds

In the early religious works by Giorgione landscape already
plays a significant role in a manner that immediately recalls
Bellini’s example. But despite his development of various

pictorial devices to link figures and settings, the landscape
itself is glimpsed from afar, partially hidden or interrupted by
foreground forms or structures, or appearing as a hazy abstrac-
tion beyond dividing walls or partitions. In his Adoration of the
Shepherds, which might date from a few years later in 1505–6,
we are granted more immediate visual access to a landscape
that seems for the first time to fully absorb the figures into
its wider domain (illus. 35).9 Giorgione generated the mean-
ing of his painting by developing contrary spatial directions
between a plunge into the depth in the landscape to the left
and a lateral movement across the picture surface encouraged
by the horizontal arrangement of the two shepherds. The idea
of contrasting imagery between the two halves of the painting
supports this, juxtaposing an accessible and gentle country
view towards a lakeside with contemporary-looking buildings
and distant mountains – replete with a tiny figure admiring
the view – and the more enclosed and secluded scene to the
right. In this latter zone, our progress into depth ends abruptly
with the mountainous rock and the visual obscurity of the

cave. Like the enlarged tree bole included to the right of the
early Judith (see illus. 5), this vertiginous feature is presented as
a section of an even larger structure that notionally continues
beyond the picture. The motif of sheer rock harbouring a deep
cavity gives an impression of the monumentality of nature, its
massive but incomplete form remaining indecipherable. In
many ways, this feature offers a stark contrast to the accom-
modating familiarity and accessibility of the well-populated
civilized landscape to the left. It may be that Giorgione
sought to imply that the shepherds have just arrived from the
one domain – domesticated and humanly knowable – into

another much less comforting one, dominated by unyielding
vertical rocks and dark obscurity where they encounter the
mystery of Christ’s birth.
There are some well-known precedents in north Italian
painting for showing just two shepherds rather than the more
usual three in this subject.10 But it may nonetheless be that
Giorgione implies that the ‘missing’ shepherd is the viewer
himself, whose eye must turn away from the sensual pleasures
of the lowland landscape to the left, towards the harsher, but
more sacred, scene to the right. The position of the two shep-
herds also accommodates a direct view of the Christ child
from the spectator’s position in front of the work. To this
extent Giorgione’s painting subtly dramatizes this projected
viewer’s moral choice. And reference to the patron’s own
elevated rank is perhaps also reflected in the way that these
‘shepherds’ appear, despite their theatrically ragged clothing,
as young Venetian noblemen in disguise, their delicate bod-
ies and postures, like the elegant lost profile of their heads,
supplying clues that these are rustics in disguise, and share a

more elevated social status with the viewer.11
So much might tell us that this painting was made for
an elite young patrician collector in Venice, who may have
liked to imagine the rural world through the prism of pasto-
ral poetry, but also understood his moral duties as a devout
Christian. If Giorgione departed to some extent from the
expected rustic humility of the Adoration of the Shepherds
theme in making the adaptation to the context of a private
cabinet painting, then he also invited his patron to contrast
two opposing realities between the secular left and sacred
right of his painting. It is no accident that the two depicted

shepherds so definitely turn their backs on their comfortable
former domain in the course of their new engagement with

the latter. And this sacred region is, unlike in the early Adoration
of the Magi (see illus. 13) or the Holy Family (see illus. 15), now
separated off from the world of man. An arch-like natural
grotto replaces the ruined man-made architectural structure
in the Benson painting, and the sense in that work that we
might still see a stable in the town of Bethlehem is, despite
the inclusion of the anachronistic cave-dwelling ox and ass,
cancelled altogether. Giorgione’s relocation of the Nativity
to a rocky wilderness was anomalous enough in iconographic
terms, but did reconfirm the contrasts of secular-sacred and
35 Giorgione, Adoration of the Shepherds, c. 1505–6, oil on panel.
culture-nature between the two sides of the painting. Such

clever and knowing departures from convention would have
been greatly enjoyed by Giorgione’s sophisticated patron.
Who this was is not quite clear, but might well have been the
Venetian citizen Vittorio Beccario who, as Isabella d’Este’s
agent reported, so prized his ‘very beautiful and unusual’
depiction of a ‘Night’ (or ‘Holy Night’) that he could not be
persuaded to sell it at any cost.
the tr amonto or ‘sunset landscape’

In the Adoration of the Shepherds Giorgione more definitely
engaged landscape with the theme of his painting, such that
its visual structure helps to express its underlying meaning.
The close interlinking of figure, subject and natural setting is
evident enough, and its general composition owed a great deal
to Bellini’s St Francis.12 But certain of the ideas that Giorgione
first experimented with in this work were soon to be devel-
oped further in works such as the Tramonto and the Three
Philosophers. In these paintings, Giorgione developed the idea

of a partial occlusion of the distant view, allowing the landscape
to be still further truncated or sectionalized. The massive out-
crop of rock in the Adoration, which sequesters the figures to
the foreground right, already served as a kind of anti-landscape
feature, contradicting the possibility of extended human vision
that underpins the presentation of an open panoramic view.
In the new works, large rocks and trees are combined with the
obscurity of shadowy caves to further undermine the expec-
tation of clarification given in a horizontally presented
landscape.
In the Tramonto, the first of these works, perhaps dating to

about 1507, the sheer or vertically overhanging rocks might
be mistaken for mere framing devices, facilitating move-
ment towards the buildings glimpsed along the horizon at
the centre (illus. 36).13 But these indications of human habi-
tation are almost lost to sight through their distance, so that
they do not provide a visual focal point, or a comforting alter-
native to the sombre harshness of the foreground scene. The
contre-jour effect of the outcrop at the left indicates the pres-
ence of the setting sun behind it, but also emphasizes our
distance from it. Our frustrated search for this light source
only returns us back to the foreground, in which the densely
opaque and space-destroying foliage of the trees supports
the colourless effect of the rocks, preventing escape into the
softer world of the far distance. The pool of yellowish water,
still and brackish, provides no relief from the monochro-
matic opacity of the other natural forms depicted, creating
irregular cliff-like banks that destroy any sense of a firm
horizontal or level ground. The irrational folds of the rock,
in which faces might easily seem to appear, further confuse

our sense of a logical spatial arrangement or recession: of
how one part of this haunting landscape might cohere with
another. In this psychologized pictorial domain, a darkly
ambiguous netherworld lurking beneath the hopeful surfaces
of rational understanding seems to emerge: one in which
uncontrolled monstrous chimeras appear among the shad-
ows. And this sinister effect is exacerbated by the disturbing
appearance of the twisting roots of the trees to the left,
which rise up from the depths to slither appallingly over the
surface of the rocks.
Something of the sense of dis-ease created by Giorgione’s

imagery in this painting is undoubtedly reflected in the over-
zealous restorations of the twentieth century, when sinister
additions were made in the form of two monstrous creatures
lurking in the pool at the centre and towards the right.14
As we have observed in a number of other instances, these
interventions are likely to have been stimulated by the post-
humous need to clarify Giorgione’s originally more ambiguous
mode of visual presentation. Yet a further pool-dweller, the
deformed open-beaked creature who appears about to leave
its sludgy domain and move towards the foreground figures,
appears to be entirely original. Although the seated figure
appears to glance in its direction, the men do not seem to
36 Giorgione, Il Tramonto (Sunset Landscape), c. 1507, oil on canvas.
have registered the creature’s imminent threat to their appar-

ently altruistic activities. If the St George and the Dragon in
the middle distance is a distracting modern addition, then
the disintegrating head and arms of St Anthony, glimpsed in
a cave to the right, seem also to be Giorgione’s work (illus.
37). Giorgione’s inclusion of this saint, like the menaced men
who appear to help and heal one another in the foreground,
might suggest that this painting was another commission
from the powerful Grimani family who funded an Antonite
hospice in Venice. The family leader, Cardinal Domenico
Grimani, apparently had a special taste for the gruesome
paintings of Hieronymus Bosch (1450–1516), and owned two
versions of the Temptation of St Anthony, which include
many similarly devilish creatures.15 But in the Tramonto, the
saint has retreated so far from view that he is easily missed.
Perhaps, in his quest for the spiritual insight attendant upon
self-denial, he actively seeks to become part of the rock itself,
disappearing into its dismal light-defying structure and losing
many of his identifying human qualities in the process.
37 Detail from Giorgione, Il Tramonto (Sunset Landscape).
Giorgione’s petrifying saint is very far from Bellini’s joyous

figure of St Francis who steps boldly forwards to meet the
clarifying light of God (illus. 34). This difference can stand as
a paradigmatic marker of Giorgione’s direction of travel away
from Bellini’s visual and spiritual certainty. If, in the older mas-
ter’s work, the landscape and its figures serve to make nature
always more intelligible to us, as well as newly comprehensible
in terms of its relationship with the divine, then the opposite
is true in Giorgione. The shadowy Tramonto is a painting that
undoubtedly reflects the intensifying impact of Leonardo’s
work on Giorgione around the years 1506–7, modelled with
sweeping masses of softly contrasting lights and shadows
that cancel the possibility of closely defined details. But this
generalizing approach also provided a new opportunity to
create overall mood or atmosphere, and by extension to sug-
gest that what is seen in a landscape is always in part a matter
of our own human projection. Giorgione’s approach in the
Tramonto, as in the works that followed immediately from it,
introduced a new dimension of emotional subjectivity into
the depiction of landscape forms, suggesting that they may

be no more than projections of the beholder’s inner thoughts
or emotions.
The recent technical examination of Tramonto has indicated
that it is a religious painting, despite the fact that its main
protagonist is quite literally buried within the all-prevalent
forms of the landscape. Such imagery still engages, in certain
ways, earlier depictions of the sacred wilderness or desert in
which rocks and caves dominate over verdant pastures.16 It is
often argued that Giorgione’s approach to landscape is essen-
tially more classical than Christian, reflecting the impact of
imagery derived from all’antica pastoral poetry, and that this

distinguishes his work from Bellini’s.17 But the evidence for
this is less than convincing, given the kind of darkly ambiguous
meanings that Giorgione increasingly allowed to infuse his
depictions of the natural world. The simple harmonies of
shepherd life imagined in the Virgilian literary tradition of
pastoral have relatively little place in his troubling paintings,
even if they become more familiar in those of his followers.
If, in a work such as the Adoration of the Shepherds, the possibility
of pastoral escape into the innocence of nature underpins the
left side of the painting, this is already juxtaposed with a more
serious sacred conception to the right. In the sinister rocky
domain of the Tramonto from a year or two later, with its distant
and disappearing sun and foreboding sense of imminent dark-
ness, we are further still from the comforting poetic ideals of
the classical Arcadia. But the evident connection of such
paintings with earlier depictions of the Christian wilderness
was not ultimately to prove defining. As works such as the
Three Philosophers and the Tempest reveal, Giorgione’s darkening
vision of nature did not lead to his development of a new kind

of sacred landscape art.
the thr ee philosophers

In the Three Philosophers, the enlarged figures, shown in brightly
coloured and elaborately contrasting dress and placed towards
the front of the picture, immediately suggest that this work
is a subject painting or an allegory (illus. 38).18 Yet the pre-
cise subject is even less apparent than that of the Tramonto.
Giorgione’s careful maintenance of a visual balance between
natural and human forms is in itself one source of the doubts

about its wider meaning. Despite the prominent figures, the

landscape serves as much more than a mere setting and is
visually demanding. Its complex or ‘difficult’ formation still
draws to some extent on the Adoration of the Shepherds and the
Tramonto, in particular expanding the motif of the darkened
cave mouth. The painting has been cut down at the left by
as much as 17.5 centimetres (7 in.), meaning that the effect of
a visually impenetrable void would originally have been still
more apparent. Set opposite to this dominating feature are a
series of massive intertwining tree trunks that are equally dif-
ficult to understand in terms of their exact position in space,
38 Giorgione, Three Philosophers, c. 1507–8, oil on canvas.
their relation to one another or to the earth beneath. Then,

still further to the right, and completing the screened-off
effect of the foreground, Giorgione includes a dark bed of
dense foliage, whose creeping shadow engulfs the right side
of the old man.
This landscape is, in fact, radically irregular (note the
bizarrely erratic ‘hairy’ line of the edge of the cave, which
seems to respond to the writhing confusion of the bare tree
boles). The eye has no way of navigating in a logical way from
front to back in the Three Philosophers, given that the middle
ground disappears once again, as in several of Giorgione’s
earlier works. A thin residual sliver of far distance is all that
remains to provide a sense of an expansive or explicatory view.
As in the Tramonto, an impression of sequestered exile from
the wider world of human culture dominates. It is uncertain
whether Giorgione directly responded to Bellini’s St Francis
in the Desert, given that this much earlier work may not have
arrived in Taddeo Contarini’s collection until after the death
of its original patron, Zuan Michiel, in 1513.19 But there are
enough similarities between the two paintings to indicate that

Giorgione had Bellini’s ground-breaking work closely in mind
as he worked on the Three Philosophers. He maintained Bellini’s
overall idea of a contrast between rocky foreground and a
softer agrarian distance with human habitations, as also the
curving pools of striated rock that provide a kind of natural
dais for the figures. Bellini’s influence is evident again in the
depiction of the old philosopher’s softly modelled head and
beard, which recalls the older master’s recent figure of St
Jerome in his San Zaccaria altarpiece of 1505. But Giorgione
also asserted his difference from Bellini in many other details.
In the draperies of the old man, he indicated his modernity in

painting by using the newly available mineral-based pigments
of orpiment and realgar.20 The broad tubular and looping
fall of highly lit drapery is much closer to Leonardo than to
Bellini. If Bellini’s St Francis shows a brightly lit and precisely
defined world of pristine clarity and light that barely needs
to acknowledge the miracle that occurs within it, then in
Giorgione’s painting everything is much less apparent, with
pools of dark and amorphous shadow becoming extensive.
The strange assemblage of obscure or contradictory visual
motifs generates an effect of bricolage, undermining the idea
that we view a joined-up landscape whose combined features
will help to elucidate the underlying meaning of the painting.
Its various elements are disintegrated, perhaps even self-
contradictory. The way in which these individualized motifs
press up close to the picture surface, appearing as incomplete
sections of larger unseen formal masses, only makes them
appear more ambiguous. The close juxtaposition of the bare
wintry tree trunks with the lush summer foliage to the right
and the spring sapling to the left suggests the appearances of

more than one season at once. And the setting sun apparently
glimpsed as a yellowing orb on the horizon is contradicted by
the fall of light onto the facades of the distant buildings from
a position far to the left. If the sun really does set to the left,
then it remains hidden away in a similar position to that in
the Tramonto, and must also be taken as the cause of the
powerful contre-jour or silhouetting effect of the zigzagging
foreground bank. The combination together of these diverse
features might suggest that Giorgione sought to present a
more allegorical image of the changeability of the natural
world, featuring its different phases and appearances through

time, rather than recording a single moment. This wider tem-
poral conception would correspond with the presentation
of the three men in different phases of life (young, middle
aged and old), and is perhaps also picked up again in their
placement on three shallow ascending natural rock steps,
each of which relates to the other in a series of interlinked
concentric circles.
But all this remains a matter of conjecture, and it is no
surprise to find that doubts about the precise identity of the
three men have multiplied since Michiel’s initial description
of them as ‘philosophers’ in 1525.21 In an inventory from
twenty years later, they are described only as ‘figures’, while in
another of 1638 they appear as ‘geometers and mathemati-
cians’. Much later again, in 1783, they are mentioned in an
inventory of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna as
the ‘Three Magi’, so initiating a long series of interpreta-
tions of the work as a biblical painting showing the three
kings waiting for the appearance of the star of Bethlehem.
That interpretation appeared to gain further authority when

an x-ray taken in 1932 seemed to prove that Giorgione had
initially shown the middle philosopher as black rather than
tawny-skinned, therefore further encouraging an identifica-
tion of him as the well-known African magus Melchior.22 But
this figure currently appears as Arabic rather than African,
and further technical examination of what lies beneath the
painted surface, undertaken in 2004, has shown that the fig-
ure had never been painted as black.23 The new infrared
reflectography also put paid to the more general theory that
Giorgione initially made paintings whose subjects were clear,
then deliberately obscured his imagery in the course of paint-

ing in order to create ‘picture puzzles’ for the enjoyment of
his patrons.24 We now know that while Giorgione certainly
experimented quite radically with figures and appearances in
the course of pictorial execution (the old philosopher once
wore an astonishing headdress with solar rays exploding from
it), he did not typically move from clarity to obscurity in the
process of making a painting; neither did he systematically
attempt to hide the subject matter of his works that had
begun as clearly stated. Giorgione’s thematic ambiguity might
instead have been more fundamental still.
There is, in fact, no reason to disbelieve Michiel’s ini-
tial identification of these men as ‘philosophers’, even if his
assertion that the youngest of them studies ‘the rays of the
sun’ is difficult to understand from what we can see in the
painting; his further comment that the work was finished
by Sebastiano del Piombo has also been disproved by the
recent technical analysis.25 Two of the philosophers certainly
appear to be intent on explaining the meaning of the world,
given that they hold instruments for its potential explication

through precise measurement. The elder holds up a parch-
ment sheet to our view with astrological diagrams: we glimpse
a quarter moon and a circular spiked disc numbered from 1
to 7, both suggesting calculations relating to a lunar eclipse.
In his right hand he holds a compass with which he has pre-
sumably made these figures. But the parchment appears oddly
irregular in shape, as if it has been bitten into or partially
damaged, and some of its findings lost. Similarly, the young
man holds a set square and compass in his hands, and looks
outwards as if directly observing and analysing the forms
of nature, making an earthly and practical contrast to the

old philosopher’s more abstract or theoretical focus on the
movements of the heavens. Yet this young and eager scien-
tific observer peers only into the empty sight-annihilating
darkness of the cave. It is unclear whether he has noticed the
fig and ivy leaves that appear out of the penumbra, let alone
recognized their possible meaning as symbols of the coming
of Christ, as has been suggested.26 It is, rather, the cave itself
that he looks towards, and his preoccupation with this amor-
phous feature must cast doubt on his ability to accurately
measure what he sees.
The enormous cave in Giorgione’s painting has perhaps
inevitably been linked to that featured in Book 7 of Plato’s
Republic.27 But it seems very unlikely that the painter closely
followed Plato’s famous book, given that many features of
his painting do not conform to the text. It is, after all, hard
to see the Three Philosophers as either a subject painting or a
learned allegory. If it is allowed that Plato was in Giorgione’s
mind, it is likely that this was because the philosopher’s
famous cave metaphor served the wider implication, evident

in many of his paintings, that it is difficult to arrive at true
or precise meanings merely by observing the ambiguously
changeable appearances of the world. If the philosophers in
Giorgione’s painting, like those in Plato, have escaped from
the cave, shedding the illusions of the many still enchained
within it watching flickering shadows of reality, then their
own efforts to understand the truth appear little better.
Giorgione’s painting has also been seen as a celebration of the
supposed intellectual progress of human understanding, with
the three contrasting figures understood as representative of
three consecutive historical phases of Aristotelian philosophy:

ancient Greek scholasticism, Arabic Averroism and the exper-
imental ‘scientific’ humanism of the Italian Renaissance.28 But
Giorgione’s presentation remains altogether less positivistic,
suggesting rather the inevitability of the ongoing human
struggle to properly understand the world.
So much is evident from many of the unsettling features of
his pictorial presentation: above all, perhaps, from the setting
of the philosophers in a disjointed contradictory landscape, in
which what is seen might superficially appear familiar enough,
but cannot, in the end, be fully understood or interpreted.
The tattered parchment of the old man, whose aged body is in
any case about to be swallowed up by the encroaching darkness,
does not necessarily promise insight or lasting understanding.
Neither does the inert passivity of the turbaned figure to his
right, presented trivially touching his belt and without the aid
of instruments to suggest the possibility of new insight. Such
negative implications might even explain the way in which the
seated figure turns determinedly away from these two and
directly towards the natural forms before him, his measuring

tools at the ready in his attempt to truly understand them.
But his stare into the darkened void indicates that he too is
destined to fail in his attempt. Indeed, his grounded posture,
as if fatefully bound to the lowly earth, might deliberately
recall the folkloric Renaissance type of the creative but frus-
trated figure of Melancholy: the humour often shown as a
frustrated seated figure holding instruments of measurement
that prove of little use in the quest for knowledge.29
man in a landscape
In both the Tramonto and the Three Philosophers, Giorgione’s
treatment of the relationship between man and nature is
haunted by darker possibilities of danger and ignorance.
Populating his landscape using the enlarged forms of twisting
tree trunks, sinister pools, impenetrable foliage, sheer cliffs
and black caves, Giorgione developed a new vocabulary of
natural imagery that departed from Bellini’s uplifting ‘land-
scapes of faith’, just as it differentiated itself from the pleasing
leisure-filled dreams of the classical Arcadia envisaged in pas-
toral poetry. Giorgione’s landscapes in these works are made
significant in visual terms, but are also structured so that our
eye cannot pass easily through them or arrive at precise expla-
nations about what they might mean. Enlarged but also
obscured natural forms have a habit of looming over the
human protagonists who have shrunk by comparison, and
might be threatened by them. In two further works, probably
made in the years 1509–10, Giorgione explored these divi-
sions or tensions between figure and landscape still more

closely.
In a red chalk drawing known as the Man in a Landscape
(illus. 39) a more precise level of information about the place
depicted seems to be given. It was demonstrated by a group
of local architects in 1978 that this drawing features the
walls of the Castel San Zeno at Montagnana.30 Despite this,
the familiar Giorgione traits of visual reticence and seman-
tic uncertainty are nonetheless very much in play, and the
apparently objective topographical information of the back-
ground is undermined by other elements that indicate that
something much more than a local view is intended. As in the

Three Philosophers, the foreground figure appears to be very sig-
nificant or even determining; but who he is, precisely, remains
mysterious. The figure is shown beyond the protective walls
of the castle or city, his body pointedly turned away from
human habitation as if he is in a self-imposed exile, beyond
the reach of society or culture.
The Man in a Landscape is the sole survivor from a larger
group of graphic works that were, until about thirty years
ago, quite regularly ascribed to Giorgione.31 Within less
than a decade this number had been cut to just one by
leading Giorgione scholars, although it seems implausi-
ble that this really is the only drawing that he produced.
The very high quality of the Man in a Landscape indicates in
itself that Giorgione was a practised draughtsman and that
he drew often enough.32 The Rotterdam drawing might tell
us something about Giorgione’s approach to graphic media
more generally, given its very particular visual qualities. It
is relatively large for a Renaissance drawing and finely exe-
cuted using a subtly abbreviated touch directly comparable

with Giorgione’s paintings. It may be that this carefully
composed work was intended more practically to serve as
a model for a contemporary printmaker in Venice such as
Giulio Campagnola (1482–1515), who certainly produced
‘Giorgionesque’ engravings from his arrival in Venice in 1507
onwards (see illus. 56). But no prints directly after Giorgione’s
works are known, and it is equally possible that the drawing
was made as a stand-alone work to be enjoyed in its own
right. Given the finished appearance of this surviving exam-
ple, it may be that Giorgione more generally treated drawing
as a kind of semi-independent medium, rather than merely as

a working tool in the preparation of a painting. If Giorgione
did not, as Vasari later noted, use drawing in a preparatory
way like a central Italian painter, he did nonetheless draw,
creating works that he considered as autonomous works of

art. Such productions would have readily overlapped with his
paintings, especially as in both media he typically worked on
a smaller scale and with a free and adumbrating touch. If the
Man in a Landscape takes on painterly qualities in its easy gen-
eration of a broad sense of spatiality and atmosphere, then
Giorgione’s paintings themselves contain many sketch-like
formal abbreviations that remind us of drawing. This was
to blur the conventional Renaissance boundaries between
visual media, as also the related distinction between finished
and unfinished works.
39 Giorgione, Man in a Landscape, c. 1509, red chalk on paper.
It is possible that Giorgione might have seen one or other

of Jacopo Bellini’s great sketchbooks, both of which contain
detailed perspective drawings of architecture, including
careful recordings of receding city walls (illus. 40).33 Jacopo’s
mid-fifteenth-century example might even have encouraged
Giorgione’s return to a superficially more objective (or at least
recognizable) treatment of the walls at Montagnana. But
40 Jacopo Bellini, City Walls with Well, c. 1450, leadpoint on paper.
closer comparison with Jacopo’s example immediately indi-

cates that Giorgione readily reduced the solidity of bricks and
mortar to a wash-like insubstantiality in the background of his
image to serve his usual highly pictorial and self-expressive
mode. The idea that the spatial objectivity of architecture
could serve to provide the basis for a carefully plotted linear
perspective so evident in Jacopo’s drawings is undermined as
Giorgione makes the precise spatial recessions of his castle
walls difficult to understand. If his drawing still allows us
to identify these walls as those of Castel San Zeno, then it
is also true that the diaphanous pictorial treatment reduces
them to mere indicators, abbreviated in a similar manner to
the very loosely suggested folds of the river bluffs in front
of them. Even allowing for the severe loss of chalk from the
surface over time, it is evident enough that Giorgione sought
to maintain a delicate sense of the way in which all forms
(solid and otherwise) lose their three-dimensionality under
prevalent atmospheric conditions of light, moist, vaporous air
and distance.34 But this atmosphere is also bleakly emotional
in kind, seeming to take its tone from the solitary crumpled

man in the foreground. The surrounding landscape might even
be taken as an outward manifestation of his ‘difficult’ inward
thought or emotion.
Who precisely this suffering figure is has inevitably become
a matter of speculation. The Old Testament religious prophet
Elijah has been mentioned, whose time in the desert was alle-
viated through his miraculous feeding by a God-sent raven.
Or perhaps he is the ancient poet Aeschylus, father of Greek
tragedy, shown in exile from the city of Athens.35 There is an
indication that he might be weak from hunger, or even further
physically disabled, given that he leans heavily on his stick,

despite his already seated position. But the supposed bird at
the upper right that might suggest that he is Elijah is very
difficult to see, given the extent of the water damage in this
particular area of the drawing, and there is little else to confirm
a precise identification. Giorgione had already developed the
idea of the landscape as desert or wilderness in recent paint-
ings, apparently without remaining closely tied to a specific
subject matter or text. The sense of a figure’s potential isolation
and vulnerability is already a kind of semi-independent visual
trope in his works and might just as easily suggest that this
outsider is a more generic figure of a philosopher, hermit or
pilgrim, wandering alone in nature, beyond the protection of
the city walls. Perhaps his apparent physical disability suggests
that he is an impoverished beggar, given that representatives
of this common social type were often shown wearing outsized
cloaks and hoods and brandishing sticks in this period.36 On
the other hand, Giorgione’s lonely man is in animated conver-
sation or discourse with himself, pointing with the first finger
of his raised left hand like an ancient rhetorician, as if suddenly

inspired by some deep philosophical thought. For all the hard-
ship, this detail seems to suggest that social or cultural exile might
also stimulate enlightenment.
the tempest
The little painting known as the Tempest is perhaps the most
often explained painting in the entire Western tradition of
painting to the extent that it has become almost impossible to
view it without a myriad of earlier ideas about what it might
mean crowding in (illus. 41). For the twenty-first-century

viewer the Tempest can all too easily appear as little more than
a palimpsest of interpretations in which dense patterns of
exposition ‘show through’, even if each theory was originally
intended as discrete and all-encompassing. Now, they inev-
itably overlap with one another so that no one theory quite
41 Giorgione, Tempest, c. 1509, tempera and oil on canvas.
manages to exclude or suppress the next. Giorgione would

undoubtedly have been surprised that his little work would
eventually stimulate such an effect, although he might not have
been too upset. It is true enough that the zeal for a conclusive
reading only really gathered force when a more ‘scientific’ kind
of art history emerged in the later nineteenth century. Prior
to this, the Tempest was very little noticed (it is not mentioned
at all by Vasari or Ridolfi, for example). Around 1800, when
it was displayed in the Manfrin Gallery in Venice, it was
repeatedly identified as a self-portrait of the painter with his
wife and child.37 This interpretation was not based on any
information about Giorgione’s personal life, and owes more
to emergent nineteenth-century ideas about the virtues of
family life than to historical reality. But it at least has the
advantage of recognizing that the Tempest is something other
than a ‘subject’ or allegorical painting, suggesting that it
might be better understood as an intensely personalized kind
of work that seems to reveal the painter’s own formative
input at every point.
It was only from the later nineteenth century onwards that

this strange little painting began to attract significant atten-
tion among art historians, though the lateness of this interest
does not mean that these more recent modern exercises in
interpretation are entirely beside the point. Even if such
attempts can sometimes appear as little more than displays
of the given interpreter’s learned knowledge, it remains likely
that Giorgione particularly encouraged his viewers to venture
a ‘reading’, presenting his work as an open visual template
ready to receive the impress of a myriad of differing responses.
In all his works, as we have seen, Giorgione generates an
extended space for the viewer’s projections, encouraging or

even requiring this as much by his visual elisions and formal
reductions as by his departures from standard Renaissance
iconographies. This kind of performative visual ambiguity is
nowhere more apparent than in the Tempest, where even the
superficially simple folds of the ground at the front of the
picture are difficult to understand as receding clearly into
space: how does the foreground stream relate to the ruins at
the left or to the river flowing towards the city beyond? How
far are we, exactly, from the bridge leading to the city gate, or
from the breaking storm beyond that?
As we have encountered before in Giorgione’s work, the
Tempest does not readily divulge its precise picture type or
category. It is slightly taller than it is wide, unlike the other
works discussed in this chapter, in which the horizontal for-
mat supports the idea of a landscape painting. The shape of
the painting is thus somewhat unexpected and yet important
enough in generating its particular mode of address. The
picture shape might suggest that we see something other
than a landscape and that the figures are more significant, espe-
cially as the man is in an upright position, his wooden staff
providing a powerful indication of verticality, and that this is
re-emphasized by other elements on his side of the painting,
such as the two broken columns, the edge of the ruined wall
and the spindly trees, even if all these potentially stabilizing
features are shown as slightly awry. As in many paintings in
a vertical format, the most dramatic action occurs at the top
of the painting.
It is the evident importance of the human figures that has
given rise to the plethora of suggestions for the painting’s
subject: the way in which they are placed almost (but not
quite in the case of the woman) in front of the landscape, sug-
gesting that they express a story or allegory of some kind, and
that the landscape will ultimately take its meaning from them.
This idea has encouraged an understanding of the work as a
moral allegory of Fortune, Fortitude and Charity, for example,
with the figures seen as virtues that counteract the danger of
the storm.38 The upright posture of the standing man con-
trasts with the reclining, seated woman, and this gendered
42 Titian (?), A Mother and a Soldier in a Landscape, c. 1510–11, oil on canvas.
figural contrast recurs in a near-contemporary painting that

can be seen as an immediate Venetian response to the Tempest,
perhaps by the young Titian (illus. 42).39 In this work, how-
ever, the staff-holding man is dressed in armour, while in the
Tempest he wears parti-coloured stockings and breeches, and a
fashionably short-cut jacket over a gold-embroidered white
camicia: an elaborate attire that has reminded some of the
extravagantly sensuous costumes worn by patrician members
of the Compagnie della Calza.40
Michiel’s identification of these figures as ‘a soldier and
a gypsy’ in 1530 thus appears immediately difficult to under-
stand. Was Michiel simply being careless, or was he already
confused about the figures in the Tempest? Giorgione was in
the habit of creating just this kind of doubt about the pre-
cise identity of his figures, suggesting that the ambiguity was
quite intentional and that Michiel’s uncertainty was genuine
enough. If the young Titian did indeed make the painting that
is now in the Fogg Museum at Harvard, then it seems likely
that he followed Giorgione’s lead, rather than vice versa, and
that his work was painted shortly after Giorgione’s, around

1510–11. In making his response, Titian characteristically
sought to clarify and confirm identities, paying particular
attention to the male figure, who now becomes unambigu-
ously a soldier. Although the early provenance of the work
is unknown, it may be that Michiel had also seen it in a
Venetian collection, and that he simply followed Titian’s
clarification of the male figure when describing the Tempest
itself. On the other hand, it is evident enough that Giorgione
knew very well how to paint a soldier, as his armoured saint
in the Castelfranco altarpiece tells us (see illus. 18). The man
in the Tempest may superficially recall the contrapposto of this

saint, but his air of studied nonchalance or sprezzatura, like his
lavish dress, is closer to the lolling attendant to the right of
the Adoration of the Magi (see illus. 14).
Is this young man really so comfortable as his stylish pos-
ture would suggest, given that his head twists sharply against
the frontal position of his body, suggesting the intensity of his
response to the woman and child? This movement appears as
momentary and is further emphasized by the disappearance
of his left arm behind his torso. At the same time, the poten-
tial connection between the two figures is serially interrupted.
The man does not share the same horizontal plane with the
feminine object of his attention, and is in any case physically
separated from her by the deep fissures of the stream and its
steep banks. And then she twists her head away from him
as if to put the possibility of their intimate relationship still
further in doubt. Given the questions over Michiel’s identi-
fication of the ‘soldier’, we might also doubt his idea that this
woman is ‘a gypsy’. Both soldiers and gypsies were becom-
ing familiar in the gradually emergent tradition of genre art

across Europe around 1500.41 And such everyday social types
were particularly associated with outdoor settings. Soldiers
loll in the background of Giorgione’s Castelfranco altarpiece,
for example, while breastfeeding gypsy women had recently
appeared in Italian popular prints.42 Taking Michiel’s identifi-
cation of the woman at face value, could it be that Giorgione
depicts a gypsy family in the Tempest, destined to wander
beyond the safety and control of the city and radically sub-
ject to the vicissitudes of nature?43 The lightning flash would
then symbolize the special vulnerability of such people to
fortune (fortuna), as also their harsh fate as earthly and poten-

tially sinful wanderers on earth. The idea that Giorgione
here represents social outsiders is tempting enough, given
his depiction of similarly exiled figures wandering in lonely
landscapes in works such as the Tramonto and the Man in a
Landscape drawing, a work more closely related to the Tempest
in visual terms than any other in his oeuvre.
The lavish and elegant costume of the man suggests, how-
ever, that he is a wealthy Venetian patrician rather an
impoverished or ragged travelling gypsy. Giorgione had already
demonstrated his readiness to depict such young noblemen
in the guise of shepherds in his Adoration of the Shepherds (see
illus. 35), and the sense that the man in the Tempest might be
performing a rustic part (with wooden shepherd’s staff rather
than sharp-edged metal weapon) persists. The woman’s
glance away from him indicates that this might not, after all,
be a family of any sort. Her eyes unexpectedly meet the spec-
tator’s, immediately making us a constituent part of the
drama. This was a device that Giorgione had often used
before in his portraits, with the beholder made key to the

imaginative completion of the work. If the sensual power of
the woman’s sideways glance is made poetically analogous to
the sudden lightning flash beyond, tellingly positioned slightly
to the right of centre, on her side of the painting (and perhaps
echoing the profile of the left side of her semi-naked body),
then this is also to implicate ‘us’. We must engage with her
with a special interest, or even a longing, that is every bit as
passionate as that of the man.
It seems likely that Giorgione again sought to tailor his
imagery to the immediate physical presence of his patron
viewing the work, as he had already done in earlier paintings

such as the Castelfranco altarpiece and the Adoration of the
Shepherds. This patron was, in all probability, the Venetian
nobleman and art collector Gabriele Vendramin. The careful
arrangement of the figures in relation to both one another
and to the spectator also allows us to appreciate just how
significant these are in the Tempest, quite apart from the way
in which they may or may not reflect a precise subject matter.
A well-known reconstruction of the painting based on x-rays
shows that Giorgione had originally included a seated naked
woman in a different posture on the man’s side of the stream
(illus. 43). This might suggest that Giorgione originally con-
ceived of his painting as an entirely feminine domain, perhaps
drawing on well-established literary convention of the Renais-
sance dating back to Boccaccio in the fourteenth century that
placed alluring female nudes in landscapes. The addition of
the man, however, complicates the scene, generating a new
kind of erotic tension between the ‘masculine’ left of the paint-
ing and the ‘feminine’ right. The continued presence of this
second woman, even after the young breastfeeding mother and

the storm were already in place, suggests that her final replace-
ment (the man) was a very late addition to the work. The very
lateness of this switch from female to male might suggest in
itself that this figure was an afterthought, and that he was
intended to function as a kind of surrogate viewer within the
painting. The man’s presentation as a stylish and contempo-
rary young patrician who also views the woman would have
enabled Vendramin to identify directly with him. Unlike the
woman he replaced, who also stared out of the picture at the
viewer, he shares ‘our’ fascination with the one who remained.
Half in and half out of the picture space, he too is immediately

enamoured with the semi-naked young beauty to the right.
But Giorgione was careful to pay his young patron a further
compliment by making him, imagined as the primary viewer,
the first object of her attention. The proxy painted observer
is thus finally defeated by the real one standing before the
work, given that he does not enjoy the acknowledgement or
confirmation of her returning gaze.
It may be, however, that the viewer’s ‘victory’ is less certain
than this would make it appear, and that the Tempest is as much
about the denial of the gaze as it is about reciprocity. In a much
43 Reconstruction of Giorgione’s Tempest based on x-rays.
later Venetian mythology from the late 1550s, Titian recalled

the arrangement of the figures in the Tempest, generating the
drama of his work by extending a similarly passionate male
view horizontally across the empty central foreground of the
picture space towards a desirable seated and semi-naked
female to the right (illus. 44). In Titian’s work, the relation-
ship between the two is more fraught again, becoming central
to the tragic theme of the painting, in which the hapless mor-
tal Actaeon inadvertently stumbles across the chaste goddess
Diana, who later responds by turning him into a stag to be
hunted down and killed by his own dogs. Nothing so dramatic
or explicit is, of course, evident in Giorgione’s Tempest, which
is typically reticent in its presentation of a narrative. But it
may be that the impotency of male desire is nonetheless
hinted at in features of the landscape such as the truncated
or frustrated phallic verticality of the columns and ruins
directly behind him, which contrast so markedly with the
fertile horizontal spread of vegetation that surrounds the
women’s sprawling body.
Observation of the complex erotics of the man/woman

relationship in the Tempest have inevitably led to suggestions
that she is the untouchable goddess Venus suckling Cupid, who
is admiringly watched by an impassioned young male mortal
from across a sacred stream. Images of Venus spied on by amor-
ous masculine eyes had become very popular in contemporary
prints. Even if the dandified appearance of the young man is
far enough removed from the aroused satyrs often featured
in such imagery, it may be that Giorgione had something
similar in mind. Perhaps he is shown as Polifilo, the wandering
amorous lover in the Hypnerotomachia Polifili (1499), who comes
across a statue of his beloved goddess Venus in the woods and

waxes lyrical on its sensual power.44 Giorgione was certainly
aware of this recent flagship vernacular production of the
Aldine press in Venice, and drew directly on one of its woodcut
illustrations for his Venus (see illus. 51 and 54). Yet there is no
close visual or textual equivalent for the imagery of the Tempest
in the Hypnerotomachia, and no other artist of the period
attempted to directly illustrate a scene from it in a painting.
Many interpretations of the subject matter of the Tempest
fall short because they cannot account for all of the features of
the painting, or must exaggerate some of these at the expense
of others in order to arrive at a supposedly watertight conclu-
sion. It is often argued that the painting represents a response
to a classical text: more recently, Lucretius’ De rerum natura and
Hesiod’s Theogony have been suggested. 45 But in each case the
proposal is weakened in an art-historical sense by the fact
that these ancient works did not inspire any other paintings
in the period; and in a methodological one by the implicit
assumption that Giorgione’s painting must necessarily be an
illustration of a specific literary text. Seeing the Tempest, instead,

as a religious work at least has the advantage of making it
appear to contribute to a known visual iconography; and
added support can be given to the given theory by linking its
composition to previous visual examples. In the most famous
recent offering of this sort, the man and woman are seen as
Adam and Eve, recently ejected from Paradise (represented
as the Eternal City beyond), and newly subject to a life of
sin, work and death.46 God’s wrath is symbolized by the light-
ning flash. But in order to arrive at such an interpretation
many visual details of the painting have to be set aside (such
as the contemporary appearance of the man and the city),

while others have to be superimposed that are not fit for
purpose, for example the spindly bush in front of the woman
becomes a fig leaf suggesting Eve’s shame. And it is even pos-

sible to add one or two details that might not be present in the
painting at all, such as the supposed snake seen creeping into
a hole at the lower foreground.
Given the evident problems with seeing the Tempest as a
recognizable subject painting, whether mythological or reli-
gious in kind, it may be more fruitful to ask whether it had a
more precise historical meaning, perhaps reflecting recent
dramatic events in Venice. Could it be that Giorgione con-
structed a deft political allegory showing the Siege of Padua
by the forces of the League of Cambrai in 1509, with the storm
44 Titian, Diana and Actaeon, 1556–9, oil on canvas.
symbolizing the coming of war?47 Can we see the man as a

member of the makeshift army of patricians sent to heroically
lift the siege, with the woman understood as a symbol of
the charity of the Venetian state itself? There are, as might by
now be expected, serious issues with both these iden-
tifications. As we have seen, the man cannot really be taken as
a soldier, while the figure of Charity conventionally has two
or more children, and there is little to connect Giorgione’s
sensuous woman with the kind of patriotic allegorical figures
of ‘Venetia’ often featured in the city’s official art. Such
attempts do, though, have the virtue of revealing that Gior-
gione was not quite so ambiguous about where, exactly, the
scene of his painting is set. The view of a town or city along
the horizon was familiar enough in Venetian paintings with
landscapes, as was the implication that this might show a
specific place on the terra ferma. In the Tempest, the presence
of the Venetian lion and the upturned cart that was the coat
of arms of the Carrara family on the facades of two of the
background buildings indicates that we see Padua, the local
town close to the area known as the Padavano where Gabriele

Vendramin owned extensive country estates. As we have
seen, Giorgione had already depicted the city walls of nearby
Montagnana, just to the south of the city, in a similar fashion
in his drawing of Man in a Landscape, a work that might well
have been another commission from Vendramin. As we have
seen, the painter had made just this kind of special visual
accommodation to the terra ferma interests of another patron,
Tuzio Costanzo, in his Castelfranco altarpiece (see illus. 18).
The reference to Padua does not, however, mean that the
Tempest is a political allegory of the Cambrai War. It might
just as easily be a response to Vendramin’s personal interest

in poetry, given that this town was the birthplace of Petrarch.
Much more certain again is the fact that Giorgione’s depiction
of a storm was wholly unprecedented in Venetian painting,
making a clear departure from Bellini’s calm and sunlit
landscapes, as also from his own earlier work. We have seen,
however, that Giorgione had already moved away from the
more comforting, humanly orientated landscapes of late
Quattrocento painting towards imagery suggesting visual
obscurity and potential danger, in which nature is granted a
new measure of independent power in works such as the
Tramonto and the Man in a Landscape. Now, in the Tempest, he
indicated its unruly energy with greater emphasis still. But
however forceful it might be, nature was not ultimately per-
mitted to overpower Giorgione’s own skill as a painter. The
Tempest is, after all, an extraordinarily well resolved and ‘artful’
painting in a formal sense. Giorgione pays particular attention
to the way in which changes in the sky control and transform
what is seen in the landscape below, with the actual colours
of objects giving way to chance and shifting atmospheric

effects.
The dark turquoise grey of the lowering storm cloud has
not yet cancelled out the last shafts of sunlight – note how
the sun can still be glimpsed at the edge of a cloud above the
lightning fork – but has nonetheless exaggerated these to a
livid cream or yellow. As this altered light strikes the facades
of the buildings it makes them appear to glow preternaturally
against the dark of the arriving storm. At the same time, the
blue of the river and green of the foliage have become suffused
with black, their original colours again radially distorted. This
was to capture the most fleeting of visual effects using subtle

admixtures of paint. It was also to emphasize the susceptibility
or contingency of human sight itself. Yet Giorgione’s colours
are carefully chosen and manipulated to create a dramatic
artistic effect, serving to compose or unify his painting so
that every form is suffused with closely related modulations of
olive green, sandy yellow and dark blue. Even the hint of scarlet
in the man’s jacket is modulated to suggest a foreground
equivalent to the fiery heat of the lightning flash far beyond.
Giorgione may have been asked by Vendramin to make a
free kind of work based on the ancient Greek painter Apelles’
depiction of a thunderbolt, which he had read about in the
new Aldine edition of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History pub-
lished in Venice in 1506. 48 And perhaps in making his little
painting, so bespoke in kind, Giorgione also had in mind the
kind of sensual imagery fashionable in so-called imprese, the
emblematic hatpins or badges worn by high-ranking individ-
uals to reflect their changeable states of mind. It is true that
Giorgione represents a tempest that has not quite arrived: one
about to break, rather than raging in full force directly over-

head. But in the luridly transformed premonitory colours we
already sense the way in which normal human vision must yield
to the effect of blinding lightning and the deafening crack of
thunder. The Tempest to this extent engages and acknowledges
the contest between the human senses in the midst of such
rapidly changing natural phenomena: the way in which their
usual ordering is suspended or overturned within the tempo-
ral flux of the present moment. Sonic allusions often occur in
sixteenth-century imprese, and although the Tempest is certainly
larger than these tiny images, it may be that this painting
was, like them, also presented as a reflection of the subjective

experiences of its owner. The Tempest would, to this extent,
appear as a kind of impresa in the form of an easel painting: as
an outward representation of personal mental associations,
albeit with an emphasis on the ultimate power of the human
senses. Perhaps a very diluted response to Giorgione’s little
painting is evident in one emblematic sonic work of this kind
dating from the 1550s showing a thunderbolt striking a moun-
tain with the motto ‘lightning strikes the highest mountain
tops.’49 But as with so many other later responses to Giorgione,
this moralizing emblematic message also represents a kind
of clarificatory retreat from his originally enigmatic pictorial
presentation.
Giorgione’s Tempest can be usefully compared with the
near-contemporary paintings of the Danubeschule by Lucas
Cranach (1472–1553), Albrecht Altdorfer (1480–1538) and
Wolf Huber (1485–1553), even if it is difficult to make close
formal parallels based on mutual influence.50 Comparison
with contemporary German painting is most useful for its
suggestion of a parallel, though perhaps essentially independ-

ent, development towards fully fledged landscape painting
in the first decade of the sixteenth century, though this was
arrived at first in the drawings and paintings of Altdorfer,
rather than in Venice. Whatever Giorgione meant by his
figures in the Tempest, it is evident that they remain highly
charged and expressively significant. On the other hand, all
these artists, north and south, seem to have shared a sense
that the painting of natural forms and effects allowed them a
new space for experimentation. Just as Altdorfer’s intimate,
densely wooded forest views served as a locus for artistic
self-reference or signature, marking him out as an innovative

and original northern master, so Giorgione’s depiction of the
storm in the Tempest was perhaps always intended to be seen
as a pictorial tour de force, a self-conscious display of art’s
ultimate supremacy over the powerful forces of nature.
five
Nudes
I
n the second version of his ‘Life of Giorgione’,
published in 1568, Giorgio Vasari strongly criti-
cized the painter’s frescoes on the canal facade of
the German Warehouse (Fondaco dei Tedeschi) at the Rialto
in Venice, announcing that the painter ‘thought of nothing
save making figures according to his own fancy, in order to
display his art’. The result, we hear, was that ‘there are no
scenes to be found there with any order, or representing the
deeds of any distinguished person, either ancient or modern’.
Vasari goes on to state that ‘I, for my part, have never under-
stood them, nor have I found, for all the inquiries I have
made, anyone who understands them, for in one place there

is a woman, in another a man, in diverse attitudes . . . nor can
one tell what it may all mean.’1 Vasari’s criticism of Giorgione’s
frescoes in the later edition of his book has its context in his
gathering attack on the Venetian painters’ supposedly unfo-
cused sensuality by comparison with the more intellectual
Florentines, a position that owes something, at least, to the
rise of Counter-Reformatory aesthetics. Giorgione’s frescoes
are faulty, Vasari states, precisely because they fail to illustrate
an underlying ethical idea, based on the illustration of a given
subject matter drawn from a culturally revered literary source
167 Nudes
(the Bible, history and so on). Even if Vasari’s critical words

reflect his Tuscan bias against the Venetians, it may also be that
he put his finger on a key feature of Giorgione’s approach. As
the discussion so far has suggested, this painter did indeed seek
to move beyond the control of a given text or a conventional
meaning, introducing many sensual, intimate or psychological
details that work against clear moral meanings.
fr escos for the fondaco dei tedeschi

Given Vasari’s partisan and punitive tone, it comes as no sur-
prise to find that many sympathetic art historians have since
attempted to answer his charge by claiming that Giorgione’s
paintings originally had a dignifying subject matter that has
been lost over time. His frescoes for the Fondaco, it has been
claimed, had a coherent or justifying iconography of this
kind, perhaps representing ‘Hercules and the Nymphs of the
Hesperides’.2 The ‘flaming’ red colouration of the surviving
fragment of the Standing Woman (illus. 45) has been used to sug-
gest that his cycle visually and thematically responded to the

setting of the sun on the west-facing Fondaco facade. And yet
the evidence for such an environmentally engaged interpreta-
tion remains slender especially given that the recent restoration
of the fragment has revealed a much less red or ‘flaming’ flesh
coloration. The underlying meaning of Giorgione’s cycle is,
in fact, as obscure today as it was for Vasari in the sixteenth
century. This need not mean that these largely destroyed works
were of lesser significance or value; and perhaps it is their ‘not-
subject’ quality that is the most interesting thing about them.3
Although the official documents tell us that Giorgione’s cycle
45 Giorgione, Standing Woman, 1508, fresco removed from the top floor
of Fondaco dei Tedeschi (between fifth and sixth windows from left
on the canal facade).
169 Nudes
was commissioned by the Venetian state in 1508, neither the

surviving fragments nor the eighteenth-century engravings
recording certain details of their already damaged appearance
indicate that these works closely illustrated a specific text or
had a precise allegorical meaning. Instead, they seem to have
featured a series of anonymous male and female figures freely
invented by Giorgione.
Giorgione’s ‘artistic’ approach at the Fondaco must in part
have been encouraged by the given picture type. Facade fresco
painting in Venice was traditionally commissioned inde-
pendently of the state by leading families of the city. However
prominently such works fronted the city’s public spaces, they
were not considered so valuable (in either an aesthetic or
financial sense) as interior oil painting, and were typically
commissioned as a kind of money-saver against the higher
costs of sculptural facade decoration. By the late fifteenth
century, when one foreign visitor described Venice as ‘a
painted city’, facade painting had developed its own partially
distinct visual vocabulary, featuring decorative illusionistic
fantasies, including vegetal and zoomorphic motifs rather

than ‘serious’ patriotic or sacred histories.4 Facade painting in
Venice already bore an ephemeral relationship to the main-
stream of oil painting, and was typically executed by young
artists towards the outset of their careers. It was not expected
to survive too long, given the salty climate of the city. But
Giorgione’s commission of 1508 was different insofar as it
was an official commission to decorate the exterior of a newly
built state building at the mercantile heart of the city. And
the kind of full-length naked figures that he painted had not
been seen before in the context of Venetian facade frescoes.
The depiction of nudes was certainly a fast-emerging theme

in Renaissance art, but still had few precedents in large-scale
public works in Venice. It may be that the increasing interest
in the representation of naked bodies in the second half of the
fifteenth century owed as much to incarnational theology as
it did to the classical revival, and it is telling that nude figures
first appear in Venetian art in large-scale sacred works.5 Gio-
vanni Bellini had introduced contrasting old and young male
nudes in his San Giobbe altarpiece as early as the late 1470s
(see illus. 17), while Antonio Rizzo (1430–1499) and Tullio
Lombardo had done likewise in certain of the niche sculptures
they produced for the Ducal Palace and for the lavish patrician
tombs in the city’s monastic churches. These figures were
presented as representations of familiar sacred persons, as if
the public’s identification of them as saints Job and Sebastian,
or as Adam and Eve, was necessary to control or offset their
potential to suggest the more independent realities of corpo-
real existence. The context of these ‘hidden nudes’, typically
presented as standing figures within wider formal ensembles,
and as contributors to carefully arranged programmes of sacred

and/or patriotic iconography, mitigated still further their
potential to generate more direct or immediate effects of phys-
icality. At the Fondaco, Giorgione’s figures were presented
outside any such justificatory sacred context, apparently as
showpieces of his own decidedly secular artistic interests. These
anonymous figures possess a new kind of independent sensu-
ous (though necessarily more ambiguous) existence beyond
the reach of conventional narratives or meanings.
Giorgione’s approach at the Fondaco appears to reflect
his more general concern to escape the close control of
46 After Giorgione, ‘Standing Woman’, engraving from Anton Maria

Zanetti, Le varie pitture a fresco de’ principali maestri veneziani (1760).
47 After Giorgione, ‘Seated Woman’, engraving from Anton Maria

Zanetti, Le varie pitture a fresco de’ principali maestri veneziani (1760).
48 After Giorgione, ‘Seated Man’, engraving from Anton Maria Zanetti,

Le varie pitture a fresco de’ principali maestri veneziani (1760).
.
giorgione’s ambig uity
externally derived literary subjects. It had already encouraged

his particular interest in portraiture and ‘portrait-type’ paint-
ings as also in the creation of ‘landscape-like’ works. Now in
the Fondaco figures he once more dispensed with the usual
supportive props of subject-based paintings. Insofar as the
original appearance of these works can be reconstructed from
the surviving fragments and engravings, it appears that they
continued his approach in the smaller-scale paintings he
completed in the media of oil and tempera. From Anton
Maria Zanetti’s engravings published in 1760, it seems that
49 Pier Jacopo Alari Boncolsi (‘Antico’), Apollo, c. 1490–96, bronze and

silver.
175 Nudes
Giorgione featured full-length figures shown in a variety of

complex standing and seated postures, some of which (at
least) were placed in foreshortened architectural niches (illus.
46–8).6 Fingertips and toes poked out over carefully defined
parapets to suggest the illusionistic three-dimensionality of
the figures. Zanetti undoubtedly embellished these figures in
accord with his eighteenth-century classical-academic taste,
presenting them in the manner of antique sculptural frag-
ments that makes it difficult to reconstruct the precise mode
of Giorgione’s original address. But it is evident enough that
Giorgione sought to make his figures appear as living beings,
whose attractive mobile bodies appear to share the same world
as ourselves, and who make familiar unanticipated move-
ments rather than studiously premeditated ones. While their
nudity might seem to recall the sculptures of classical Greece
or Rome, these figures are not closely based on any known
examples from the art of antiquity. Despite Zanetti’s classi-
cizing idealizations, it appears that the original effect was
intensely lifelike and sensuous rather than formally correct.
Perhaps Giorgione again engaged the paragone between paint-

ing and sculpture, allowing his figures to appear superficially
as if they were a carved frieze (and thus fulfilling one expec-
tation for Venetian facade painting noted above), while then
revealing them as painted illusions whose capacity to give an
impression of the pinkish flesh of human bodies went beyond
the non-naturalistic tones of marble or stone.
The heads of Giorgione’s figures seem to have remained
important, and perhaps appeared more like his closely indi-
vidualized portraits or portrait-like works than the generalized
types featured in classical sculptures. The gazes of the seated
50 Michelangelo, Ignudo, c. 1511–12, fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine

Chapel, Vatican City.
177 Nudes
figures are sometimes turned downwards, as if to directly

acknowledge and engage the viewer. The familiar interactivity
of Giorgione’s approach is thus evident again, as if his imagery
anticipated the active input or projection of his viewers in
order to achieve its intimate effect. And despite the dramatic
foreshortenings and contrapposti of the figures’ limbs, their
bodies appear to move and respond casually, as if in response
to a chance conversation continued with the beholder or each
other. The Seated Man looks intently to his lower right while
pointing to his left, apparently towards the next painted figure
along (illus. 48). His figure might faintly recall the upper part
of the already revered late antique sculpture known as the
Apollo Belvedere, a work well known in Venice by 1508 through
the production of reproductive statuettes by sculptors such
as Antico (c. 1460–1528, illus. 49). In Giorgione’s figure, how-
ever, the effect is made decidedly non-classical, given that the
man’s head points in the opposite direction to his arm. This
opens his body to the lateral scansion of the facade surface
while also suggesting that his posture is fleeting or contingent,
defined by a passing or chance movement or emotion. In these

works Giorgione seems more generally to have avoided an
effect of all’antica monumentality, as can be found in the ide-
alized ignudi that Michelangelo began to depict on the Sistine
Chapel in the same year. Perhaps the contrasting position of
the lower limbs in the Seated Man, with the right leg dramati-
cally raised and the foot tucked in behind the calf of the left,
had an influence on certain of Michelangelo’s figures (illus.
50).7 If Michelangelo’s muscular anatomically perfected figures
are presented as exemplars of internal formal cohesion and
resolution, expressing independence from both the narrow
spaces they occupy and the viewer peering up from below,

then Giorgione’s figures appear as if radically subject to these
immediate contingencies. Perched uncomfortably and pre-
cariously on the fictive architectural edges, they peer at one
another or down to the spectator below, making immediate
eye contact, or gesture to point out something to us. Perhaps
drawing on a famous distinction made by Kenneth Clark, they
are better considered as ‘naked’ rather than ‘nude’, at least
insofar as they refer more directly to the fluid realities and
unstable contexts of the human body, rather than to a fixed
or abstracted ideal version of it.8
Vasari strongly implied that Giorgione’s figures were drawn
directly from life, and this might be reflected in their apparent
independence of existing formal models or types. And yet
passive conformity to the outward appearances of the examples
he found in nature had never been the defining feature of
Giorgione’s approach; and Vasari’s suggestion probably owes
more to his own central Italian opposition to the supposedly
more empirical Venetian approach than to the historical
reality of Giorgione’s working practice. It seems much more

likely that in these frescoes Giorgione freely invented lifelike
figures without being closely dependent on specific living
models. In sensual portrait-like works such as the Young Man
with an Arrow (see illus. 25) and the Laura (see illus. 27) he had
already presented mysterious figures which were apparently
modelled on the appearance of real individuals but that can
hardly be understood as the products of a naive inductive
naturalism. In these paintings there is already a sense that we
might be viewing partially dressed figures, at least insofar as
the sitters’ remaining clothing serves more to reveal the soft
179 Nudes
flesh beneath than to cover or conceal it. This effect of semi-

nakedness is not so apparent in an early work such as the Judith
(see illus. 5), but the careful attention given to his heroine’s
revealed flesh and to the extremity of her limbs (fingers and
toes) nonetheless makes her physical presence appear tangible
enough. In the frontally presented Standing Woman (see illus. 45
and 46), Giorgione appears to have returned to his figure of
Judith, recalling her upright and frontal presentation, with
bent right arm slightly recessed from the right of her torso, but
this time showing her naked. The Seated Woman (see illus. 47),
on the other hand, might conceivably be taken as a first idea
for the woman in the Tempest (see illus. 41) completed a year or
two later, particularly in the area of the left arm shown trailing
across her body to touch her right knee, and the consequent
slight hunching of her shoulders as she looks to her left.
Giorgione’s ambiguous Fondaco frescoes might not, after
all, have been narrowly based on the close analysis of real
bodies. If an observation-based approach to the human form
had become the norm by the late fifteenth century in parts
of central Italy, ‘life-drawing’ was by no means an estab-

lished or standard practice in Venetian workshops by 1508.
Giorgione’s approach was equally free from the close control
of an established formal canon based on the works of antiq-
uity to regulate how a body might be shown, despite his odd
reference to one classical sculpture or another. At the time
of the Fondaco frescoes the depiction of the nude in Italian
art remained a field of experimentation and diversity, not
yet governed by the concern to accurately represent the facts
of human anatomy, or to remodel these with reference to
the revered models of the classical tradition.9 If Giorgione
was relatively uninterested in the supposed science of per-

spective painting, or in theories of physiognomic expression,
then in the Fondaco figures he maintained a similar freedom
from the rationalizing control of anatomical study. But he
did maintain and further develop his concern to present the
sensuous reality of living human bodies that we have noted in
many of his other paintings. Rather than showing his naked
figures as physical exempla that embodied an intellectual
ideal of the perfect human, he presented them instead as
ambiguously transient beings, whose forms move unexpect-
edly or adventitiously, and who might even appear like fluid
projections of the beholder’s own inner world.
venus
In a further important painting from this period showing the
goddess Venus, Giorgione again demonstrated his burgeon-
ing interest in the depiction of the unclothed human body
51 Giorgione and Titian, Venus, c. 1510–11, oil on canvas.
181 Nudes
(illus. 51). In this work, the naked figure is extended expan-

sively across the foreground space, echoing the horizontality
of the picture shape, her reclining form turned outwards to
maximize our view. Giorgione’s painting was easily his most
influential work, given that it was destined to serve as a fun-
damental model for many subsequent painters in Venice, as
also for hundreds of later artists across Italy and Europe
when dealing with the subject of the reclining erotic nude. In

these circumstances it would be easy to see it as a prototypical
Renaissance depiction of the idealized female form: as a per-
fect image of beauty that owed more to the abstract intellectual
idea in the mind of the painter than it did to the realities of
a specific living human body. Recalling Clark’s formulation
again, it may be that Giorgione’s Venus appears more as ‘nude’
than ‘naked’. The perfected internal balance and proportion-
ality of her body, like the careful classicization of her head,
announces a universalizing ideal rather than a personal iden-
tity or physical reality. And to this extent it might be assumed
52 Giorgione and Titian, detail from Venus.
53 Roman copy of Praxiteles, Venus, 2nd century ce, marble; restored

by Ippolito Buzzi (1562–1634).
183 Nudes
that Giorgione, in this self-consciously artful presentation,

abandoned the more spontaneous and interactive qualities
so evident in his Fondaco figures. But perhaps it would none-
theless be a mistake to claim that ‘all the sensuality has been
distilled off from this sensuous presence, and all the incite-
ment.’10 Closer attention to Giorgione’s figure reveals that he
introduced an easily overlooked detail that suggests some-
thing quite different. As Venus lies back with eyes closed, she
moves her left hand across her pubic area, the fingertips of
her left hand seeming to slip into her vagina (illus. 52).
As we have noted in other Giorgiones, the visual suggest-
iveness of the detail resides in the measure of ambiguity that
he allows to surround it. In characteristic fashion, Giorgione
first suggests a possibly meaningful detail but then does not
allow us to quite confirm its presence or precise significance.
We cannot, after all, be quite certain that we see what we seem
to see: might the fingers, after all, just lie innocently on the
surface of the goddess’s body? And isn’t her covering gesture
an action of modesty, following a well-established visual
convention in classical and all’antica depictions known as the

Venus pudica (illus. 53)? Nonetheless, closer visual comparison
with the arm and hand in famous examples of this latter
type does suggest that it was Giorgione’s intention to intro-
duce a potentially transformative semantic possibility. In
many sculptural examples, well known in the Renaissance, an
all-important space between hand and body is maintained
with the fingertips extended downwards and remaining
wholly visible in front of the body. In the ‘Venus of Modesty’
tradition, the goddess covers rather than touches herself. In
Giorgione’s figure, on the other hand, the fingers are no
longer outstretched, but bent at the distal and proximal

interphalangeal joints so that the tips themselves disappear
from view into the shadow (with perhaps a hint of pubic
hair) between her thighs.
We do not, that is, quite see that she pleasures herself,
although that seems to be the implication. Even if we take
Giorgione’s hint, and her action is thus understood to offer
a reverse meaning to the Venus pudica, was this really such a
departure from the wider all’antica tradition in Renaissance
art and culture? Sexual excitement on seeing an image was
well established as a natural and justifiable response to the
great masterpieces of ancient erotic art.11 In a much-read
passage in Pliny’s Natural History, recently republished in a
lavish new Aldine edition in Venice, the author describes
how Praxiteles’ Venus of Cnidos (widely known from Roman
copies such as that illustrated here) had been stained by the
seed of a young male admirer who was no longer able to dis-
tinguish image from reality.12 As a classical topos of the mimetic
power of naturalistic art, the sexually excited male response to
a great erotic artwork was deemed appropriate enough. It was,

in fact, already becoming a popular subject for visual imagery
in the early sixteenth century. Prints had appeared featuring
voyeuristic satyrs with erections viewing naked Venuses or
nymphs, aroused figures who served as playful surrogates for
the responses of stimulated male viewers. A woodcut illustra-
tion of this type in another Aldine publication, the
Hypnerotomachia Polifili (1499), provided an important formal
source for Giorgione’s figure of Venus. The goddess in this
print, tellingly placed adjacent to a passage in the text relat-
ing the hero’s aroused response to a Cnidian-style sculpture
185 Nudes
of Venus, reclines horizontally in the foreground with her

right arm raised to her head and her legs crossed in a very
similar manner to Giorgione’s goddess. At the same time, she
is approached by a sexually excited satyr with an erect penis
(illus. 54).13
In this woodcut, however, it is also true that the goddess’s
genital region is decorously covered by drapery, while her left
54 Benedetto Bordone (attrib.), ‘Satyr with Sleeping Nymph’, woodcut

from Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499).
hand lies passively on her raised hip. If the appropriateness

of sexual arousal is certainly suggested by the approaching
satyr, then this is strictly a male response to the sight of her
beautiful body. In Giorgione’s work, on the other hand, the

physical excitement appears to be transferred to, and gener-
ated by, the heroine herself. The goddess’s body beautiful is
now presented as independently self-stimulating rather than
as a passive object, dependent on an externalized male gaze.
And the suggestion that Giorgione’s Venus is sexually excited
may also encourage us to see other details of the painting in
this light. Another formal source for Giorgione’s figure was
the Sleeping Ariadne, a well-known and much-studied antique
work in the early sixteenth century (illus. 55). Probably work-
ing from a print after the sculpture, Giorgione reprises the
55 Sleeping Ariadne, 2nd century ce Roman copy of a Pergamene original of

c. 200 BCE, marble.
187 Nudes
Ariadne’s horizontally reclining posture with crossed legs, her

raised right arm encircling the head, and the lowered eyelids
suggesting that she sleeps. But the Ariadne exposes just one
breast and is otherwise elaborately draped, and both her arms
encircle her head. In Giorgione’s Venus, the half-concealed
left arm is altogether more active, snaking up from behind
the area of her breasts to engage with her pubic area, rather
than reiterating the significance of her head. And if her closed
lids might seem to indicate that she sleeps, then perhaps the
implied action of her fingers suggests otherwise, and that the
work’s traditional title is a misnomer. If she is not, in fact,
asleep, then her closed eyes may instead reflect an immediate
physical response to the sensations caused by the action of her
fingers. The sense of sight is, after all, temporarily suspended
or occluded during sexual arousal.
As in his other paintings, Giorgione allows a new kind of
authority to what Lessing once described as the ‘dark senses’,
those conventionally understood as most closely (and fatally)
attached to the body, especially, of course, in the Venus, the
sense of touch.14 Giorgione’s softened and blended brushwork

frequently realigned the usual Renaissance hierarchy of the
senses. He readily dethroned the rational clarity of vision
through his eliding and obscuring painterly touch, while
granting the physical bodies he depicted a new kind of sensual
presence. And perhaps too the closed eyes of his Venus served
to further undermine the usual balance of power between an
active, penetrative, all-seeing (and male) eye that fantasizes,
and a passive, non-aware female body that is the object of
his projections. As she closes herself off from the viewer, it is
Giorgione’s goddess herself who appears to determine things.
The pleasure depicted in the image becomes, to this extent,

her own: integral to the reality of her body and to some extent
independent of the sanctioning gaze of a male observer.
The all-dominant female body in Giorgione’s painting
emits contradictory signs regarding her identity. If she is on
the one hand presented as a remote iconic nude who exists
out of time as the masculine ideal of feminine beauty, then
her disappearing fingertips suggest something very different.
If the artfully arranged dispersal of her limbs and symmetry
of her facial features, which broadly recall the kind of famous
prototypes in classical sculpture noted above, suggest an
abstract formal perfection, then the all’antica spell is broken
by this detail, indicating that we might view instead a ‘real’
and living body, capable of feeling powerful physical sensa-
tions and of taking independent pleasure. If she masturbates,
then she must also be understood as existing in present time.
She becomes corporal and embodied. But the detail remains
just a detail, a mere suggestion that does not wholly undo
the wider effect of her finished beauty as a revered classical
deity. Giorgione’s ambiguous presentation undermines the

influential conceptual binary regarding the body envisaged
by Bakhtin, for example, between one presented as fully alive
and receptive but also ‘grotesque’, and one seen as perfect
and complete but also as fixed, closed and cut-off.15 If she
pleasures herself, she must in any case necessarily imagine
others, her apparently self-isolating action paradoxically
predicated on her desire to engage with the world beyond her
own body. And yet all this remains unpainted, as a mere asso-
ciation within the mind of the viewer. The goddess herself
is outwardly still and impassive, her beautifully balanced and
189 Nudes
finished figure appearing as the very image of a perfected

work of art.
In order to understand further Giorgione’s ambiguous
presentation of his nude, we need to take account of the
possible original function of the work as an invitation to
scopophilia, a stimulus to sexual excitement or activity for
those who viewed it. It has gradually become clear that many
of the erotic paintings featuring reclining naked figures of
Venus or her followers that feature in Venetian Renaissance
painting from the time of Giorgione’s Venus onwards were
commissioned in the context of a marriage.16 As the apparent
prototype of this kind of imagery, the original context for
Giorgione’s painting has itself been understood as epitha-
lamic, with the work seen as commissioned to mark the
marriage of its patron, Girolamo Marcello, to Morosina Pisani
on 9 October 1507.17 If so, then it seems more than likely that
it was made to hang in the newlyweds’ bedroom, where it
would have served as a visual stimulus to the couple’s sexual
activity and to their anticipated production of family heirs.
In order to serve its purpose, the painting would have to

excite both partners equally, and this would provide a plau-
sible contextual reason for the painter’s inclusion of the
intensifying onanistic detail. The possibility that the goddess
self-stimulates would hardly have excluded the young hus-
band from the effect of excitement. It may have been intended
to further absorb his young wife into the erotic circuitry
between image and reality, especially as the female orgasm
was sometimes understood as a prerequisite to the conception
of a child in the Renaissance.18 As the young couple viewed
their work in the intimate privacy of their bedroom, the
pleasurable action of the goddess of love’s fingers would have

served as a suitably affecting model for them both.
If Giorgione was more widely concerned to maximize
viewer response or engagement with his paintings, his inclu-
sion of this ‘stimulating’ detail must come as no surprise. But
the close association of Giorgione’s painting with Marcello’s
marriage is more difficult to establish than this would allow.
It seems likely that Giorgione never delivered his painting to
the Palazzo Marcello: Michiel tells us that it was finished by
Titian, presumably after Giorgione’s death in September 1510.
Recent technical analysis suggests that Titian did, indeed,
finish the work, adding an iconographically clarifying Cupid,
the landscape, the wine-red pillows and the crisp swathe of
silvery drapery at the front of the painting.19 In these circum-
stances, different possibilities present themselves: perhaps the
work was not a marriage painting after all, but rather a more
independent kind of production, made as a bespoke collector’s
piece to hang in Marcello’s collection alongside his other
works by Giorgione?20 This might, after all, better account
for its overall effect of visual newness. The more functional

interpretation in the marriage context is in danger of assum-
ing that the work was a somehow inevitable visual response
to circumstances and that its meaning would have been crystal
clear to its original viewers. But this was far from Giorgione’s
usual procedure in painting, and it is more likely that his Venus
would initially have appeared as a very strange and unprece-
dented work that challenged its contemporary viewers to
understand its new form and meanings. And even if Giorgione
was initially commissioned by Marcello around the time of
his marriage in 1507 to make a celebratory picture, it remains
191 Nudes
significant that the work was still unfinished almost three

years later in September 1510. Perhaps the painter was dis-
tracted by other important commissions such as that at the
Fondaco? Or perhaps he hesitated just because the figure that
he had already completed was so ambiguously risqué, fearing
that even a progressive patron such as Marcello might baulk

at its appearance?
Given the lack of precise documentation, it remains im-
possible to fully answer these questions. Yet it is clear enough
from the early responses of Giorgionesque artists working
in Venice that the significance of his provoking detail was
quickly registered or understood. The talented printmaker
Giulio Campagnola certainly reveals a pressing awareness of
it, appearing to decide that Giorgione had indeed depicted
the goddess self-pleasuring (illus. 56). He may have followed
another (now lost) depiction of a reclining Venus by Giorgione
56 Giulio Campagnola, Venus or Nymph, c. 1511–12, engraving.
mentioned in the sources that showed the goddess from the

back.21 Perhaps this lost ‘Venus-from-behind’ was a kind of
pendant to the Dresden painting that shows the goddess from
the front, and also showed a masturbating figure? Or maybe
Campagnola responded to Giorgione’s motif in the surviving
work. However this may be, it is hard not to see his self-
absorbed earthy nymph as intent on taking her pleasure as

her right hand moves between her legs. But he also studiously
turns the woman’s body away, excluding the spectator from
too explicit a view. This was also a subtle response to the
ambiguity of Giorgione’s original figure.
In a further work by Palma Vecchio (1480–1528), the
painter is less equivocal, decorously removing the goddess’s
left arm away from her pubis so that it once again lies pas-
sively on her left hip, as it had done in the Polifili illustration
noted above (see illus. 54 and 57). If the hands of Palma’s
woman retreat altogether from her genital region in a manner
57 Palma Vecchio, Venus, c. 1525, oil on canvas.
193 Nudes
that reveals her pudenda, this part of her body also becomes
a kind of inert visual blank or caesura, a semantic sacrifice to
the painter’s eagerness to cancel the possibility that she
might be sexually excited. In subsequent reclining Venuses
by Palma himself and younger painters such as Paris Bordone
(1500–1571), the hands of the goddess remain similarly dis-
tant from her pubic region, simultaneously revealing this
hidden part of the body while also making it appear visually
anodyne and desexualized.22 Among the many local artists
who responded to Giorgione’s Venus in the first half of the
sixteenth century, only Titian himself, the painter who had
been closest to the master, continued to develop the mastur-
batory motif, remaining uniquely sensitive to its expressive
implications and possibilities.
It is very likely that Giorgione had always planned to set
his figure in an extensive landscape, given that he was well
aware of the conventional literary connection between female
nudes and outdoor settings in erotic all’antica works such as the
Hypnerotomachia Polifili.23 He had already featured nudes in works
to be viewed outdoors, such as the Fondaco frescoes, and he

had placed a semi-naked female figure in the foreground of
the Tempest. Titian may have worked on the unfinished paint-
ing in the years immediately following Giorgione’s death.
Even if he did not know anything about the master’s original
ambitions for the Marcello painting, he managed to supply a
studiously ‘Giorgionesque’ landscape that supports or echoes
the figure rather than challenging her authority. Titian made
the soft reclining folds of the grassy pastures appear to take
their shape from the gentle curves of her body, as if to suggest
that the outward world in the painting was nothing more
than a further projection of her own self-pleasuring body.

And the younger master proved himself even more alert to
the possible significance of her disappearing fingertips by
adding a powerfully expressive twist of ridged drapery to the
immediate foreground area beneath this detail that serves as
a kind of visual analogue to the goddess’s auto-eroticism,
drawing further attention to its defining significance.24
Titian carefully maintained and developed the motif in
his apparent homage to Giorgione’s painting from the 1530s
(illus. 58).25 If certain aspects of Giorgione’s prototype are
altered (she is now awake), the position of the left arm and
hand is scrupulously maintained, the significance of the
fingertips further marked out by the vertical fall of the divid-
ing curtain, and euphemistically referred to again by the
mirroring disappearance of their counterparts on her right
hand into a bed of purple petals. All this was to make
Giorgione’s visually slight detail more explicit, and perhaps
even to suggest its centrality to the meaning of the work. But
it was also to undo the ambiguous duality of the prototype, to
make masturbation rather than modesty more definitely the

meaning of the image. Dropping the poetic pastoral connec-
tion between nude and landscape, Titian relocated the scene
to a contemporary bedroom complete with servants putting
the woman’s clothes into a cassone chest. And now this ‘so and
so reclining on her couch’, as Wallace Stevens once described
her, becomes more explicitly a contemporary beauty of the
here and now. Perhaps replete with the portrait-like head of
the contemporary courtesan Angela Zaffetta, she sports a
fashionable coiffure and wears expensive jewellery.26 And as
she looks out of the painting, her finger action is now made
195 Nudes
a response to external stimulus, tacitly brought back under

the control of the male onlooker. Wide awake and sexually
ready, she stares lovingly into the eyes of her unpainted part-
ner, her erotic movement an accommodating reaction to his
commanding presence.
All this says much about Titian’s artistic response to
Giorgione. If he certainly understood the sensual provocation
of the left hand in the Venus, and the related suggestion that
the nude female body depicted is living and sensate, then he
was also unhappy with the ‘doubleness’ of the older master’s
depiction: the way in which his original Venus balanced
contradictory possibilities of unfinished physical reality and
completed intellectual ideal. But Titian’s leap into a newly
explicit art of fully realized sensuous naturalism came at a
certain price. Giorgione’s Venus remains, by comparison with
58 Titian, Venus of Urbino, c. 1536–8, oil on canvas.
Titian’s modern woman, independently powerful and self-

possessed, whether or not she masturbates. Her stimulation
of male desire is made a mere by-product of her own author-
itative identity and bodily experience. She is decidedly not
supplied with the head of a contemporary courtesan; neither
does she appear as a safely accommodating wife in the con-
temporary home, as the domesticated puppet of her husband’s
desires. Giorgione’s always more independent image of female
power is not subject to any such masculine control, and poses
(without answering) a more subtle kind of question. She
maintains within herself a sense of possibility that allows her
to escape from the kind of misogynistic erotic entrapment
lurking beneath the surface sparkle of Titian’s ‘updated’ ver-
sion. The mysterious power and relevance of her figure is
maintained precisely because she remains ambiguous, playing
between contrary associations without conforming finally to
one or the other.
Conclusion
T
itian’s early attraction to the work of Giorgione
soon diminished, but in a work such as the Concert
Champêtre, probably dating from the same years in
which he completed the Venus, the young painter offered the
most sensitive response to the mode of the older master in
the entire history of art (illus. 59).1 It is the most difficult to
attribute among a group of very early Giorgionesque paint-
ings made in Venice that closely reprise his style, but which
are nonetheless hard to accept as by the master himself. These
include still controversial works such as the Shepherd with a Flute
(Hampton Court, Royal Collection), the Archer (Edinburgh,
National Gallery of Scotland) and the Portrait of a Young Man

(Budapest, Szépművészeti Múzeum), all of which remain
difficult to attribute to a known master. The large-scale
unfinished work featuring the Judgement of Solomon (Kingston
Lacy, The Bankes Collection), first mentioned as a Giorgione
by Ridolfi in 1648, was rightly recognized as a major early
work by Sebastiano del Piombo in 1903. Other paintings that
were long considered to be by Giorgione, such as the Christ and
the Adulterous Woman (Glasgow, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and
Museum) and Christ Carrying the Cross (Venice, Scuola Grande
di San Rocco), were probably painted by the young Titian.
The haemorrhage of attributions away from Giorgione

might seem to throw his artistic identity (and even his wider
art-historical significance) into question.2 And yet the much

leaner Giorgione oeuvre that has now come into view also
offers a new opportunity to better understand this elusive
painter. Close attention to works that can no longer be
attributed to him, such as the Concert Champêtre, can also help
to further define Giorgione’s own approach. Self-consciously
Giorgionesque paintings continued to be made for centuries
after the master’s death, as we will see, but typically simplify
or clarify his approach while busily filling in the semantic gaps
that he had originally opened up. Titian’s Concert, on the other
hand, is perhaps the very finest early Giorgionesque painting,
59 Titian, Concert Champêtre, c. 1510, oil on canvas.
199 Conclusion
appearing uniquely responsive to the master’s open-ended

approach, with its difficult-to-establish subject matter, loose
and blurry handling of paint and tonal approach to colour.
The combination of clothed male figures and female nudes
placed in a lush landscape must remind us of the Tempest (see
illus. 41), while the apparently pastoral or Arcadian theme of
music-making, with the pointed inclusion of finely dressed
young patricians, all seem to point to Giorgione and his fav-
oured pictorial themes and motifs. Yet the figures already
possess a certain immediacy and dynamism, a propensity to
twist and turn independently on their own axes, supported
by expansive billowing draperies. They interact more intensely
with one another (with the admitted exception of the woman
drawing water from the well at the left), while the landscape
itself is busier than Giorgione’s, its curving hollows and
hillocks and deeply wooded appearance recalling other early
Titians. And perhaps too this painting is made somewhat
more ‘poetic’ than any known example from Giorgione’s own
oeuvre: did Titian even exaggerate this aspect of the older
master’s approach in his early attempt to encompass and

surpass the older master’s approach?
The Concert Champêtre was certainly not the only Giorgion-
esque painting that Titian made in his early period; and he
sometimes remembered his one-time mentor’s compositions
in much later works (see illus. 44). But as we have already seen
in the examples illustrated in this book (see illus. 24, 33, 42,
58), Titian’s approach was distinct, based on a more direct
approach to the given narrative, as also on a keen interest in
formal movement and surface detail in support of this. The
paintings of Giovanni Bellini can appear closer to Giorgione’s
penchant for stillness and visual understatement than those

of Titian; and in certain of his late works it is Bellini rather
than Titian who appears as Giorgione’s most sympathetic
early interpreter. While it would be an exaggeration to
describe Bellini’s paintings from the final decade of his career
as defined by Giorgione’s pictorial innovations, it is true that
the expressive scope of the old painter’s work was widened
by his growing interest in the younger painter’s experimental
example. Bellini’s Lady with a Mirror (illus. 60) is unimaginable
without the example of Giorgione’s Laura (illus. 27). And it
is no accident that recent arguments about the status and
meaning of this late work have developed along similar lines
to those surrounding many of Giorgione’s paintings, some
interpreting it as an allegory of vanity, while others see only a
sensual depiction, devoid of any moralizing intent.3 Giorgione’s
Venus (illus. 51) was in Bellini’s mind when he depicted the
sleeping nymph Lotus approached by the libidinous Priapus
in his late mythology for Ferrara showing the Feast of the Gods
(1514, Washington, dc, National Gallery of Art). And Gior-
gione’s reclining nude was still an important point of reference

in one of Bellini’s very last sacred paintings, the disturbing
Drunkenness of Noah (c. 1515, Besançon, Musée des Beaux-Arts),
which features the naked body of the aged patriarch sprawling
in a drunken stupor across the lower foreground like a parody
of his one-time pupil’s sensuous goddess.
While the Besançon painting might suggest that the elderly
Bellini shrank from Giorgione’s sensuousness, he nonetheless
remained closer to this pupil than to others in his workshop
such as Titian and Sebastiano del Piombo. If these emergent
artists initially fell under Giorgione’s spell, their sympathy
201 Conclusion
for his approach was relatively brief. Their engagement with

the monumental and dynamic all’antica art of Raphael and
Michelangelo in Florence and Rome was deeper and more long-
lasting.4 We have seen how Giorgione’s art was characterized
by its own form of subtle rebellion against Bellini’s established
model for painting. It is nonetheless true that Giorgione’s
mode also resists the increasingly muscular narrative-based
approach evident in the early works of Titian or Sebastiano,
whose repeated employment on large-scale public commis-
sions in Venice is symptomatic of their artistic direction of
travel. The interactive urgency of Titian’s bulky protagonists
enacting the story was more suitable for such productions,
while the Venetian works of Sebastiano make still more overt
reference to the Central Italian canon of classicizing forms. In
his Death of Adonis, perhaps painted after his move to Rome in
1511, Sebastiano’s atmospheric yellowing sunset pointedly recalls
Giorgione, but the large and smooth-skinned figures appear
more like a Roman sculptural frieze, their interlocking forms
and flamboyant rhetorical gestures combining to express the
tragic subject of the painting (illus. 61).

Given Giorgione’s evident difference from these younger
painters, it is understandable that Giorgio Vasari equivo-
cated over ascribing him a position in the history of art in the
Lives of the Artists, initially suggesting that he painted ‘without
the modern manner’ (1550 edition) before changing his
mind to ally him with the leading artists of the sixteenth cen-
tury (1568 edition). There was, indeed, something ambiguous
about Giorgione’s position between the Quattrocento past
and the Cinquecento future. But Renaissance painting did
not simply progress in teleological fashion, as Vasari imagined,
and it would be a mistake to see Giorgione as a convenient

linking figure in a wider and coherent historical narrative,
who facilitated a smooth and inevitable artistic development

between one century and the next. The approaches of Titian
and Sebastiano were, as the subsequent history of art was to
prove, more adaptable to the mainstream of the European
classical-academic tradition of the future, with its preference
for clearly articulated dramatic action and explicit moral
meaning presented on a large scale, based on the established
formal vocabulary of ancient art (primarily sculpture). Gior-
gione’s ambiguous painting, on the other hand, appears more
like a turning aside from this gathering tradition, his example
becoming most significant at points of transformation or
60 Giovanni Bellini, Lady with a Mirror, 1515, oil on panel.
203 Conclusion
hiatus within it, when the pictorial orthodoxies came under

particular scrutiny or were challenged. Giorgione was always
a more tangential or marginal figure, whose obscurely orig-
inal art somehow escaped the more worldly demands on
painting.
Giorgione’s non-explicitness was also his expressive
strength, and can be considered as an aesthetic position in its
own right. The details of his paintings frequently suggest a
meaning that is then downplayed or deferred. More obvious
associations are typically undermined even as their possibility
is presented to us. One thinks of the woman’s slight gesture
to cover or reveal her breast in the Laura, which suddenly
suggests that she might be the Venus Genetrix; or the powerful
sense of the old woman’s physical presence in La vecchia, which
renders the moralizing inscription insufficient to explain the
full visual effect of the painting. The measuring instruments
61 Sebastiano del Piombo, Death of Adonis, c. 1512, oil on canvas.
featured in the Three Philosophers promise to uncover precise

meanings, but might not finally deliver a sense of certainty
or clarity. And the paired broken columns or lightning flash
in the Tempest appear as familiar symbols but nonetheless
refuse to divulge their significance. The ambiguous position
of the left hand in the Venus simultaneously suggests contrary
possibilities without attempting to resolve the issue.
Withholding what might have confirmed a conventional
symbolic or iconographic meaning, Giorgione undermines
the idea that painting must offer a coherent explanation of
the things it represents, however naturalistically they are
presented. By doing so he undoes the clarifying or explicatory
principle of illusionistic or mimetic art in the Renaissance.
Our attention turns instead to the way in which the given
illusion or meaning might be produced or withheld as the
painter chooses. We inevitably think again of Vasari’s telling
critical comment about Giorgione’s too wilful determination
to show off his technique and to ‘follow his own fancy’.
Giorgione’s works run against the grain of the artistic
mainstream insofar as they introduce what might be described

as an aesthetic of diminution. As we have seen, many of his
works were on a smaller scale, and in some, at least, the figures
within them are reduced in size again in relation to the overall
picture space. This was to move painting in a different direc-
tion from the monumentalizing mode of Renaissance art in
the Cinquecento as practised in the dominant artistic centres
of Italy: not only in Florence and Rome but in Venice itself,
where painters like Tintoretto (1518–1594) and Veronese
(1528–1588) followed Titian’s lead in building an art based
on crowds of enlarged, dynamically interacting figures. And
205 Conclusion
diminution can also be taken in a less literal sense, as relating

to the wider meanings of his paintings. Some of this might
merely reflect Giorgione’s youthful obscurity: his relative in-
experience as a beginner in painting and as one yet unable to
win large-scale commissions.5 His larger-scaled figural works
on the Fondaco, and the more monumental aspects of his
Venus, might indicate the beginnings of a very different direc-
tion of travel in the final years of his life. But the evidence of
many of the works that he previously completed nonetheless
suggests that diminution, rather than enlargement or expan-
sion, had already become established as Giorgione’s defining
mode. Even if his approach owed rather less to poetry than
many have thought, it is tempting to see his work as a visual
parallel to literary tradition, in which the mock-humble
pastoral had long presented itself as the antithesis to the lofty
epic, with its grand scale and sweep and related moral ideal-
ism. General parallels between the small physical scale of
the printed publications of the Aldine press in Venice and
Giorgione’s paintings, or between the bespoke spaces left for
the individual reader’s interpretations at the margins of these

books and the artist’s encouragement to his viewers to make
their own readings of his works, appear suggestive enough.6
In the field of painting, Giorgione’s insistence on intimate
smallness offered an analogous contrast to the monumental
public istoria promoted by theorists such as Alberti as the ideal
kind of painting.
Giorgione’s is the art of the trace rather than the mark,
the unfinished glance rather than the steady gaze, less a fully
achieved composition than a youthful sketch. Moving beyond
the usual chronological or diachronic view of Renaissance art,
and allowing that Giorgione was to some extent an outsider

to its typical preoccupations and concerns, we can recover
something of his original strangeness. Stepping aside from the
seemingly inevitable ‘progress’ towards fully achieved all’antica
classicism in the Western tradition, Giorgione was something
of a fugitive transitional, whose art finally belongs neither to
the past nor the future. This half-formed quality must appear
to us latecomers, at least, as the issue of the eternal youthful-
ness granted by his premature death. His paintings are always
those of a partially unformed and experimental artist who is
finding his way. Each work is different from the next, and offers
a new point of departure, rather than a fully explored territory.
There is something fundamentally intuitive about a Giorgione
compared to a settled and mature painting by Giovanni Bellini
or Titian, and this might be taken as both a weakness and a
strength. Like any original young man, Giorgione provokes
and stimulates, without finally arriving; but there is also a
certain painful delight for the posthumous viewer in the fact
that he did not live on to fully monumentalize himself in
painting.
Giorgione’s ambiguous example came back into play at
moments of artistic change or crisis in the later history of
European art: in Rome at the beginning of the seventeenth
century, for example, when the realist Caravaggio turned
away from the eclectic ideal classicism of the nascent academy.
The development of the Fête galante theme in eighteenth-
century France by Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) and his
followers offered a delicately ambiguous Rococo alternative
to the heavy monumentalized explicitness of the Baroque
tradition, and again owed much to Giorgione’s example
207 Conclusion
(admittedly via Titian’s Concert Champêtre and Rubens). And

Giorgione – or at least a Victorian version of him – became
important once again for members of the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood in mid-nineteenth-century Britain as they
sought to recreate a lost mode of painting from before the
rise of the mainstream of Renaissance-style academic classi-
cism.7 In the obscurity of his youthfulness, Giorgione could
stand as a romantic ideal of the innocent self-determining
painter who works beyond the control of the old and estab-
lished and their institutions and conventions. But his kind of
painting could also serve as a model for nascent modernists
in this period, given that its ambiguity exposed the roots of
painting, revealing something of its core condition of mate-
riality beneath the external demands of a prescribed subject
matter, meaning or illusionistic effect. Edouard Manet (1832–
1883) turned to the Concert Champêtre, then believed to be a
seminal Giorgione, in the course of his work on Le Déjeuner
sur l’herbe; and to Titian’s Venus of Urbino, a work closely inspired
by Giorgione’s Venus, for his Olympia.8
But if Giorgione’s independent painterly example pro-

vided a useful alternative model, it was always more implicated
in the marketable future of European painting than this
might allow. In Venice, as elsewhere in Italy, and eventually
right across Europe, approximations of his delicate manner
of painting had become very popular, especially in the field
of small-scale domestic works. Giorgione’s approach to por-
traits and portrait-like images, like his penchant for placing
sensuous (often naked) figures in landscapes, was often imi-
tated. His influence is pervasive in many ‘lesser’ paintings
made to decorate furniture in the home, where his blurry
painting technique was also emulated. Such Giorgionesque

works typically featured naked nymphs and handsome men,
chivalric soldiers and their pages, dreamy musicians and
ancient philosophers, along with poetic shepherds in pastoral
landscapes, and were produced in large numbers for more
than three centuries after his death.
Many such works may miss the point insofar as they trans-
form Giorgione’s paintings into renditions of the convenient
clichés of young romantic life. Giorgione’s more historically
distanced followers knew very little about what he had actually
painted, and produced works that came to have only the most
generic relationship to his originals. As we have seen through-
out this book, Giorgione was an altogether more ambiguous
and difficult painter than these later works would imply. Much
of this posthumous imagery substitutes Giorgione’s own subtle
visual reticence and sometimes disturbing obscurity with
something more plangently and pleasingly poetic. But it none-
theless remains likely that Giorgione’s imagery was always
particularly open to simulation. His understated works can
appear like open visual templates or pictorial blanks that

invited subsequent painters to ‘fill them in’. If Giorgione’s
works were also produced as self-consciously original aesthetic
objects, then this also implies that he played an important
role in the early development of the art market. His works
were apparently always understood as bespoke collectables,
and were (as the letter of Isabella d’Este’s agent from October
1510 tells us) very highly valued by their original owners. They
mark a new stage in the apprehension of artistic style as a
more independent category within Western culture, one that
had the potential to undermine the authority of externally
209 Conclusion
derived meanings originating in the world beyond the picture.

In these circumstances, it is no surprise to find that the name
Giorgione gradually came to obsess the European art market
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was the
Venetian writer Marco Boschini who first coined the term
‘Giorgionesque’ to describe an already very popular category
of painting in 1660.9 He went on to especially commend his
painter-friend Pietro della Vecchia (1603–1678), who made
a good career from such productions, as ‘Giorgione’s ape’. By
the mid-eighteenth century, literally thousands of pseudo-
Giorgiones of the kind produced by Della Vecchia and others
were present in aristocratic collections, or were on sale in
auction houses, all across Europe.10
To this extent, the ‘Giorgionesque’ is a very misleading
category and a most uncertain indicator of the master’s own
approach, which is both more reticent and more radical in its
implications. Close analysis of the small but powerfully orig-
inal oeuvre that remains after all the recent reattributions
indicates that Giorgione was especially significant as an orig-
inator of the Venetian aesthetic of colorito, which emphasized

the materiality of painting, as also its capacity for sensual
embodiment.11 This approach offered an alternative to the
rationalizing disegno-based tradition of central Italy with its
emphasis on figure drawing and firmly defined outlines that
served to secure the visual realization of the artist’s original
intellectual and moral idea for the work. If this latter tradition
enthroned vision or sight as the primary means of human
knowing, and thus elevated painting as the perfect artistic
medium, then Giorgione’s example did not conform. In his
work, depicted forms appear as mirage-like rather than things
that can be objectively or intellectually known. In this way,

Giorgione questioned the illusionistic principles of the
Renaissance, redeeming and promoting the ‘lower’ senses
that it sought to master, overcome or set aside. We have seen
how sound and touch could gain a new kind of authority in
his work. At the same time the ambiguous sensate body
emerges as the primary subject of painting, as much in his
portraits and portrait-like paintings as in his nudes. It is inti-
mately connected to that of the beholder, conjoined with our
own in a wave or circuit of sensual response. Even in those
works in which natural forms play a more important part the
figures remain significant, while the landscape itself takes on
‘moods’ that appear to reflect theirs, or those of the viewer.
This interactive approach, with its assumption of an indi-
vidualized or sensitized viewer, marked an alternative to the
traditional patriotic and pious culture of Venice around 1500.
It would be easy to oversimplify the relationship between
‘private’ and ‘public’ in Venice, cultural domains that certainly
overlapped and interpenetrated.12 But it is nonetheless likely
that Giorgione’s career reflects, or perhaps was even defined

by, the rise of the art market and of interlinked practices
and categories of aesthetic taste, individual ownership and
monetary investment. Giorgione’s paintings signal the rise
of a more elite and personalized kind of aristocratic culture
within the city. His works undoubtedly possessed a special
allure for sophisticated and wealthy art collectors and con-
noisseurs within the short span of his lifetime. Perhaps, too,
the newly intimate reach into the sensate body of the spec-
tator proposed in Giorgione’s paintings marks a new stage
in the colonization of the individual under the conditions of
211 Conclusion
early modern capitalism. That Giorgione surfaced in Venice,

then one of Europe’s great entrepôts, is no accident. The per-
sistent implication of existential aloneness or isolation that
haunts so many of the actors in his paintings might indirectly
reflect his withdrawal from the communal life of the past.
Giorgione offered a new acknowledgement of the fluid
but defining realities of personal life. To the extent that his
imagery moved beyond the control of outwardly defined,
conventionally derived or abstracted meanings, so too it
demanded a new kind of attention to immediate corporeal
matters. The thematic ambiguity of his paintings is closely
linked to this intensified engagement with sensuous phenom-
ena, whether this involved the intimate depiction of usually
forbidden flesh, slight gestural, eye or finger movements, the
sounds of a voice or a storm; or attention to the way that
apparently fixed colours and shapes in a landscape are trans-
figured by equally sudden switches of weather, psychological
mood or emotion. Giorgione constantly challenged the intel-
lect’s cold demand for encompassing or over-arching
meanings, engaging instead a more carnal reality that net-

works his imagery directly to ‘the flesh of the world’.13 Yet
there is a darker side to this embodied approach that might
underpin the melancholic emotional tenor of many of his
paintings. A fundamentally sceptical hermeneutic question
is raised by Giorgione’s equivocal paintings. Despite his very
evident extensions to the traditional expressive range of
Western painting, what can finally be known about reality
beyond its immediate sensuous appearances, Giorgione paint-
ings seem also to imply, is uncertain and obscure. Implicit
within his alluring sensual explorations is also an indication
of the limits to human understanding. If his kind of painting

gives the viewer access to a more immediate and existentially
true sense of human life, then this does not entail some pos-
itivistic increase in knowledge. Rather it suggests that the
underlying meaning of the world has become newly uncertain,
unfixed and ambiguous.
references
Introduction
1 For a similar equation between paintings and traps in the context
of Pieter Bruegel’s works, see Joseph Leo Koerner, Bosch and Bruegel:
From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life (Princeton, nj, and Oxford,
2016), pp. 35–6, 339–40.
2 James Elkins, ‘On Monstrously Ambiguous Paintings’, History and
Theory, xxxii/3 (October 1993), pp. 227–47.
3 For the philosophical background to this distinction, see Martin
W. Bloomfield, ‘Allegory as Interpretation’, New Literary History,
iii/2 (Winter 1970), pp. 30–117.
4 See John Shearman, Only Connect . . . Art and the Spectator in the Italian
Renaissance (Washington, dc, 1988).
5 Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses
(London, 2005), p. 13.
6 See the section on ‘Optics’ in Edward MacCurdy, trans.,

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (London, 2009), vol. i, pp. 175–223.
7 Martin Jay, ‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’, in Vision and Visuality,
ed. Hal Foster (Seattle, wa, 1988), pp. 3–27.
8 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture: The Latin Texts of
De Pictura and De Statua, ed. and trans. Cecil Grayson (London and
New York, 1972), pp. 36–59.
9 John Gage, Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to
Abstraction (London, 1993), pp. 117–38; Paul Hills, Venetian Colour:
Marble, Mosaic, Painting and Glass, 1250–1500 (New Haven, ct, and
London, 1999), pp. 201–26.
10 David Rosand, Painting in Sixteenth-century Venice: Titian, Veronese,
Tintoretto (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 18–25.
11 See Sylvia Ferino-Pagden and Giovanna Nepi Scirè, Giorgione: Myth

and Enigma, exh. cat., Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (Milan,
2004), pp. 255–76; and Enrico Maria dal Pozzolo and Lionello
Puppi, Giorgione, exh. cat., Castelfranco Veneto, Casa Marta
(Milan, 2009), pp. 225–42.
12 Salvatore Settis, ‘Giorgione e i suoi committenti’, in Giorgione e
l’umanismo veneziano, ed. Rodolfo Pallucchini (Florence, 1981), vol. i,
pp. 373–98. See also Chapter One below.
13 Jennifer Fletcher, ‘“Fatto al specchio”: Venetian Renaissance
Attitudes to Self-portraiture’, in Imaging the Self in Renaissance Italy,
ed. Hilliard T. Goldfarb (Boston, ma, 1992), pp. 45–60.
14 Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans.
Gaston du C. de Vere (London, 1996), vol. i, p. 643.

1 He is already named as ‘Zorzo(n)’ or ‘Giorgione’ in a recently
discovered inscription apparently applied to a drawing shortly
after his death in 1510. Jaynie Anderson et al., ‘Giorgione in
Sydney’, Burlington Magazine, clxi/1392 (March 2019), pp. 190–99.
Gaston du C. de Vere (London, 1996), vol. i, pp. 640–45.
3 Claudio Strinati, ‘Giorgione e la musica’, in Enrico Maria dal
Pozzolo and Lionello Puppi, Giorgione, exh. cat., Castelfranco
Veneto, Casa Marta (Milan, 2009), pp. 163–8.

4 Anderson et al., ‘Giorgione in Sydney’.
5 Renata Segre, ‘A Rare Document on Giorgione’, Burlington
Magazine, clxi/1299 (June 2011), pp. 383–6.
6 Giambattista Magazza, for example, punningly describes ‘the
beautiful heads of Barba Zorzon’ in a poem of 1568. See Jaynie
Anderson, Giorgione: Painter of Poetic Brevity (Paris, 1996), p. 68.
7 Lionello Puppi, ‘Il cognomen di Giorgione è Barbarella’, Corriere
del Veneto, 12 October 2011. See also Lionello Puppi, ‘Tracce e
scommesse per un biografia impossibile’, in Dal Pozzolo and
Puppi, Giorgione, pp. 21–36.
8 Giovanni Chiuppani, ‘Per la biografia di Giorgione da
Castelfranco’, Bollettino del Museo Civico di Bassano, vi (1909),
217 References
pp. 73–8. See also Giacinto Cecchetto, ‘Castelfranco tra la fine del
xv secolo e i primi decenni del xvi: “mappe urbane” e paesaggi
del contado’, in Dal Pozzolo and Puppi, Giorgione, pp. 63–7.
9 Anik Waldeck, ‘Vicenzo Catena and Giorgione Reconsidered’,
Artibus et Historiae, 74 (2016), pp. 59–71.
10 14 August 1507 and 24 January 1508 (more veneto 1507): Archivio
di Stato di Venezia, Provveditori al Sal, b. 60, reg. 3, c. 144v.; and
b. 60, reg. 3, c. 119r.
11 See especially Tullio’s so-called ‘double-portrait’ reliefs, such as
the Bacchus and Ariadne, c. 1505, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
12 11 December 1508: Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Provveditori al Sal,
b. 63, reg. 7, c. 95r.
13 25 October 1510: Archivio di Stato di Mantova, Archivio Gonzaga,
b. 2996, copialettere 28, c. 70r.
14 8 November 1510: Archivio di Stato di Mantova, Archivio
Gonzaga, b. 1893, c. 68.
15 For this possible local connection, see Danila Dal Pos, Museo Casa
Giorgione (Castelfranco Veneto, 2009), pp. 74–117.
16 For the attribution to Giorgione, see ibid., pp. 147–219.
17 Marcantonio Michiel, Der Anonimo Morelliano (Marcantonio Michiel’s
Notizie d’opere del Disegno, ed. Theodore von Frimmel (Bologna, 1884).
18 See Marco Paoli, La Tempesta Svelata: Giorgione, Gabriele Vendramin,
Cristoforo Marcello e la Vecchia (Lucca, 2011), pp. 143–60, who argues
that Cristoforo Marcello rather than Vendramin was the original
patron of the Tempest and La vecchia.

19 Anderson, Giorgione, pp. 160–75.
20 Rosella Lauber, ‘Taddeo Contarini’, in Il Collezionismo d’arte a Venezia:
Dalle origini al Cinquecento, ed. Michel Hochmann, Rosella Lauber
and Stefania Mason (Venice, 2008), pp. 263–4.
21 Anderson, Giorgione, pp. 181–2. For Domenico Grimani’s collection
see, most recently, Rosella Lauber, ‘Per il cardinal Domenico
Grimani: Tra eccellenza e “materia della fantasia”’ and the entries
under ‘Il cardinal Domenico Grimani’ in Bernard Aikema,
Jheronimus Bosch e Venezia, exh. cat., Palazzo Ducale, Venice
(Venice, 2017), pp. 35–51 and pp. 121–35.
22 Puppi, ‘Tracce e scommesse per un biografia impossibile’,
in Dal Pozzolo and Puppi, Giorgione, pp. 26–8.
23 Guido Ruggiero, Violence in Early Renaissance Venice (New Brunswick,

nj, 1986). For the development of an ‘aesthetic of violence’ in
Florence, see Scott Nethersole, Art and Violence in Early Renaissance
Florence (New Haven, ct, and London, 2018).
24 See Helen Langdon, Caravaggio: A Life (London, 1998), pp. 30 and
385.
25 For the Grimani collection, see note 21 above.
26 In addition to the work now in Vienna mentioned below, a
near-contemporary copy, painted on paper, is now in Budapest,
Szépmüvészeti Múzeum: see Sylvia Ferino-Pagden and
Giovanna Nepi Scirè, Giorgione: Myth and Enigma, exh. cat., Vienna,
Kunsthistorisches Museum (Milan, 2004), cat. no. 17, pp. 232–3.
27 See Enrico Maria dal Pozzolo, ‘La Barba di Giorgione’, in Dal
Pozzolo and Puppi, Giorgione, esp. pp. 215–16.
28 See Jodi Cranston, The Poetics of Portraiture in the Italian Renaissance
(Cambridge, 2000), p. 86.
29 See Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image
of the Artist: A Historical Experiment (New Haven, ct, and London,
1981).
30 On a preparatory drawing for the sculpture now in the Louvre,
Paris, Michelangelo wrote, ‘David with the sling and I with the
bow – Michelangelo’.
31 See James Hall, The Sinister Side: How Left–Right Symbolism Shaped
Western Art (Oxford, 2008)
32 Tom Nichols, Titian and the End of the Venetian Renaissance (London,
2013), pp. 162–3.
33 Walter Pater, ‘On the School of Giorgione’ (1877), in The Renaissance:
Studies in Art and Poetry (Oxford, 1990), p. 85.
34 This painting, almost certainly by a follower, is now in Vienna,
Kunsthistorisches Museum: see Ferino-Pagden and Nepi Scirè,
Giorgione: Myth and Enigma, cat. no. 20 and p. 270. For the drawing
see Anderson, Giorgione, p. 71, illus. 35.
35 Anderson, Giorgione, p. 317. The Teniers painting mentioned here
is in the Suida-Manning Collection, New York.
36 See below, Chapter Three.
37 ‘She took sandals upon her feet, and put about her bracelets and
her chains, and her rings, and her earrings, and all her ornaments,
219 References
and decked herself bravely, to allure the eyes of all men who should
see her.’
38 Anderson, Giorgione, p. 196.
39 Marianne Koos, ‘Identität und Begehren: Bildnisse effeminierter
Männlichkeit in der venezianischen Malerei des frühen 16.
Jahrhunderts’, in Männlichkeit im Blick: Visuelle Inszenierungen in der
Kunst seit der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Mechthild Fend and Marianne Koos
(Cologne, 2004), pp. 53–78.
40 See John Shearman, Only Connect . . . Art and the Spectator in the Italian
Renaissance (Princeton, nj, 1992), p. 25.
41 Albrecht Dürer, Orpheus Slain by Bacchantes, 1494, Hamburg,
Kunsthalle, with the inscription reading ‘Orfeus der erst puseren’.
42 ‘Medusa’s Head’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. xviii (1920–22), pp. 273–4. For the
possibility of Giorgione’s amorphous sexuality, see Anderson,
Giorgione, p. 286.

1 Patricia Fortini Brown, Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio
(New Haven, ct, and London, 1988).
2 David Rosand, Myths of Venice: The Figuration of a State (Chapel Hill,
nc, and London, 2001).
3 See, for example, Domenico Ghirlandaio’s St Francis Healing the
Injured Child, c. 1482–6. Florence, S Trinità, Sassetti Chapel.

4 Rona Goffen, ‘Icon and Vision: Giovanni Bellini’s Half-length
Madonnas’, Art Bulletin, lvii/3 (1975), pp. 487–518.
5 Keith Christiansen, ‘Bellini and the Meditational poesia’, Artibus et
Historiae, xxxiv/67 (2013), pp. 9–20.
6 Adrian Stokes, Venice: An Aspect of Art (London, 1945), p. 52.
7 Roberto Longhi, Richerche sulla pittura Veneta, 1946–1969 (Florence,
1978), p. 17.
8 Carolyn C. Wilson, ‘St Joseph and the Process of Decoding
Vincenzo Catena’s Warrior Adoring the Infant Christ and the Virgin’,
Artibus et Historiae, xxxiv/67 (2013), pp. 117–32, esp. pp. 121–3.
9 A recent infrared reflectogram of the painting indicates that the
postures of the Virgin and Child are quite close to the figures
in the recently discovered drawing in Sydney University library:

Jaynie Anderson et al., ‘Giorgione in Sydney’, Burlington Magazine,
clxi/1392 (March 2019), pp. 196–7.
10 Matteo Casini, ‘“The Company of the Hose”: Youth and Courtly
Culture in Europe, Italy and Venice’, Studi Veneziani, 63 (2011),
pp. 133–53.
11 Peter Humfrey, Cima da Conegliano (Cambridge, 1983), cat. no. 61,
pp. 108–9.
12 David Alan Brown, in Sylvia Ferino-Pagden and Giovanna Nepi
Scirè, Giorgione: Myth and Enigma, exh. cat., Vienna, Kunsthistorisches
Museum (Milan, 2004), cat. no. 2, pp. 170–72.
13 See Bernard Aikema and Beverley Louise Brown, Renaissance Venice
and the North: Crosscurrents in the Time of Dürer, Bellini and Titian, exh.
cat., Venice, Palazzo Grassi (London, 2000).
14 Louisa C. Matthew, ‘“Vendecolori a Venezia”: The Reconstruction
of a Profession’, Burlington Magazine, cxliv/1196 (Nov. 2002),
pp. 680–86.
15 For cangiantismo in Renaissance painting, see Marcia B. Hall, Color
and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting (Cambridge,
1994), pp. 20–22, 123–9.
16 See also the new Venetian interest in perspective evident in the
woodcut illustrations to Manutius’s flagship vernacular publication
of 1499: Roswitha Stewering, ‘Architectural Representation in the
Hypnerotomachia Polifili’, Journal of the Society of Architectural History, lix/1
(March 2000), pp. 6–25.

17 See Pacioli’s mention of these discussions in his Summa di arithmetica
geometria, proportioni e proportionalità (Venice, 1494), p. 2.
18 Quoted in Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form
(New York, 1993), p. 59.
19 Francesco Valconover, ‘La Pala di Castelfranco’, in Giorgione e
l’umanismo veneziano, ed. Rodolfo Pallucchini (Florence, 1981),
vol. i, pp. 173–4. See also Giorgio Castelfranco, ‘Nota su
Giorgione’, Bolletino d’Arte, xl (1955), p. 298.
20 Salvatore Settis, ‘Giorgione in Sicily: On the Dating
and Composition of the Castelfranco Altarpiece’, in
Ferino-Pagden and Nepi Sciré, Giorgione: Myth and Enigma,
pp. 133–63.
221 References
21 Francesca Cortesi Bosco, ‘Matteo Costanzo nella Guerra

del Casentino: Considerazioni sull’esecuzione della tavola
di Giorgione a Castelfranco’, in Enrico Maria dal Pozzolo
and Lionello Puppi, Giorgione, exh. cat., Castelfranco Veneto,
Casa Marta (Milan, 2009), pp. 113–22.
22 Settis, ‘Giorgione in Sicily’, pp. 136–46.
23 Ibid., pp. 143–4.

1 ‘A “historia” will move spectators when the men painted in
the picture outwardly demonstrate their own feelings as clearly
as possible’: Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture:
The Latin Texts of De Pictura and De Statua, ed. and trans. Cecil Grayson
(London and New York, 1972), pp. 80–81.
2 See Per Rumberg, Peter Humfrey and Paul Joannides, ‘The
Portrait Debate: Giorgione or Titian?’, 17 February 2016, www.
royalacademy.org.uk, accessed 1 November 2019; Sylvia Ferino-
Pagden and Giovanna Nepi Scirè, Giorgione: Myth and Enigma, exh.
cat., Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum (Milan, 2004), cat. no. 4,
pp. 176–8.
3 Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture, pp. 60–61; Evelyn Welch,
‘Naming Names: The Transience of Individual Identity in
Fifteenth-century Italian Portraiture’, in The Image of the Individual:
Portraits in the Renaissance, ed. Nicholas Mann and Luke Syson, exh.
cat., London, British Museum (London, 1998), p. 92.
4 See Robert Finlay, ‘The Venetian Republic as a Gerontocracy: Age
and Politics in the Renaissance’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance
Studies, viii/1 (1978), pp. 157–78.
5 Lorne Campbell, Renaissance Portraits: European Portrait-painting in the 14th,
15th and 16th Centuries (New Haven, ct, and London, 1990), pp. 9–11.
6 The foreshortened hand might reflect the influence of the
Netherlandish painter Hans Memling. See Erich Schleier,
Gemäldegalerie Berlin: Geschichte der Sammlung und ausgewählte Meisterwerke
(Berlin, 1985), p. 330.
7 Rona Goffen, Giovanni Bellini (New Haven, ct, and London, 1989),
p. 210.
8 John Pope Hennessy, The Portrait in the Renaissance (Princeton, nj,

1966), p. 132.
9 Probably a shortening of V[irtus] V[incit]. See Simone Facchinetti
and Arturo Galansino, In the Age of Giorgione, exh. cat., London,
Royal Academy (London, 2016), p. 40.
10 See, most recently, for this work, Facchinetti and Galansino,
In the Age of Giorgione, cat. no. 5, pp. 48–9.
11 Klàra Garas, ‘Bildnisse der Renaissance: ii, Dürer und Giorgione’,
Acta historiae artium Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, xviii/1 (1972),
pp. 125–35.
12 Peter Humfrey in Pietro Marani and Giovanna Nepi Scirè,
Leonardo and Venice, exh. cat., Venice, Palazzo Grassi (Milan,
1992), pp. 42–3; and David Alan Brown and Sylvia Ferino-
Pagden, Bellini, Giorgione, Titian and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting,
exh. cat., Washington, dc, National Gallery of Art; Vienna,
Kunsthistorisches Museum (New Haven, ct, and London, 2006),
p. 15.
13 Edward MacCurdy, ed. and trans., The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci
(London, 2009), vol. iii, p. 17.
14 Peter Humfrey, Titian (Ghent, 2007), cat. no. 47, p. 88.
15 William Schupbach, ‘Doctor Parma’s Medicinal Macronic: Poem by
Bartolotti, Pictures by Giorgione and Titian’, Journal of the Warburg
and Courtauld Institutes, xli (1978), pp. 147–91.
16 ‘La testa del gargione che tiene in mano la frezza’: Marcantonio
Michiel, Der Anonimo Morelliano (Marcantonio Michiel’s Notizie d’opere del

Disegno), ed. Theodore Frimmel (Vienna, 1884), pp. 78–9.
17 Caroline Campbell et al., Mantegna and Bellini, exh. cat., London,
National Gallery (London, 2019), pp. 216–17.
19 See, for example, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio’s Portrait of a Boy
as St Sebastian (c. 1490–95, Moscow, Pushkin Museum of Fine Art)
as a possible formal source.
20 Ferino-Pagden and Nepi Scirè, Giorgione: Myth and Enigma, cat. no. 6,
pp. 184–7.
21 For further references, see Brown and Ferino-Pagden, Bellini,
Giorgione, Titian, cat. no. 38, pp. 208–11.
223 References
22 Rudolf Schier, ‘Identifying Giorgione’s Laura’, Italian Studies, lxix/1

(2014), pp. 24–40. For the painting as an allegory of marriage,
see Enrico Maria dal Pozzolo, ‘Il lauro di Laura e delle “maritate
veneziane”’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz, xxxvii
(1993), pp. 275–7.
23 Mary Garrard, ‘Leonardo da Vinci: Female Portraits, Female
Nature’, in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History,
ed. N. Broude and M. Garrard (New York and London, 1994),
pp. 59–85; Paul Holberton, ‘To Loosen the Tongue of Mute
Poetry: Giorgione’s Self-portrait as David as a Paragone
Demonstration’, in Poetry on Art: Renaissance to Romanticism, ed.
Thomas Frangenberg (Donington, 2003), pp. 40–42.
24 For a useful summary of the literature, see Patricia Fortini Brown,
Private Lives in Renaissance Venice: Art, Architecture and the Family (New
Haven, ct, and London, 2004), pp. 162–4.
25 Anne Christine Junkermann, ‘The Lady and the Laurel: Gender
and Meaning in Giorgione’s “Laura”’, Oxford Art Journal, xvi/1
(1993), pp. 49–58.
26 For the recent infrared analysis of the inscription, see Enrico
Maria dal Pozzolo, ‘Il problema della committenza della “Laura” di
Giorgione: una revision paleografica e un’ ipotesi aperta’, Jahrbuch
des Kunsthistorischen Museums Wien, 17–18 (2015–16), pp. 44–57.
27 Hasan Niyazi, ‘Giorgione’s Woman in Red’, online blog, 4 June
2011, www.3pp.website, accessed 1 November 2019.
28 Ferino-Pagden and Nepi Scirè, Giorgione: Myth and Enigma, cat. no. 8,
pp. 197–201.
29 Rona Goffen, Titian’s Women (New Haven, ct, and London, 1997),
pp. 65–86.
30 Jaynie Anderson, Giorgione: Painter of Poetic Brevity (Paris, 1996),
p. 38.
31 Michael W. Kwakkelstein, ‘Leonardo da Vinci’s Grotesque Heads
and the Breaking of the Physiognomic Mould’, Journal of the Warburg
and Courtauld Institutes, liv (1991), pp. 127–36.
32 For this work, which survives in two separate fragments now in the
Museo Correr and the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, see Simona
Cohen, ‘The Enigma of Carpaccio’s Venetian Ladies’, Renaissance
Studies, xix/2 (2005), pp. 150–84.
33 Two lost female portraits attributed to Bellini and known

from watercolour copies are, however, listed in the Vendramin
collection in 1627; see Karl Schütz, ‘Dürer in Venice: A Few
Comments on the Relationship between German and Venetian
Painting around 1505’, in Giorgione: Myth and Enigma, ed. Ferino-
Pagden and Nepi-Scirè, p. 106.
34 Brown, Private Lives in Renaissance Venice, pp. 162–4.
35 See Patricia Simons, ‘Portraiture, Portrayal and Idealization:
Ambiguous Individualization in Representations of Renaissance
Women’, in Language and Images in Renaissance Italy, ed. Alison Brown
(Oxford, 1995), pp. 263–311.
36 See the discussions of this work in Jodi Cranston, The Poetics
of Portraiture in the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge, 2000),
pp. 8–11 and pp. 102–3; Mary E. Frank, ‘Visible Signs of
Aging: Images of Old Women in Renaissance Venice’ and
Erin J. Campbell, ‘“Unenduring Beauty”: Gender and Old
Age in Early Modern Art and Aesthetics’, in Growing Old in
Early Modern Europe: Cultural Representations, ed. Erin Campbell
(Aldershot, 2006), pp. 139–52 and pp. 153–68, respectively.
37 Campbell, ‘“Unenduring Beauty”’, p. 155 and p. 161 argues instead
that La vecchia contributes to ‘a Renaissance aesthetic discourse
based on the ideal of masculine beauty’ and ‘obeys a decorum for
the repulsive female body’.
38 These two paintings were initially compared by Hans Tietze
and Erica Tietze-Conrat, Kritisches Verzeichnis der Werke Albrecht

Dürers: Der reife Dürer (Basel and Leipzig, 1937), vol. i, p. 341.
39 The crude symbolism of the coins is conveniently ignored in the
recent interpretations of Dürer’s painting as showing a vanitas rather
than the sin of Avarice: see Schütz, ‘Dürer in Venice’, pp. 107–8.
40 G. M. Richter, ‘Lost and Rediscovered Works by Giorgione’, Art in
America, XXX (1942), p. 151.
41 For an alternative reading of Dürer’s painting as more rather than
less ambiguous than Giorgione’s see Schütz, ‘Dürer in Venice’,
pp. 107–8.
42 See Campbell, ‘“Unenduring Beauty”’, p. 161.
43 The painting is described as ‘retrato della madre di Zorzon de
man de Zorzon’ (‘portrait of Giorgione’s mother by the hand of
225 References
Giorgione’) in the inventory of Vendramin’s collection of 1567:

see Brown and Ferino-Pagden, Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, cat. no. 39,
pp. 212–15.
44 The sitter’s white headgear links her to images of impoverished
widows, often shown receiving alms in Venetian Renaissance art,
and it remains possible that Giorgione’s La vecchia is presented as a
street woman requesting charity. For some relevant comparisons,
see Tom Nichols, ‘Secular Charity, Sacred Poverty: Picturing the
Poor in Renaissance Venice’, Art History, xxx/2 (2007), pp. 138–
69, esp. figs. 1.3 and 1.13.
45 Rona Goffen, ‘Signatures: Inscribing Identity in Renaissance Art’,
Viator, xxxii (January 2001), pp. 303–70.
46 This area of the painting has sometimes been seen as clumsy and
perhaps overpainted by a later artist. But the restoration of the
work by the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice completed in 2019
suggests that the paint is original, even if Giorgione seems to have
added the inscription at a late stage: ‘La “Vecchia” di Giorgione
prima e dopo: Tutto sul restauro del capolavoro di Venezia’, Finestre
sull’arte, 11 February 2019, www.finestresullarte.info, accessed
1 November 2019.
47 See Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and
Character (New York, 1971), vol. i, pp. 293–4.
48 The inscription in Giorgione’s La vecchia differs greatly from
that in Andrea Mantegna’s moralizing Minerva Expelling the Vices
(1502, Paris, Musée du Louvre) for Isabella d’Este’s studiolo in the

Mantuan Ducal Palace, in which extended ribbon-like scrolls
wound around the tree figure to the left offer a precise description
of the meaning of the allegory.
49 Erwin Panofsky, Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographic (New York,
1969), p. 91.
50 See Peter Lüdemann, ‘Col tempo impara scientia e virtude: Spunti per
una rilettura iconologica della Vecchia di Giorgione’, Studi Tizianeschi,
ix (2016), pp. 18–20.
51 Vendramin gave Antonio Pasqualino a marble head of an open-
mouthed woman according to Michiel; see Anderson, Giorgione,
p. 162.
52 Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture, pp. 60–61.
53 Welch, ‘Naming Names’, p. 92.

54 For the wider cultural and philosophical background, see Ricardo
J. Quinones, The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Cambridge, ma,
1972). See also Simona Cohen, Transformations of Time and Temporality
in Medieval and Renaissance Art (Boston, ma, 2014), p. 116.
55 Sound has been aptly described as ‘the natural symbol of
transience and the lostness of past time’: see Jonathan Rée,
I See a Voice: A Philosophical History of Language, Deafness and the Senses
(London, 2000), p. 23.
56 It was probably owned by Gabriele Vendramin. For a reading
of the painting as showing the ‘Education of Marcus Aurelius’
following a very brief indication in a Venetian inventory of 1666,
see Anderson, Giorgione, p. 298.
57 The man at the centre of Titian’s painting has been identified as
Gusnasco da Pavia, while Gabriele della Volta is to the right: see
Maria H. Loh, Titian’s Touch: Art, Magic and Philosophy (London, 2019),
p. 59.
58 Joseph Hoffman, ‘Giorgione’s Three Ages of Man’, Pantheon, xlii
(1965), pp. 238–44; Jane Hatter, ‘Col Tempo, Musical Time,
Ageing and Sexuality in Sixteenth-century Venetian Painting’,
Early Music, xxxix/1 (2011), pp. 3–14.
59 The ‘Four Ages of Man’ is a sub-theme in the sculpture included
in Antonio Rizzo’s Nicoló Tron monument in the Frari of c. 1476,
for example, although in this context it supports tetrarchic
references to the seasons and the humours.

1 For the growing importance of creative fantasy rather than mere
imitation in the Renaissance, see Martin Kemp, ‘From Mimesis to
Fantasia: The Quattrocento Vocabulary of Creation, Inspiration
and Genius in the Visual Arts’, Viator, viii (1977), pp. 347–98.
2 ‘Di là dal fiume e tra gli alberi’: Il paesaggio del Rinascimento a Venezia. Nascita
e fortuna di un genere artistico (secoli xv–xvii), ed. Laura de Fuccia and
Christophe Brouard (Ravenna, 2012).
3 Lost Giorgiones such as the Finding of Paris, an early work owned by
Taddeo Contarini, but now known only through a seventeenth-
227 References
century copy by David Teniers, apparently featured figures in a

broadly treated landscape: see Jaynie Anderson, Giorgione: Painter of
Poetic Brevity (Paris, 1996), p. 317.
4 Davide Gasparotto, Giovanni Bellini: Landscapes of Faith in Renaissance
Venice, exh. cat., Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles,
2017).
5 Felton Gibbons, ‘Giovanni Bellini’s Topographical Landscapes’,
in Studies of Late Medieval and Renaissance Painting in Honor of Millard Meiss,
ed. Irving Lavin and John Plummer (New York, 1977), vol. i,
pp. 174–84.
6 Augusto Gentili, ‘Bellini and Landscape’, in The Cambridge Companion
to Giovanni Bellini, ed. Peter Humfrey (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 167–81.
7 See Bellini’s Resurrection, c. 1475–7 (Berlin, Staatliche Museen,
Gemäldegalerie) and Madonna of the Meadow, c. 1495–1500 (London,
National Gallery).
8 Susannah Rutherglen and Charlotte Hale, ed., In a New Light:
Giovanni Bellini’s St Francis in the Desert (New York and London, 2015).
9 David Alan Brown and Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, Bellini, Giorgione,
Titian and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting, exh. cat., Washington, dc,
National Gallery of Art; Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum
(New Haven, ct, and London, 2006), cat. no. 17, pp. 116–18.
10 See, for example, Andrea Mantegna’s Adoration of the Shepherds,
c. 1450–51, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
11 For the fashionable Renaissance literary trope of the nobleman
shepherd and its impact on painting, see Patricia Emison, Low and
High Style in Italian Renaissance Art (New Haven, ct, and London,
1997), pp. 37–89.
12 Its immediate success is suggested by the near-replica painting
now in Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, which, though of
lesser quality, might have been the version originally recorded in
Taddeo Contarini’s collection.
13 Brown and Ferino-Pagden, Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, cat. no. 29,
pp. 160–63. The title now used for this painting was invented
by Roberto Longhi.
14 See Jill Dunkerton, ‘Giorgione and Not Giorgione: The
Conservation History and Technical Examination of Il Tramonto’,
National Gallery Technical Bulletin, xxxi (2010), pp. 42–63.
15 See Bernard Aikema, Jheronimus Bosch e Venezia, exh. cat., Venice,

Palazzo Ducale (Venice, 2017). Perhaps Grimani’s taste for the
macabre is also reflected in Giorgione’s Self-portrait as David (see
illus. 1), a work that he may well have commissioned.
16 See, for example, the paintings discussed by Hans Belting, ‘Poetry
and Painting: Saint Jerome in the Wilderness’, in Gasparotto,
Giovanni Bellini: Landscapes of Faith, pp. 25–35.
17 See Rudolf Wittkower, ‘L’Arcadia e il giorgionismo’, in Umanesimo
europeo e umanesimo veneziano, ed. Vittore Branca (Florence, 1963),
pp. 473–84; David Rosand, ‘Giorgione, Venice and the Pastoral
Vision’, in Places of Delight: The Pastoral Landscape, ed. Robert
C. Cafritz (Washington, dc, 1988), pp. 20–81.
18 Brown and Ferino-Pagden, Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, cat. no. 30,
pp. 164–6.
19 Rutherglen and Hale, eds, In a New Light, p. 55.
20 Giorgione had recently used these colours in a similar fashion in
the figure of Joseph in his Adoration of the Shepherds (see illus. 35);
see Brown and Ferino-Pagden, Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, pp. 26–7.
21 Michiel notes ‘The canvas in oil of three philosophers in a
landscape, two standing and another seated, who contemplates
the rays of the sun, with a painted rock that is miraculously
rendered. It was begun by Giorgione da Castelfranco and finished
by Sebastiano the Venetian’; Marcantonio Michiel, Der Anonimo
Morelliano (Marcantonio Michiel’s Notizia d’opere del Disegno),
ed. Theodore Frimmel (Vienna, 1884), pp. 86–8.

22 Johannes Wilde, ‘Röntgenaufnahmen der Drei Philosophen
Giorgiones und der Zigeunermadonna Tizians’, Jahrbuch der
Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, vi (1932), pp. 141–54.
23 Brown and Ferino-Pagden, Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, p. 293, fig. 11.
24 See Salvatore Settis, Giorgione’s Tempest: Interpreting the Hidden Subject
(London, 1990), pp. 15–48.
25 Brown and Ferino-Pagden, Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, cat. no. 30, p. 164.
26 Johannes Wilde, Venetian Art from Bellini to Titian (Oxford, 1981),
p. 67.
27 Peter Meller, ‘I tre filosofi di Giorgione’, in Giorgione e l’umanismo
veneziano, ed. Rodolfo Pallucchini (Florence, 1981), vol. i, pp. 227–
47.
229 References
28 Arnaldo Ferriguto, Attraverso i misteri di Giorgione (Castelfranco

Veneto, 1933), p. 61.
29 See, for example, the seated female figure of ‘Geometry’
surrounded by such instruments in Gregor Reisch’s Margarita
philosophica (1504), one of the sources for Dürer’s great engraving
of Melencolia i of 1514.
30 See S. Carezzolo, A. Giacomelli, N. Parola and C. Vitali, ‘Castel
San Zeno di Montagnana in un disegno attribuito a Giorgione’,
Antichità viva, xvii/4–5 (1978), pp. 40–52.
31 For example, the Rotterdam drawing was one of nine still attributed
to Giorgione in the large exhibition held in Paris in 1993. See Gilles
Fage, Le Siècle de Titien: L’âge d’or de la peinture à Venise, exh. cat., Paris,
Grand Palais (Paris, 1993), cat. nos 86–94 and pp. 484–95.
32 For the further attribution of a red chalk drawing showing the
Virgin and Child to Giorgione, along with a reiteration of an
earlier attribution of a drawing showing Cupid Bending His Bow
(New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art) relating to the Fondaco
commission, see Jaynie Anderson et al., ‘Giorgione in Sydney’,
Burlington Magazine, clxi/1392 (March 2019), pp. 190–99.
33 Colin Eisler, The Genius of Jacopo Bellini: The Complete Paintings and
Drawings (New York, 1989), pp. 105–82.
34 The drawing is badly abraded after it was washed in warm water
by Sebastiano Resta, its owner in the late seventeenth century; see
Catherine Whistler, Venice and Drawing, 1500–1800: Theory, Practice and
Collecting (New Haven, ct, and London, 2016), pp. 242–3.

35 See Bert Meijer, ‘Due proposte iconografiche per il Pastorello di
Rotterdam’, in Giorgione: Atti del Convegno, ed. Rodolfo Pallucchini
(Venice, 1979), pp. 53–6.
36 Tom Nichols, The Art of Poverty: Irony and Ideal in Sixteenth-century Beggar
Imagery (Manchester, 2007).
37 Pietro Edwards identified the Tempest as showing ‘the family of
the painter’ in 1797, and his interpretation was followed by Lord
Byron when he viewed the work in the same gallery twenty years
later. See Linda Borean, La galleria Manfrin a Venezia: L’ultima collezione
d’arte della Serenissima (Udine, 2018), p. 17.
38 Edgar Wind, Giorgione’s Tempesta with Comments on Giorgione’s Poetic
Allegories (Oxford, 1969).
39 Peter Humfrey, Titian: The Complete Paintings (Ghent, 2007), cat. no. 3,
p. 32.
40 Sandra Moschini Marconi, in Giorgione a Venezia, ed. Antonio
Ruggeri, Francesco Valconover et al. (Milan, 1978), p. 104.
41 Andrew Morrall, ‘Soldiers and Gypsies: Outsiders and their
Families in Early Sixteenth-century German Art’, in Artful Armies,
Beautiful Battles: Art and Warfare in Early Modern Europe, ed. Pia Cuneo
(Leiden, 2002), pp. 159–80.
42 See, for example, Nicoletto da Modena’s engraving of a Gypsy
Family (c. 1500, London, British Museum).
43 Paul Holberton, ‘Giorgione’s Tempest or “Little Landscape with the
Storm with the Gypsy”: More on the Gypsy and a Reassessment’,
Art History, xviii/3 (September 1995), pp. 383–404.
44 Joscelyn Godwin, trans., Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in
a Dream (London, 1999), pp. 71–3. For the Tempest as an illustration
of the Hypnerotomachia, see Luigi Stefanini, Il motivo della Tempesta di
Giorgione, 2nd edn (Padua, 1955).
45 Stephen Campbell, ‘Giorgione’s “Tempest”, “Studiolo” Culture
and the Renaissance Lucretius’, Renaissance Quarterly, lvi/2
(Summer 2003), pp. 299–332; Ursula Kirkendale and Warren
Kirkendale, Hesiod’s Theogony as Source of the Iconological Program of
Giorgione’s ‘Tempesta’: The Poet, Amalthea, the Infant Zeus and the Muses
(Florence, 2015).
46 Settis, Giorgione’s Tempest, pp. 81–125.
47 Deborah Howard, ‘Giorgione’s Tempesta and Titian’s Assunta in

the Context of the Cambrai Wars’, Art History, viii/3 (1985),
pp. 271–89; Paul H. D. Kaplan, ‘The Storm of War: The Paduan
Key to Giorgione’s Tempesta’, Art History, ix/4 (1986), pp. 405–27.
48 See Oliver Logan, Culture and Society in Venice, 1470–1790 (London,
1972), pp. 165 and 229.
49 Included in Paolo Giovio, Dialogo dell’imprese militari e amorosi
(Florence, 1555; repr. Lyons, 1574). See François Quiviger, The
Sensory World of Italian Renaissance Art (London, 2010), p. 32.
50 Bernard Aikema, ‘Giorgione: Relationships with the North and a
New Interpretation of La Vecchia and La Tempesta’, in Sylvia Ferino-
Pagden and Giovanna Nepi Scirè, Giorgione: Myth and Enigma, exh. cat.,
Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum (Milan, 2004), pp. 85–103.
231 References
5 Nudes
2 Jaynie Anderson, Giorgione: Painter of Poetic Brevity (Paris, 1996),
pp. 277–84.
3 Creighton Gilbert, ‘On Subject and Not-subject in Italian
Renaissance Pictures’, Art Bulletin, xxxiv/3 (1952), pp. 202–16.
4 Philippe de Commynes, the French ambassador, described Venice
as an urbs picta in 1495.
5 Thomas Kren, ‘The Nude and Christian Art’, in The Renaissance
Nude, ed. Thomas Kren with Jill Burke and Stephen J. Campbell,
exh. cat., Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum; London, Royal
Academy of Arts (Los Angeles, ca, 2018), pp. 14–77.
6 His facade might also have included a naked Cupid as recorded
in a surviving drawing and fresco fragment: see Anderson,
Giorgione, pp. 278–9.
7 Anderson, Giorgione, p. 283, argues that the Fondaco nudes
influenced Michelangelo’s ignudi, although there is little evidence
of close formal borrowings. See also Craig Hugh Smyth,
‘Michelangelo and Giorgione’, in Giorgione: Atti del Convegno
Internazionale, ed. Rodolfo Pallucchini (Venice, 1979), pp. 213–20.
8 Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art (London, 1956),
pp. 1–25.
9 Jill Burke, The Italian Renaissance Nude (New Haven, ct, and London,
2018).
10 S. J. Freedberg, Painting in Italy, 1500–1600 (London, 1971), p. 134.
11 James Grantham Turner, Eros Visible: Art, Sexuality and Antiquity in
Renaissance Italy (New Haven, ct, and London, 2017), pp. 223–69.
12 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, trans. Harris Rackham (Cambridge,
ma, 1952), vol. x, books 36–7, pp. 16–17.
13 First noted by Fritz Saxl, ‘Titian and Aretino’, in Lectures (London,
1957), vol. i, pp. 162–3.
14 For Lessing’s coinage, see Jonathan Rée, I See a Voice: A Philosophical
History of Language, Deafness and the Senses (London, 2000), pp. 350–51.
15 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky
(Bloomington, in, 1984), pp. 27–8.
16 This has been used to refute the idea that such images show
courtesans, although the marriage context might not cancel the
possibility that courtesans were featured. See the discussion of
Titian’s Venus of Urbino below.
17 Anderson, Giorgione, pp. 223–4.
18 Rona Goffen, Titian’s Women (New Haven, ct, and London, 1997),
pp. 151–2.
19 Marlies Giebe, ‘Die Schlummernde Venus von Giorgione und Tizian:
Bestandsaufnahme und Konservierung – neue Ergebnisse der
Röntgenanalyse’, Jahrbuch der Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen Dresden,
33 (1992), pp. 91–108.
20 For the other Giorgiones that Michiel recorded in Marcello’s
collection in 1525, see Chapter One.
21 M. J. Zucker, The Illustrated Bartsch, xxv: Early Italian Masters
(New York, 1988), pp. 473–6.
22 See Palma’s Venus and Cupid (c. 1523–4, Cambridge, Fitzwilliam
Museum) and Paris Bordone, Venus and Cupid (c. 1545–60, Warsaw,
Museum Narodowe).
23 The connection between sleeping female nudes and landscapes
first surfaces in Boccaccio’s tale of Cymon and Iphigenia in
The Decameron (1349–53); see Maria Ruvoldt, The Italian Renaissance
Imagery of Inspiration: Metaphors of Sex, Sleep and Dreams
(Cambridge, 2004), pp. 107–14.
24 Tom Nichols, Titian and the End of the Venetian Renaissance (London,
2013), pp. 43–5.

25 See the essays in Rona Goffen, ed., Titian’s Venus of Urbino
(Cambridge, 1997).
26 David Rosand, ‘So-and-so Reclining on Her Couch’, Titian 500,
Studies in the History of Art, 45 (Washington, dc, 1993),
pp. 100–119, repr. in Goffen, ed., Titian’s Venus of Urbino, pp. 37–63.
For Titian’s putative use of Zaffetta’s head, see Sheila Hale,
Titian: His Life (London, 2012), pp. 343–4 and 761 note 5.
Conclusion
1 This painting was attributed to Giorgione in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries (like many others), but over the past thirty
233 References
years has typically been given to Titian. See Jaynie Anderson,

Giorgione: Painter of Poetic Brevity (Paris, 1996), pp. 308–9, for one
very significant scholar’s continuing advocacy of Giorgione’s
authorship.
2 Augusto Gentili, ‘Traces of Giorgione: Jewish Culture and
Astrological Science’, in Sylvia Ferino-Pagden and Giovanna
Nepi Scirè, eds, Giorgione, Myth and Enigma, exh. cat., Vienna,
Kunsthistoriches Museum (Milan, 2004) pp. 57–8.
3 Sarah Blake McHam, ‘Reflections of Pliny in Giovanni Bellini’s
Woman with a Mirror’, Artibus et Historiae, xxix/58 (2008),
pp. 157–71; Elise Goodman-Soeliner, ‘Poetic Interpretations of
the “Lady at Her Toilette” Theme in Sixteenth-century Painting’,
Sixteenth Century Journal, xiv/4 (Winter 1983), pp. 426–42.
4 Michel Hochmann, Venise et Rome, 1500–1600: Deux écoles de peintures
et leurs exchanges (Geneva, 2004), pp. 193–242; Matthias Wivel,
Michelangelo and Sebastiano (London, 2017).
5 Gentili, ‘Traces of Giorgione’, pp. 57–8, for Giorgione’s defining
professional marginality and a putative association with the Jewish
community in Venice.
6 Paolo Sachet, ‘Aldine Books for Collectors’, in Guido Beltramini
and Davide Gasparotto, Aldo Manuzio: Renaissance in Venice, exh. cat.,
Venice, Fondazione Cini (Venice, 2016), p. 87.
7 Elizabeth Prettejohn, Modern Painters, Old Masters: The Art of Imitation
from the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War (New Haven, ct, and
London, 2017).
8 Manet worked from a drawing after the Concert Champêtre by Henri
Fantin-Latour, while he made a copy of Titian’s Venus of Urbino
during a visit to Florence in 1857; see Stéphanie Guégan and
Gabriella Belli, Manet: Ritorno a Venezia, exh. cat., Venice, Palazzo
Ducale (Milan, 2013).
9 For Boschini, the Giorgionesque and Pietro della Vecchia, see
Anderson, Giorgione, pp. 74–5.
10 Francis Haskell, ‘La sfortuna critica di Giorgione’, in Giorgione e
pp. 583–606.
11 See more recently, for example, Michel Hochmann, Colorito:
La technique des peintres Venitiens à la Renaissance (Turnhout, 2015)
and Jodi Cranston, ed., Venetian Painting Matters (1450–1750)

(Turnout, 2015).
12 Patricia Fortuni Brown, Private Lives in Renaissance Venice: Art,
Architecture and the Family (New Haven, ct, and London, 2004).
13 See Amelia Jones, quoting Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in ‘Meaning,
Identity and Embodiment: The Uses of Merleau-Ponty’s
Phenomenology in Art History’, in Art and Thought, ed. Dana
Arnold and Margaret Iversen (Oxford, 2003), p. 75.
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acknowledgements
Many thanks go to Michael Leaman and François Quiviger for inviting

me to contribute to the Renaissance Lives series. I began working on this
book while I was a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced
Study in the Visual Arts at Washington, dc, and I would like to thank
Peter Lukehart and Elisabeth Cropper for their very kind hospitality.
I continued to work on it during a prolonged stay in Venice in 2018,
funded in part by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation of New York.
I was grateful for the opportunity to try out some ideas at a World Art
Research Seminar at the University of East Anglia and would like to
thank Jack Hartnell and Simon Dell for inviting me to speak on that
occasion. I would also like to thank Philip Cottrell, David Hopkins and
Elisabetta Torreno for kindly reading drafts of the book and for their
very helpful comments. My discussions with Giulio Bono, Matteo Casini,
Melissa Conn, John Richards and Giorgio Tagliaferro were also signifi-
cant, as were those carried on in a more familial way with my sister Tessa
Hadley and mother Mary Nichols, especially those we enjoyed so much
in front of La vecchia and the Tempest at the Accademia in Venice. The
book could not have been written without the amazing love and support
of my wife, Kerry.
photo acknowledgements
The author and publishers wish to express their thanks to the below
sources of illustrative material and/or permission to reproduce it. Some
locations of artworks are also given below, in the interest of brevity:
© Archivio fotografico G.A.VE – su concessione del Ministero dei beni

e delle attività culturali e del turismo – Gallerie dell’Accademia di
Venezia: 28, 30, 41; The British Museum, London: 40, 56; from Francesco
Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili . . . (Venice, 1499), photo courtesy
Boston Public Library: 54; Duomo di Castelfranco Veneto, photos
Mondadori Portfolio/Electa/Cameraphoto Arte/Bridgeman Images: 18,
19; The Frick Collection, New York: 34; Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian,
Lisbon: 16; Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence: 32, 33; Gallerie dell’
Accademia, Venice: 11, 17, 45; Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice, photo akg-
images/Cameraphoto: 10; Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence: 58, 61; Gemälde-
galerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin: 6, 20; Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister,

Dresden: 51, 52; Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge, ma:
42; Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig: 2; History and Art
Collection/Alamy Stock Photo: 43; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna:
24, 29, 60; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna/Bridgeman Images: 25,
27, 38 (photo Luisa Ricciarini); Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung,
Frankfurt: 49; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: 12; Musée
du Louvre, Paris: 59; Musei di Strada Nuova, Palazzo Rosso, Genoa: 23;
Musei Vaticani, Vatican City: 50, 55; Museo Civico, Padua: 21; Museum
Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam: 39; photos © The National
Gallery, London: 13, 14, National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc: 7, 15,
35; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh and The National Gallery,
London: 44; Palazzo Altemps, Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome/photo
Marie-Lan Nguyen: 53; Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco, Milan: 26;

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam: 3, 9; The San Diego Museum of Art, ca/
photo Bridgeman Images: 22; Slovenská národná galéria, Bratislava: 1;
Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden: 57; The State Hermitage Museum,
St Petersburg/photo Bridgeman Images: 5, 8; from Giorgio Vasari, Le vite
de’ piv eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori, part iii, vol. i (Florence, 1568): 4;
from Anton Maria Zanetti, Le varie pitture a fresco de’ principali maestri veneziani
(Venice, 1760), photos Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute
for Art History, Rome: 46, 47, 48.
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index
Illustration numbers are indicated by italics
Abioso, Giovan Battista 23 Procession in St Mark’s Square

Aeschylus 147 45–6, 63–5, 10
Albano, Taddeo 22, 130, 208 Bellini, Giovanni 16, 21–2, 38,
Alberti, Leon Battista, De pictura 48–52, 57–8, 105, 110–11,
13, 48, 66–7, 76, 79–80, 118, 124–7
205 Drunkenness of Noah 200
Aldus Manutius (and the Aldine Feast of the Gods 200
press) 25, 159, 163, 184, 205 Lady with a Mirror 200, 60
Altdorfer, Albrecht 164 Portrait of a Humanist 94–6, 98,
Antonello da Messina 77, 84, 96 26
Anthony, St 133 Portrait of a Man 80–82, 84, 21
Antico, Apollo 177, 49 San Giobbe Altarpiece 58, 65–7,
Apelles 163 72–3, 170, 17
Aphrodite Ourania 42–3 San Zaccaria Altarpiece 137
Apollo 97 St Francis in the Desert 50–51,

Apollo Belvedere 177 125–6, 130, 134, 136–8, 34
Arcadia 135, 143, 199 Virgin and Child 48–50, 110, 12
Asolo 24, 71 see also Giorgione and
Athens 147 Giovanni Bellini
Augustine, St 119 Bellini, Jacopo 63
City Walls with Well 146–7, 40
Bakhtin, Mikhail 182 Bembo, Pietro 24
banderoles 111–13 Gli Asolani 23–4
Barbarella, Altadona 20–21, 27, Boccaccio, Giovanni 156
109 Bordone, Paris 193
Beccario, Vittorio 22, 25, 130 Bosch, Hieronymus 133
Bellini, Gentile 77 Boschini, Marco 209
Camelio (Vittore di Antonio Dürer, Albrecht 43, 92

Gambello), Portrait Medal of Avarice 107–9, 114, 29
Giovanni Bellini 38, 7 Christ Among the Doctors 103
Campagnola, Giulio 144 Portrait of a Man 86–9, 23
Venus or Nymph 191–2, 56 see also Giorgione and
Carrara family 161 Albrecht Dürer
Caravaggio 27, 43, 206
Carpaccio, Vittore 55, 104–5 Elijah 147–8
Castelfranco 16, 19–20, 24, 38, Eros 97
69, 72 Erythrean Sybil 112
allegorical frieze at 24
documents 20, 23–4 Freud, Sigmund 44
Catena, Vincenzo 21
Cima da Conegliano, Rest on the Gauricus, Pomponius, De sculptura
Flight into Egypt 58–60, 62–3, 67
16 George, St 74
Clark, Kenneth 178, 181 Giorgione
Compagnie della Calza 55–6, and Albrecht Dürer 85–9,
153 103, 107–9, 114
Contarini, Taddeo 22–3, 25, 125, and Giovanni Bellini 58–60,
137 68–9, 130, 134–5, 137–8, 143,
Cornaro, Caterina 23, 71 162, 199–201
Costanzo, Matteo 73 and Leonardo da Vinci 12,
Costanzo, Tuzio 24, 69–75, 161 19, 60, 85, 88–91, 102–4,
Cranach, Lucas 164 122, 134

Cyprus 24 and poetry 135, 143, 199, 205,
208
Da Lodi, Giovanni Agostino and Republican culture in
88–9 Venice 16, 37, 210
Dante, Divine Comedy 19 and Venetian painting 16,
David 30, 35, 37, 40 43, 45–51, 63–7, 81–2, 202,
De’Barbari, Jacopo, Map of Venice 204
65 as outsider and imagery
Della Vecchia, Pietro 208 of outsiders in 26–7, 101,
D’Este, Isabella 22, 208 105–6, 114, 144, 148, 154–5,
Donà, Laura 100 206
Donatello, David (bronze) 37, 42 as teenage delinquent 27
249 Index
clarifying alterations or nudes and naked figures in

responses to works by 166–96
30–32, 76, 84, 109, 132–3, painting technique of 14–15,
164, 195–8 56, 83, 162–3
cultural background of 27, paintings as open templates
71–2 9, 11, 150, 208
dates of birth and death paragone (painting versus
18–20 sculpture, painting versus
dexter manus (right hand) music) in 96, 121–2, 175
in 38, 81–2, 84, 115 patrons of 15, 21–6, 29,
diminution in 204–6 69–75
drapery style of 59–61, personae of 39–41
109–10 portraiture of 12–13, 33–5,
drawings of 143–7 41, 76–122, 174
early religious paintings of professional ambition/
12, 51–63, 76, 126–7 anxiety of 16, 29, 35, 37–40
eroticism and homoeroticism paintings and the spectator
in 43–4, 56, 97–8, 100–101, 106, 114–17, 128, 134, 155,
181–96 180, 190, 210
family of 20–21, 109, 150 scopophilia in paintings of
influence of north European 189–90
prints and paintings on 60, sensuousness and corporality
164 in paintings of 11, 44, 101,
influence of 18, 102, 182, 113–14, 163–4, 166–7, 180,
191–3, 199–200, 206–8 209–11

introspection, isolation and sonic allusions in 39, 119–20,
melancholy in 35, 53, 92–3, 163–4, 210
142, 148, 211 special accommodation of
inventory of possessions of the interests of individual
18, 20 patrons in 11, 69–75, 128–30,
landscapes in works by 12–13, 133, 155–7, 161–4
74, 123–65, 174, 210 synaesthesia in 11–12
limits to vision and technique and pigments of
visibility in work of 8, 11–12, 11–12, 14–15, 60–61, 89–90,
62–3, 68–9, 83, 89–91, 119, 138, 190, 209
163, 187 time in the paintings of
music in 19, 39, 43, 119–22 117–22, 138–9
touch in 44, 82, 187, 210 Portrait of a Young Man (‘The

x-rays and infrared Giustiniani Portrait’) 13,
reflectography of works by 15, 77–85, 93, 117, 20
108, 132, 134, 139–40, 156, 43 Portrait of a Man (‘The Terris
Giorgione, works by Portrait’) 13, 85–94, 97, 22
Adoration of the Magi 12, 51, Self-portrait as David, 26–45, 84,
53–6, 73, 129, 154, 13, 14 97–8, 113, 115, 118–19, 2
Adoration of the Shepherds Self-portrait as Orpheus (lost) see
(Washington) 22, 25, 126– Lucas Vorsterman print after
30, 136, 155–6, 35 a copy by David Teniers the
Adoration of the Shepherds Younger 6, 39, 43, 1
(Vienna) 22, 25 St Jerome Reading (lost) 25
Castelfranco Altarpiece 12, 67–76, Standing Woman 45
83, 119, 153–4, 156, 161, 18–19 Tempest 7–9, 13, 119, 135,
Concert/Three Ages of Man 25, 148–65, 179, 193, 41
120–22, 32 Three Philosophers 7–9, 13,
Finding of the Infant Paris (lost) 25 50–51, 123, 130, 135–44,
Fondaco dei Tedeschi frescos 203–4, 38
14, 21–2, 72, 166–80, 183, Tramonto (‘The Sunset
191, 205 Landscape’) 26, 119, 130–38,
Hell with Aeneas and Anchises 143, 155, 162, 36–7
(lost) 25 Young Man with an Arrow 13, 25,
Holy Family (‘The Benson 93–9, 100, 102, 178, 25
Madonna’) 12, 26, 51, 56–63, Venus 14, 159, 180–96, 200,
73, 129, 15 204, 207, 51, 52

Judith 35–7, 42–5, 53, 84, 127, Giorgionesque works 9, 144,
179, 5, 8 191–201, 207–9
Laura 13, 21, 98–106, 108, 117, Archer 197
178, 203, 27 Portrait of a Young Man 197
La vecchia (‘Col tempo’) 13, 25, Shepherd with a Flute 197
88, 103–19, 122, 203, 28, 30 Grimani, Domenico 26, 29–30,
Man in a Landscape 143–8, 155, 133
161–2, 39 Grimani, Marino 26
Portrait of Caterina Cornaro
(lost) 24 Hesiod, Theogony 159
Portrait of Girolamo Marcello Hippocrates 118
(lost) 25 Hollar, Wenceslaus, print after
251 Index
Giorgione’s Self-portrait as Marcello, Girolamo 25, 189–91

David, 30, 32–3, 38, 84, 3, 9 Michelangelo 201
Huber, Wolf 164 David 35–7
Hypnerotomachia Polifili (Francesco ignudo 177–8, 50
Colonna?) 158–9, 193 Michiel, Marcantonio 24–5, 67,
woodcut illustration from 94, 139–40, 153–4, 190
184–6, 192, 54 Michiel, Zuan 137
Milan 103
imprese 163–4 Montagnana, Castel Zan Zeno
istorie (‘histories’) 13, 45, 48, 66–7, 143, 146–7, 161
76, 80, 205
Naples 77
Jacobello del Fiore, Justice Nicasius, St 74
Enthroned Between Michael and
Gabriel 47, 111, 11 Orpheus 39, 43
Job, St 170
Joseph 54–5, 62 Pacioli, Luca 65
Padua and the Padovano 161–2
Laocoön 115 Palazzo Grimani 30
Leonardo da Vinci 19, 60, Palma Vecchio, Venus 192–3, 57
88–92, 138 Panofsky, Erwin 113–14, 118
sfumato 12, 90, 96 Pater, Walter 39
see also Giorgione and Petrarca (Petrarch), Francesco
Leonardo 100, 104, 162
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim Pisani, Morosina 189

187 Plato, Republic 141
Liberalis, St 74 Pliny the Elder, Natural History
Lombardo, Antonio 21 163, 184
Lombardo, Tullio 21, 170 Poliziano, Agnolo (Angelo) Orfeo
Longhi, Roberto 53 43
Lucretius, De rerum natura 159 Praxiteles, Roman copy of 182–3
Venus 53
Manet, Edouard, Le Déjeuner Venus of Cnidos 184
sur l’herbe 207 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 207
Olympia 207
Mantegna, Andrea 43 Ram, Giovanni 25
Marca Trevigiana 23, 74 Raphael 201
Renaissance art Diana and Actaeon 157–8,

facial expression in 76 199, 44
fantasia in 123 Portrait of Gian Giacomo
figural definition and linear Bartolotti da Parma 93, 24
perspective in 62–3, 65–7, Self-portrait 38, 6
179–80, 209 Venus of Urbino 194–6, 207, 58
Florentine and Roman Titian(?), A Mother and Soldier in a
disegno in 15, 17, 48, 166–7, Landscape 153, 42
209–10
life-drawing in 179 Vasari, Giorgio 17–21, 27, 39, 48,
progression in 201–2, 205–6 67, 96, 145, 150
visual and semantic clarity in ‘Life of Giorgione’ and
10, 13, 63–7 woodcut of ‘Giorgione da
Ridolfi, Carlo 68, 150, 197 Castelfranco’ from the Lives
Rizzo, Antonio 170 of the Artists (1568) 31–2, 76,
166–7, 201–2, 4
Sebastian, St 97, 170 Vendramin, Gabriele 25, 39, 88,
Sebastiano del Piombo 9, 140, 115, 156, 161–3
202 Vendramin inventories of the
Death of Adonis 200–201, 61 sixteenth and seventeenth
Judgement of Solomon 197 centuries 109
Siege of Padua 160 Venetian art
Sleeping Ariadne 186–7, 55 belle donne paintings in 102,
Stevens, Wallace 194 104
Stokes, Adrian 51 devotional paintings in 48

Sybils 112 facade fresco paintings in
169
Teniers the Younger, David 25 group portraits in 80
Tintoretto, Jacopo 204 Netherlandish influence on
Titian 9, 38, 77, 113, 190, 193, 77, 96, 125
199–200, 202 nudes in 170
Christ and the Adulterous Woman portraiture in 43, 77, 117–18
197 sacred or desert landscapes in
Christ Carrying the Cross 197 134
Concert 120, 33 speaking pictures in 116–17
Concert Champêtre 197–9, tomb sculpture in 122
207, 59 votive paintings in 75
253 Index
Venice
as entrepôt 211 ,
bocche di leone in 115, 31
Ducal Palace of 115, 170
gerontocracy in 38, 80
Great Council of 80–81
Manfrin Gallery 150
position of artists in 29
Venus Genetrix 102, 108, 203
Venus pudica 183–4
Veronese, Paolo 204
Vienna, Kunsthistorisches
Museum 139
Watteau, Antoine 206–7
Zaffetta, Angela 194

Zanetti, Anton Maria, Le varie
pitture a fresco de’principali maestri
veneziani, engravings after
Giorgione’s Standing Woman,
Seated Woman and Seated Man
174–80, 46, 47, 48

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Copyright © 2020. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Series Editor: François Quiviger

Michelangelo and the Viewer in His Time Bernadine Barnes

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd

First published 2020

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval

Printed and bound in China by 1010 Printing International Ltd

isbn 978 1 78914 297 6

cover: Giorgione, Young Man with an Arrow, c. 1506–7, oil on poplar.

than a reality. To this extent Giorgione might appear to be an

1 Lucas Vorsterman, print after a copy by David Teniers the Younger,

like most other Renaissance paintings. But Giorgione then

attempts to explain his paintings, taking the bait of the appar-

‘true’ subject matter or iconography of his works. Rather than

The presence of ambiguity in all these aspects can help us

those paintings which I consider to be by him, discussing them

understand Giorgione’s ambiguity in its own time. Rather

interpret Giorgione’s paintings from a purely intellectual

gione abandons rigorous sharp definition or ‘seeing through’,

suggests is, in fact, truer to human experience than focused

psychologies of his sitters rather than using his imagery to

human protagonists who remain. In these works the kind of

to wander imaginatively beyond the control of the precise

nent of the sixteenth-century tradition of oil painting in

precise medium he used, his works seem to be characterized

exploited the opportunity for improvisation or composition

Giorgione’s approach was certainly founded on the exam-

made in the amended account of the painter that Giorgio

Who Was Giorgione?

lifetime many of the city’s leading painters, sculptors and

account, first published in 1550, supplies some suggestive

who knew more about the painter than he did. If Giorgione

probably owed to a small scribal error; the inventory in fact

Giovanni’s widow. This difference in names does not wholly

document in the Venetian state archives dating from 1507

on the facade of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, mentioned in the

designed and better finished’, in the collection of Vittorio

so-called Marca Trevigiana region near Castelfranco, stimu-

the estate. This hypothesis of Giorgione’s close connection

painter to the period before his move to Venice around the

have owned a Giorgione himself, recorded the presence of as

on the other hand, who may have focused more exclusively

nonetheless remains likely that a relatively narrow circle of

scale patriotic or pious public works for State and Church.

significance. Such works are interesting not only because of

and elsewhere in Italy in the period.23 About a century later, it

2 Giorgione, Self-portrait as David, c. 1503–4, oil on canvas.

the self-portr ait as david and the judith

We might reasonably have expected the question posed by

stimulate his own myth as an all-powerful creative artist. It

Domenico himself.25 Vasari probably saw the work at the

that we must see him not only as the sixteenth-century painter

self-image towards greater conventionality or orthodoxy in

3 Wenceslaus Hollar, print after Giorgione’s Self-portrait, 1650, etching on

of the original painting in this print. But the gruesome and

Judging from the evidence of both the painted fragment

Giorgione’s original work was presented as a portrait, espe-

4 Woodcut illustration of ‘Giorgione da Castelfranco’, from Giorgio Vasari,

5 Giorgione, Judith, c. 1500–1501, oil on canvas transferred from panel.

which indicates that the work is, rather, a quasi-historical or

Michelangelo and the Viewer in His Time Bernadine Barnes