Giorgione's Ambiguity

Tom Nichols

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781789142969
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte general

The Venetian painter known as Giorgione or "big George" died at a young age in the dreadful plague of 1510, possibly having painted fewer than twenty-five works. But many of these are among the most mysterious and alluring in the history of art. Paintings such as The Three Philosophers and The Tempest remain compellingly elusive, seeming to deny the viewer the possibility of interpreting their meaning. Tom Nichols argues that this visual elusiveness was essential to Giorgione's sensual approach and that ambiguity is the defining quality of his art. Through detailed discussions of all Giorgione's works, Nichols shows that by abandoning the more intellectual tendencies of much Renaissance art, Giorgione made the world and its meanings appear always more inscrutable.

ONE Who Was Giorgione?

iorgione received few large-scale public commissions 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 evidence 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 influence 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 acknowledged by the Tuscan writer Giorgio Vasari, the leading authority on Italian Renaissance art of this period.² Vasari’s 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 inventorying 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 document 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 prominent public works in Venice, adorning a newly built official building at the mercantile heart of Venice. Bellini’s commission allotted a fee of 150 ducats, although this was subsequently reduced to 130 by his patrons.

A further indication of Giorgione’s fast-growing reputation 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 surroundings 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, stimulated 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 philosophers 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 Castelfranco 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 attachment 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 palazzo 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 t...