Who Painted The Venetian Painting Venetian Summer Escape

Giorgio da Castelfranco, or Giorgione every bit he is ameliorate known, lived a brusk, but vital, life; a life that confirmed him indeed as ane of the most important and enigmatic figures in the history of Western fine art. The elusive, poetic quality to his painting - with no surviving documentation of the artist's preferences and aims, and no record of his patron's demands, their meanings take always been discipline to fervent conjecture - secured a legacy that belies a career that lasted only fifteen years. Though Giorgione'due south paintings resist straightforward classification, they undoubtedly challenged the modern manner of the day and the artist was instrumental in effecting a shift within Venetian civilisation towards a new appreciation for the ancient globe, esoteric mythology and the natural world. He is remembered primarily for his portraits and landscapes, and of the latter, there is some consensus amongst historians that his work led to the development of mural as a legitimate genre in its own right. Vasari's famous biography describes him merely equally a man of intelligence, charm and biggy talent (though the writer's account was probably fatigued from Giorgione's painting style rather than from reliable records and/or anecdotes) - he emerges as a pivotal figure in the motility within Renaissance art towards a style that promoted the sensuous blending of luminous color that we recognise to this twenty-four hour period as a authentication of the Venetian Renaissance.

c.1497-99

Portrait of a Young man ('Giustiniani Portrait')

The face of this young man is not quite in profile every bit he turns his head to appoint the look of the spectator. Placed against a dark background, he wears a purple doublet fastened with bows over a white undershirt, with long hair reaching downwards to his shoulders. With his correct manus he holds on to a parapet, his fingers curling over its border, and on which we see the letters 'V 5' (added to the painting during a nineteenth-century restoration), possibly to signify 'Virtus Vincit' (virtue conquers), or 'Vivus Vivo' (the living [made it] for the living).

The pose and naturalistic use of colour in this painting demonstrate the influence of the Venetian primary Giovanni Bellini, nether whom Giorgione trained. Where information technology differs from his main's formal, "detached," way of portraiture is in the interaction it encourages between sitter and spectator. Past depicting his subject as turning to meet our gaze, and by moving beyond the ledge that divides the states, Giorgione sets upwardly a new relationship that invites united states to consider the young man'south personality and his state of heed. Describing this portrait, art historian Simone Facchinetti alleged that "Giorgione's genuinely innovative approach [...] can be appreciated by comparing it to contemporary work by Bellini, for example the Portrait of Pietro Bembo in Hampton Court. There, the painting is still executed in fifteenth-century 'medallion style' and is prepare in a fictitious mural. In the Giorgione portrait we are presented with an anxious personality, a sit-in of how Giorgione, in Vasari's words, desired to 'face living and natural things'."

Oil on canvas - Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

1506

Portrait of a Immature Woman (Laura)

This painting depicts a young woman in a red, fur-lined coat, with a translucent white robe below that wraps up and across her chest. Shown in profile, her eyes escape our gaze. With one mitt she moves her garments to reveal the soft curve and pale pare of her right breast. Her hair is modestly bound underneath a lace cap, though a few tendrils autumn loose around her ears. Backside her, ascension the branches and leaves of a laurel (lauro in Italian), a tree associated in Italian literature and art with "Laura" being the love of the poet Petrarch. Indeed, it was this clan that led seventeenth century scholars to championship the painting as A Portrait of Laura.

As with many paintings past this enigmatic artist, the true identity and status of his subject is unclear. The laurel that accompanies her tin can be interpreted as a symbol of chastity, and the baring of her breast her fecundity and potential for a fruitful marriage, lending itself to the theory that it may accept been deputed as a marriage portrait. Alternatively, information technology is possible that she might have been a courtesan depicted in the guise of Petrarch'southward Laura, equally her way of wearing apparel corresponds with the Venetian writer Cesare Vecellio's descriptions of courtesans' habiliment in his book On Habiliment. Any its meaning, this is undoubtedly a piece of work of hitting naturalism blended with a streak of eroticism.

On its reverse is an inscription declaring that Laura was painted in 1506 by "Master Giorgio of Castelfranco, at the request of a Mister Giacomo". This appears to take been written shortly afterwards the painting was fabricated, although probably not past the artist himself. Only 1 other piece of work by Giorgione carries a similar inscription documenting its creation (in which, however, the date is illegible), making this portrait invaluable in dating Giorgione's works (of which art historians believe mayhap up to forty now exist). Stylistically, the delicate modelling and blending of light and shade across the young woman'due south features demonstrate the influence of the Florentine painter Leonardo da Vinci, who visited Venice in 1499, and shows Giorgione moving across the model and style of the preceding chief of Venetian painting, Giovanni Bellini. In its exquisitely detailed depiction of the texture of her clothing, and the crisp outlines of the laurel leaves, however, we observe the continuing importance of Albrecht Dürer and northern European Renaissance painting as a model.

Oil on canvas over spruce panel - Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

c.1504-08

La Tempesta (The Tempest)

On the grassy banking concern of a river, a young female parent, naked except for a white cape and a lace cap, suckles her child. Dissimilar the Portrait of a Young Woman, she turns her head to meet our gaze. To the left a fashionably dressed youth surveys the scene as he leans on a staff, while behind him we see the remains of two broken columns and other architectural fragments. Copse frame the scene to the left and right, and in the eye footing a wooden bridge stretches over the h2o to the dwellings of a town beyond. To a higher place, lightning breaks out in a sky heavy with atmosphere, lending the painting its title: The Tempest.

Giorgione was among the first generation of painters in Italy to paint exclusively in oils. Oil painting was developed by northern European artists such as Jan van Eyck, and introduced to Venice by Antonello da Messina in the 1470s. The young Giorgione would also take been able to observe the technique in the work of the German creative person Albrecht Dürer, who visited the city in 1494-95, around the time that his apprenticeship with Giovanni Bellini would take been drawing to a close at that time. In this painting he exploits the dramatic potential of oil to capture the tension and expectancy of a summer's day earlier a tempest, and the luxurious dazzler of the northern Italian landscape, which comes to the fore here in a way that prefigures the evolution of landscape art as an independent genre of painting.

Despite its relatively pocket-sized size, this painting has had an enormous impact and influence on art history. Since its creation in the early on sixteenth century the painting has been puzzling viewers and eluding interpretation: is the male figure a soldier or a shepherd? The female parent a goddess or a gipsy? Writing nearly the painting in 1949 in his work Landscape into Art, the great art historian Sir Kenneth Clark alleged "No i knows what it represents; fifty-fifty Michiel, writing in Giorgione's day could offer no better title than 'a soldier and a gypsy', and I recollect that there is niggling doubtfulness that it is a gratuitous fantasy". Perhaps considering of its ambivalence, The Tempest has fascinated and influenced later on artists, who have echoed its treatment of landscape and atmosphere, and the intriguing interaction of its figures. Nosotros find strong echoes of La Tempesta in Titian's painting Sacred and Profane Dear, in Nicolas Poussin's every bit enigmatic work Et in Arcadia ego, and later in Manet's controversial impressionist painting Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe.

Oil on canvas - Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice

c.1506-x

Il Tramonto (The Sunset)

In the midst of a rocky landscape we observe an older and younger human seated by a path that follows the contours of a lake. The elder effigy seems to be tending the wounds of the younger, who has set down his walking stick. To the heart right an armoured and mounted Saint George rears his lance to attack a dragon every bit a hermit looks on, while in the background a townscape stretches into the distance as the sky turns from twenty-four hours to night.

Once again this composition past Giorgione lends itself to multiple interpretations, from aboriginal Greek myth to a devotional Christian scene, and the search for its "true" significant has not been aided past its poor status (having been discovered in a villa close to Venice in the early 1930s). Recent technical analysis carried out past the National Gallery, London, has revealed that the figure of Saint George slaying the dragon was added to the painting by a restorer in 1934, probably in an attempt to persuade potential buyers of the painting that information technology was less damaged than information technology appeared when first discovered. This highlights the importance of an awareness of conservation problems when analyzing and interpreting erstwhile primary paintings, and the ways in which their visual furnishings may have altered over time due to restoration or the fading of pigments.

Stylistically, meanwhile, this painting shows the evolution and increasing sophistication of Giorgione's piece of work, particularly in his depiction of the landscape. Every bit the Giorgione scholar Simone Facchinetti writes "Compared to the landscape of The Storm, the setting for Il Tramonto appears more than developed, with a progression of planes shaded in lite blue glazes that seems to herald the Sleeping Venus." Disregarding the later add-on of Saint George, a plausible identification of the 2 figures in the scene are Saint Roch and his attendant Gothardus. Originally from Montpellier, Saint Roch travelled to Northern Italy, where he cared for sufferers of the Black Death, before falling victim to the illness himself. After death, his remains were moved to Venice, where he became an important saint invoked confronting the plague that struck the city in 1504. Tragically for art history, Giorgione himself succumbed to the later epidemic of 1510.

Oil on sheet - The National Gallery, London

c.1508-ten

Sleeping Venus

A beautiful young adult female lies naked in a verdant mural, sheltered from the sun by a rocky outcrop. She rests on a luxurious silk sheet that glows in the low-cal, her upper-torso propped against a scarlet bolster decorated with gold thread. In the foreground wildflowers spring from the grass on which she lies, while in the heart altitude subcontract buildings are framed confronting a cloud-filled sky and a landscape that stretches to distant woods and hills. Venus lies with her correct arm above her head, her face is turned towards the spectator merely her optics are closed. She is seemingly unaware of our gaze - the painting's championship tells usa that she is asleep - with her left hand covering her genitals. The strategically placed left-hand leaves us to wonder yet if Venus is in fact asleep or if she is "pretending"; posed, in that instance, purely for aesthetic reasons.

The Venetian nobleman Marcantonio Michiel described this piece of work as a canvas with Venus sleeping in a mural with cherubs (which announced to have afterward been removed from the composition). According to Michiel, Venus was painted by Giorgione, with the landscape and cherubs completed by Titian. Knowing this detail suggests to us the close links between the two artists, and the influence that Giorgione exerted over his colleague in making the composition (indeed, Titian's world famous Venus of Urbino (1532-24) is an obvious descendant of Giorgione'south Venus.) Although female nudes had been represented in Venice in the small panels of wedding chests, this was the start big-scale representation of the nude in the urban center, and the get-go convincing representation of the female form using deep space perspective. The painting would go the archetype in fact for a whole genre of painting and the many variations that followed it past Venetian painters such every bit Titian, Palma Vecchio, and Paris Bordon.

The nineteenth-century critic Walter Pater dubbed this trio of painters, along with later painters, Velázquez and Manet, "The School of Giorgione." With Caravaggio and Rubens, Giorgione is one of the few figures in fine art history to have entered a wider cultural consciousness in such a way equally to lead to the development of the describing word Giorgionesque, usually applied to such depictions of beautiful nude women, and used by the French novelist Proust, for example, to describe a maid that he has long lusted-after in his work In Search of Lost Time as "wildly Giorgionesque."

Oil on canvas - Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden

c.1508-10

La Vecchia (Portrait of an Former Woman)

An old adult female, her gray hair merely partially covered past her white cap, emerges from a black background. Placed behind a parapet, she turns to face the spectator, her near toothless mouth open every bit if in speech. With her correct hand she gestures to herself, touching the rough material of her tunic. In the same hand she holds a piece of parchment on which is written "col tempo" (with time).

Although lacking the beauty of the young Laura, Giorgione's One-time Woman is a bright presence who, despite her age, still brims with life, and looks as if she might even step out of the flick aeroplane to meet the spectator in our earth. Although a reminder of the brevity of life and the passage of fourth dimension, this vividness makes this portrait a memento senescere (what it is "to abound old") rather than a memento mori ("call back y'all will die"). In its depiction of the ravages inflicted on the human torso by time, Giorgione manages to retain a sympathy towards the humanity, frailty, and uniqueness of its discipline that differentiates it from mere allegory.

Tempera and oil on sail - Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice

Biography of Giorgione

Childhood

Giorgio da Castelfranco was born around 1477 in the modest northern Italian town of Castelfranco Veneto, some twenty-five miles inland from the Republic of Venice. Passed down by posterity, the name Giorgione - "Big" or "Tall George" - tells us something maybe about his physical stature while legend has tended to view him as a handsome and passionate beau. Yet and so little is known well-nigh Giorgione, least of all his early childhood. From a document listing his possessions compiled shortly after his expiry, we learn the name of his father, Giovanni Gasparini, and that his female parent (unnamed) died while Giorgione was a immature kid. He was raised past his stepmother, Alessandra, though we cannot tell from what date. Even Giorgio Vasari, writer of the influential The Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550) offers no more than the observation that the artist was born of apprehensive origins. But there can be no doubt that he was a prodigiously talented child given that, aged thirteen, Giorgione moved to Venice to take upwards an apprenticeship under i Giovanni Bellini, the pre-eminent Venetian master of the second half of the fifteenth century.

Didactics and Early on training

A fellow member of the esteemed Venetian artistic dynasty, that also included his father Jacopo and brother Gentile, Giovanni Bellini's late Renaissance style clearly exerted a strong influence on the young Giorgione. The application of colour in Giorgione's paintings conduct Bellini's influence though the student is thought to have quickly surpassed his master in technique and in the manner he brought a greater sense of cerebral complexity to his work.

Mature Period

By the time Vasari published the 2nd, enlarged edition of his Lives in 1568, his view of Giorgione seems to have shifted from a talented student of the Bellini family to a master in his ain right. Vasari suggested indeed that Giorgione was responsible for a turning betoken in Venetian painting; that being an evolution in mode, subject, and mood that marked the beginnings of the modern Venetian style. By 1507 his reputation was such that he was commissioned by the Venetian Republic to paint a large work for the centre of government, the Sala del Maggior Consiglio in the Palazzo Ducale, which unfortunately has not survived. A second state committee followed in 1508, when he decorated the façade of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi on the Yard Canal, assisted this time by Titian. The exact relationship between the two artists is unclear and in the centuries post-obit Giorgione'due south death, art historians accept frequently struggled to distinguish between Giorgione'southward piece of work and that of the young Titian.

Although little about his life and work can be established with certainty, Giorgione's death is well-documented, specially in correspondence betwixt the celebrated patron and fine art collector Isabella d'Este, Marchesa of Mantua and her agent in Venice, Taddeo Albano. The daughter of Duke Ercole I d'Este and Eleonora of Naples, Isabella was raised in the highly cultured surround of the court of Ferrara in northern Italy, and married Francesco II Gonzaga, Marquess of Mantua, in whose absence she acted as regent of the city. Arguably the most important art patron of the Renaissance, she had deputed works by the greatest artists of her historic period, including Bellini, Leonardo, Andrea Mantegna, Raphael, Titian, Correggio, and Giulio Romano. Isabella wrote to Albano on the 25^th of Oct 1510, having learned of the artist's expiry from the plague in a Venetian infirmary. She asked the agent to procure a painting of a night scene by Giorgione that she has heard was very beautiful and original, and which could be found in his studio. If the painting was as fine equally it was reputed to be, Albano should buy it at whatever price will forestall others from buying information technology. From Albano'due south reply, however, we discover that Giorgione left no such painting among his effects. Reading, meanwhile, from an inventory drawn up at the request of Giorgione'due south heir, we larn that the artist, who died at the age of about thirty-3, left behind few possessions and footling wealth.

The Legacy of Giorgione

The twenty^th century Italian poet Gabriele d'Annunzio made the post-obit observation in respect of Giorgione's legend: "He seems more than of a myth than a man. No poet on globe has a destiny to compare with his. Almost aught is known of him, some people even incertitude his very existence [...] Yet all the art of Venice seems inflamed by his revelation." The illustrious critic and historian Ernst Gombrich just added to the sense of awe when he stated that "scarcely five paintings can be ascribed with absolute certainty to [Giorgione'southward] hand. Nonetheless these suffice to secure him a fame nearly as slap-up every bit that of the great leaders of the new [Venetian] move." Indeed, Giorgione's reputation merely seems to have profited from his untimely demise. Equally early every bit 1528 (just xviii years subsequently his death) he was cited past Baldassare Castiglione, in his Volume of the Courtier, as ranking amidst Italy'south most fantabulous painters and equal in stature to the likes of Leonardo, Mantegna, Raphael, and Michelangelo.

Giorgione'due south paintings - both portraits and landscapes - would defy straightforward categorization. His benevolent and courteous response to Leonardo's apply of sfumato and chiaroscuro was taken up by a generation of Venetian painters including Sebastiano del Piombo and Titian, while historians are generally agreed that Giorgione effectively reinvented mural painting. Others, such every bit Edgar Air current, have understood his legacy every bit initiating a cultural shift within Renaissance art that brought about a new appreciation of the ancient world and its esoteric mythology while, in the longer term, his sophisticated rendering of temper set precedents for the development of early on 19^th Century Romanticism. More specifically, Giorgione's Sleeping Venus (1508-10) provided the impetus for two of the greatest masterpieces of Western art: Titian'south Venus of Urbino and Manet'south Olympia.

Source: https://www.theartstory.org/artist/giorgione/

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