_Giorgione_ (Venetian: 1477-1510).
Giorgio[121] of Castelfranco, called Giorgione, George the
Great,--a name given him, according to Vasari, "because of
the gifts of his person and the greatness of his mind,"--is
one of the most renowned of the old masters, and exercised a
deeper influence upon the artists of his time than any other
painter. He was the fellow-pupil with Titian of Bellini at
Venice, and after executing works at his native place was
employed in Venice. Here by way of exhibiting a specimen of his
ability, he decorated the front of his house with frescoes.
He was afterwards employed in conjunction with Titian there
to decorate the façade of the Fondaco de' Tedeschi. These
paintings have been destroyed by the sea-winds.[122] But what
was more original in Giorgione's work was his small subject
pictures. He was, says Pater, "the inventor of _genre_, of
those easily movable pictures which serve for uses neither of
devotion, nor of allegorical or historical teaching--little
groups of real men and women, amid congruous furniture or
landscape--morsels of actual life, conversation or music or
play, refined upon or idealised, till they come to seem like
glimpses of life from afar." Some of Bellini's late works
are already of this kind; but they were a little too austere
and sober in colour for the taste of the time. Carpaccio was
full of brilliancy, fancy, and gaiety, but he painted few
easel pictures. Giorgione brought to the new style all the
resources of a poetical imagination, of a happy temper, and
of supreme gifts as a colourist. He was, says Ruskin, one of
"the seven supreme colourists."[123] The chief colour on his
palette, it has been said, was sunlight. In the glowing colour
with which he invested the human form "the sense of nudity is
utterly lost, and there is no need nor desire of concealment
any more, but his naked figures move among the trees like
fiery pillars, and lie on the grass like flakes of sunshine"
(_Modern Painters_, vol. ii. pt. iii. sec. i. ch. xiv. § 20).
Giorgione, says Mr. Colvin, came to enrich Venetian painting
further, with "a stronger sense of life and of the glory of
the real world as distinguished from the solemn dreamland of
the religious imagination. He had a power hitherto unknown
of interpreting both the charm of merely human grace and
distinction, and the natural joy of life in the golden sunlight
among woods and meadows." Giorgione, by his originality and
his exact correspondence with the spirit of the time, created
a demand which other painters were forced to supply. His
influence, says Morelli, is not only to be traced in the
early work of Titian; it stands out broadly in the paintings
of nearly all his Venetian contemporaries--Lotto, Palma,
Pordenone, Bonifacio, Cariani, and many others, not to speak
of his scholar, Sebastiano del Piombo. The surviving pictures
which are undoubtedly by Giorgione's own hand are very few.
This category hardly includes more than four,--the altar-piece
at Castelfranco (see below), the so-called "Famiglia di
Giorgione" (now identified as "Adrastus and Hypsipyle," in the
Palazzo Giovanelli at Venice), the "Three Philosophers" (in
the Belvedere at Vienna), and the lovely "Sleeping Venus,"
identified by Morelli, in the Dresden Gallery. Among pictures
in a second and less certain category, may be mentioned the
"Concert" in the Louvre (the "Venetian Pastoral" of Rossetti's
sonnet), another "Concert" in the Pitti, the "Head of a
Shepherd" at Hampton Court, and (more doubtfully) No. 1160 in
this Gallery. The number of reputed Giorgiones is very large.
His fame has been constant from his own day to ours, and as
every gallery desired to have a Giorgione, the wish was freely
gratified by dealers and cataloguers. Modern criticism has
played havoc among most of these so-called Giorgiones;[124] but
the Giorgionesque spirit remains--unmistakable and distinct--in
many works. Such in this Gallery are Nos. 930, 1123, and 1173,
ascribed by the director to "the School of Giorgione." It is
a school, as we have seen, of _genre_. It "employs itself
mainly with painted idylls, but, in the production of this
pictorial poetry, exercises a wonderful tact in the selecting
of such matter as lends itself most readily and entirely to
pictorial form, to complete expression by drawing and colour.
For although its productions are painted poems, they belong
to a sort of poetry which tells itself without an articulated
story." Vasari remarked that it was difficult to give
Giorgione's representations an explanatory name. As Morelli has
well pointed out, the genius of Titian was wholly dramatic;
Giorgione was a lyric poet, who gives us at most dramatic
lyrics. A picture by Giorgione or in his style "presents us
with a kind of profoundly significant and animated instant, a
mere gesture, a look, a smile perhaps--some brief and wholly
concrete moment--into which, however, all the motives, all
the interests and effects of a long history, have condensed
themselves, and which seem to absorb past and future in an
intense consciousness of the present. Such ideal instants the
school of Giorgione selects, with its admirable tact, from
that feverish, tumultuously coloured life of the old citizens
of Venice--exquisite pauses in Time, in which, arrested thus,
we seem to be spectators of all the fulness of existence, and
which are like some consummate extract or quintessence of
life." Pictures in the Giorgionesque spirit are, as it were,
"musical intervals in human existence--filled with people with
intent faces listening to music, to the sound of water, to time
as it flies" (Pater: "The School of Giorgione," _Fortnightly
Review_, October 1877, reprinted in the third edition of _The
Renaissance_). The landscapes of Giorgione have the same
quality of quickened life. "Most painted landscapes leave
little power to call up the actual physical sensations of the
scenes themselves, but Giorgione's never fail to produce this
effect; they speak directly to the sensations, making the
beholder feel refreshed and soothed, as if actually reclining
on the grass in the shade of the trees, with his mind free
to muse on what delights it most. In so far as poetry may
be compared to painting, Giorgione's feeling for landscape
suggests Keats" (Mary Logan: _Guide to the Italian Pictures at
Hampton Court_, p. 13).
Giorgione's pictures may be described as showing us golden
moments of a golden age. His life, as told by Vasari and
Ridolfi, corresponds with this ideal, which also was in exact
accordance with the spirit of the times. Many readers will
remember that it is with a mention of Giorgione that Ruskin
prefaces his noble description of Venice in the days of the
early Renaissance: "Born half-way between the mountains and the
sea--that young George of Castelfranco--of the Brave Castle;
stout George they called him, George of Georges, so goodly a
boy he was--Giorgione. Have you ever thought what a world his
eyes opened on--fair, searching eyes of youth? What a world
of mighty life, from those mountain roots to the shore; of
loveliest life, when he went down, yet so young, to the marble
city, and became himself as a fiery heart to it?" (_Modern
Painters_, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. ix. § 1). He spent his childhood
at Castelfranco, "where the last crags of the Venetian Alps
break down romantically with something of a park-like grace to
the plain." "Giorgione's ideal of luxuriant pastoral scenery,
the country of pleasant copses, glades and brooks, amid which
his personages love to wander or recline with lute and pipe,
was derived, no doubt, from these natural surroundings of his
childhood." Close by his birthplace is Asolo, whence the word
_asolare_, "to disport in the open air; to amuse oneself at
random" (see Browning's _Asolando_). Giorgione "found his way
early into a circle of notable persons--people of courtesy,
and became initiated into those differences of personal type,
manner, and even of dress, which are best understood there.
Not far from his home lived Catherine of Cornaro, formerly
Queen of Cyprus, and up in the towers which still remain, Tuzio
Costanzo, the famous _condottiére_--a picturesque remnant
of mediæval manners, in a civilisation rapidly changing"
(Pater). In Venice Giorgione's gracious bearing and varied
accomplishments introduced him into congenial company. "He took
no small delight," says Vasari, "in love-passages and in the
sound of the lute, to which he was so cordially devoted, and
which he practised so constantly, that he played and sang with
the most exquisite perfection, insomuch that he was for this
cause frequently invited to musical assemblies and festivals
by the most distinguished personages." "It happened, about his
thirty-fourth year, that in one of those parties at which he
entertained his friends with music, he met a certain lady of
whom he became greatly enamoured, and 'they rejoiced greatly,'
says Vasari, 'the one and the other in their love.' And two
quite different legends concerning it agree in this, that it
was through this lady he came by his death; Ridolfi relating
that, being robbed of her by one of his pupils, he died of
grief at the double treason; Vasari, that she being secretly
stricken of the plague, and he making his visits to her as
usual, he took the sickness from her mortally, along with her
kisses, and so briefly departed" (Pater).[125]
This little panel is a study for the figure of San Liberale, the
warrior-saint, in the altar-piece by Giorgione at Castelfranco--one of
his acknowledged masterpieces, and according to Ruskin one of the two
best pictures in the world.[126] Notice "the bronzed, burning flesh"
of the knight--"the right Giorgione colour on his brow" characteristic
of a race of seamen (_Modern Painters_, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. v. ch.
i. § 19). This "original little study in oil, with the delicately
gleaming silver-grey armour is," says Mr. Pater, "one of the greatest
treasures of the National Gallery, and in it, as in some other knightly
personages attributed to Giorgione, people have supposed the likeness
of his own presumably gracious presence." From a MS. memorandum on the
back of the Castelfranco picture, it appears, however, that the warrior
was said to represent Gaston de Foix. The only difference between this
study and the picture is that in the altar-piece the warrior wears his
helmet, while in the picture he is bareheaded. On this ground, and
owing to the high finish of our picture, some have argued that it is
not an original study for the picture, but a later copy from it (see
_e.g._ Richter's _Italian Art in the National Gallery_, p. 86). The
argument does not seem conclusive. Do artists never make elaborate
studies? and is not an artist as likely to vary his design as a copyist
his model? Our picture, which was formerly in the collection of
Benjamin West, P.R.A., was bequeathed to the National Gallery by Samuel
Rogers.