GIORGIONE
When we enter a gallery of Florentine paintings, we find our admiration
and criticism expressing themselves naturally in certain terms; we are
struck by grace of line, by strenuous study of form, by the evidence of
knowledge, by the display of thought and intellectual feeling. The
Florentine gestures and attitudes are expressive, nervous, fervent, or,
as in Michelangelo and Signorelli, alive with superhuman energy. But
when looking at pictures of the Venetian School we unconsciously use
quite another sort of language; epithets like "dark" and "rich" come
most freely to our lips; a golden glow, a slumberous velvety depth,
seem to engulf and absorb all details. We are carried into the land
of romance, and are fascinated and soothed, rather than stimulated
and aroused. So it is with portraits; before the "Mona Lisa" our
intelligence is all awake, but the men and women of Venetian canvases
have a grave, indolent serenity, which accords well with the slumber
of thought.
Up to the beginning of the sixteenth century the painters of Venice
had not differed very materially from those of other schools; they
had gradually worked out or learned the technicalities of drawing,
perspective and anatomy. They had been painting in oils for twenty-five
years, and they betrayed a greater fondness for pageant-pictures than
was felt in other States of Italy. Florence appoints Michelangelo and
Leonardo to decorate her public palace, but no great store is set by
their splendid achievements; their work is not even completed. The
students fall upon the cartoons, which are allowed to perish, instead
of being treasured by the nation. Gentile Bellini and Carpaccio and the
band of State painters are appreciated and well rewarded. These men have
reproduced something of the lucent transparency, the natural colour of
Venice, but it is as if unconsciously; they are not fully aiming at any
special effect. Year after year the Venetian masters assimilate more or
less languidly the influences which reach them from the mainland. They
welcome Guariento and Gentile da Fabriano, they set themselves to learn
from Veronese or Florentine, the Paduans contribute their chiselled
drawing, their learned perspective, their archeological curiosity. Yet
even early in the day the Venetians escape from that hard and learned
art which is so alien to their easy, voluptuous temperament. Jacopo
Bellini cannot conform to it, and his greatest son is ready to follow
feeling and emotion, and in his old age is quick to discover the first
flavour of the new wine. If Venetian art had gone on upon the lines
we have been tracing up to now, there would have been nothing very
distinctive about it, for, however interesting and charming Alvise and
Carpaccio, Cima and the Bellini may be, it is not of them we think when
we speak of the Venetian School and when we rank it beside that of
Florence, while Giovanni Bellini alone, in his later works, is not
strong enough to bear the burden.
The change which now comes over painting is not so much a technical one
as a change of temper, a new tendency in human thought, and we link it
with Giorgione because he was the channel through which the deep impulse
first burst into the light. We have tried to trace the growth of the
early Venetian School, but it does not develop logically like that of
Florence; it is not the result of long endeavour, adding one acquisition
and discovery to another. Venetian art was peculiarly the outcome of
personalities, and it did not know its own mind till the sixteenth
century. Then, like a hidden spring, it bubbles irresistibly to the
surface, and the spot where it does so is called by the name of a man.
There are beings in most great creative epochs who, with peculiar
facility, seem to embody the purpose of their age and to yield
themselves as ready instruments to its design. When time is ripe they
appear, and are able, with perfect ease, to carry out and give voice to
the desires and tendencies which have been straining for expression.
These desires may owe their origin to national life and temperament; it
may have taken generations to bring them to fruition, but they become
audible through the agency of an individual genius. A genius is
inevitably moulded by his age. Rome, in the seventeenth century,
drew to her in Bernini a man who could with real power illustrate her
determination to be grandiose and ostentatious, and, at the height of
the Renaissance, Venice draws into her service a man whose sensuous
feeling was instilled, accentuated, and welcomed by every element
around him.
More conclusively than ever, at this time, Venice, the world's great
sea-power, was in her full glory as the centre of the world's commerce
and its art and culture. Vasco da Gama had discovered the sea route to
India in 1498, but the stupendous effect which this was to exert on the
whole current of power did not become apparent all at once. Venice was
still the great emporium of the East, linked to it by a thousand ties,
Oriental in her love of Eastern richness.
It would be exaggerating to say that the Venetians of the sixteenth
century could not draw. As there were Tuscans who understood beautiful
harmonies of colour, so there were Venetians who knew a good deal about
form; but the other Italians looked upon colour as a charming adjunct,
almost, one might say, as an amiable weakness: they never would have
allowed that it might legitimately become the end and aim in painting,
and in the same way form, though respected and considered, was never the
principal object of the Venetians. Up to this time Venice had fed her
emotional instincts by pageants and gold and velvets and brocades, but
with Giorgione she discovered that there was a deeper emotional vehicle
than these superficial glories,--glowing depths of colour enveloped in
the mysterious richness of chiaroscuro which obliterated form, and hid
and suggested more than it revealed.
Giorgione no longer described "in drawing's learned tongue"; he
carried all before him by giving his direct impression in colour. He
conceives in colour. The Florentines cared little if their finely drawn
draperies were blue or red, but Giorgione images purple clouds, their
dark velvet glowing towards a rose and orange horizon. He hardly knows
what attitudes his characters take, but their chestnut hair, their
deep-hued draperies, their amber flesh, make a moving harmony in which
the importance of exact modelling is lost sight of. His scenes are not
composed methodically and according to the old rules, but are the direct
impress of the painter's joy in life. It was a new and audacious style
in painting, and its keynote, and absolutely inevitable consequence,
was to substitute for form and for gay, simple tints laid upon it, the
quality of chiaroscuro. We all know how the shades of evening are able
to transform the most commonplace scene; the dull road becomes a
mysterious avenue, the colourless foliage develops luscious depths,
the drab and arid plain glows with mellow light, purple shadows clothe
and soften every harsh and ugly object, all detail dies, and our
apprehension of it dies also. Our mood changes; instead of observing
and criticising, we become soothed, contemplative, dreamy. It is the
carrying of this profound feeling into a colour-scheme by means of
chiaroscuro, so that it is no longer learned and explanatory, but deeply
sensuous and emotional, that is the gift to art which found full voice
with Giorgione, and which in one moment was recognised and welcomed to
the exclusion of the older manner, because it touched the chord which
vibrated through the whole Venetian temperament.
And the immediate result was the picture of _no subject_. Giorgione
creates for us idle figures with radiant flesh, or robed in rich
costumes, surrounded by lovely country, and we do not ask or care why
they are gathered together. We have all had dreams of Elysian fields,
"where falls not any rain, nor ever wind blows loudly," where all is
rest and freedom, where music blends with the plash of fountains, and
fruits ripen, and lovers dream away the days, and no one asks what went
before or what follows after. The Golden Age, the haunt of fauns and
nymphs: there never has been such a day, or such a land: it is a mood, a
vision: it has danced before the eyes of poets, from David to Keats and
Tennyson: it has rocked the tired hearts of men in all ages: the vision
of a resting-place which makes no demands and where the dwellers are
exempt from the cares and weakness of mortality. Needless to say, it is
an ideal born of the East; it is the Eastern dream of Paradise, and it
speaks to that strain in the temperament which recognises that life
cannot be all thought, but also needs feeling and emotion. And for the
first time in all the world the painter of Castelfranco sets that vague
dream before men's eyes. The world, with its wistful yearnings and
questionings, such as Leonardo or Botticelli embodied, said little to
his audience. Here was their natural atmosphere, though they had never
known it before. These deep, solemn tones, these fused and golden lights
are what Giorgione grasps from the material world, and as he steeps his
senses in them the subject counts but little in the deep enjoyment they
communicate. We, who have seen his manner repeated and developed through
thousands of pictures, find it difficult to realise that there had been
nothing like it before, that it was a unique departure, that when
Bellini and Titian looked at his first creations they must have
experienced a shock of revelation. The old definite style must have
seemed suddenly hard and meagre, and every time they looked on the
glorious world, the deep glow of sunset, the mysterious shades of
falling night, they must have felt they were endowed with a sense to
which they had hitherto been strangers, but which, it was at once
apparent, was their true heritage. They had found themselves, and in
them Venice found her real expression, and with Giorgione and those who
felt his impetus began the true Venetian School, set apart from all
other forms of art by its way of using and diffusing and intensifying
colour.
When Giorgione, the son of a member of the house of Barbarelli and a
peasant girl of Vedelago, came down to Venice, we gather that he had
nothing of the provincial. Vasari, who must often have heard of him
from Titian, describes him as handsome, engaging, of distinguished
appearance, beloved by his friends, a favourite with women, fond of
dress and amusement, an admirable musician, and a welcome guest in the
houses of the great. He was evidently no peasant-bred lad, but probably,
though there is no record of the fact, was brought up, like many
illegitimate children, in the paternal mansion. His home was not far
from the lagoons, in one of the most beautiful places it is possible to
imagine, on a lovely and fertile plain running up to the Asolean hills
and with the Julian Alps lying behind. We guess that he received his
education in the school of Bellini, for when that master sold his
allegory of the "Souls in Paradise" to one of the Medici, to adorn the
summer villa of Poggio Imperiale, there went with it the two small
canvases now in the Uffizi, the "Ordeal of Moses" and the "Judgment
of Solomon," delightful little paintings in Giorgione's rich and
distinctive style, but less accomplished than Bellini's picture, and
with imperfections in the drawing of drapery and figures which suggest
that they are the work of a very young man. The love of the Venetians
for decorating the exterior of their palaces with fresco led to
Giorgione being largely employed on work which was unhappily a grievous
waste of time and talent, as far as posterity is concerned. We have a
record of façades covered with spirited compositions and heraldic
devices, of friezes with Bacchus and Mars, Venus and Mercury. Zanetti,
in his seventeenth-century prints, has preserved a noble figure of
"Fortitude" grasping an axe, but beyond a few fragments nothing has
survived. Before he was thirty Giorgione was entrusted with the
important commission of decorating the Fondaco dei Tedeschi. This
building, which we hear of so often in connection with the artists
of Venice, was the trading-house for German, Hungarian, and Polish
merchants. The Venetian Government surrounded these merchants with the
most jealous restrictions. Every assistant and servant connected with
them was by law a Venetian, and, in fact, a spy of the Republic. All
transactions of buying and selling were carried out by Venetian brokers,
of whom some thirty were appointed. As time went on, some of these
brokerships must have resolved themselves into sinecure offices, for
we find Bellini holding one, and certainly without discharging any of
the original duties, and they seem to have become some sort of State
retainerships. In 1505 the old Fondaco had been burnt to the ground, and
the present building was rising when Giorgione and Titian were boys. A
decree went forth that no marble, carving, or gilding were to be used,
so that painting the outside was the only alternative. The roof was on
in 1507, and from that date Giorgione, Titian, and Morto da Feltre were
employed in the adornment of the façade. Vasari is very much exercised
over Giorgione's share in these decorations. "One does not find one
subject carefully arranged," he complains, "or which follows correctly
the history or actions of ancients or moderns. As for me, I have never
been able to understand the meaning of these compositions, or have met
any one able to explain them to me. Here one sees a man with a lion's
head, beside a woman. Close by one comes upon an angel or a Love: it is
all an inexplicable medley." Yet he is delighted with the brilliancy of
the colour and the splendid execution, and adds, "Colour gives more
pleasure in Venice than anywhere else."
Among other early work was the little "Adoration of the Magi," in the
National Gallery, and the so-called "Philosophers" at Vienna. According
to the latest reading, this last illustrates Virgil's legend that when
the Trojan Æneas arrived in Italy, Evander pointed out the future site
of Rome to the ancient seer and his son. Giorgione, in painting the
scene, is absorbed in the beauty of nature. It is his first great
landscape, and all accessories have been sacrificed to intensity of
effect. He revels in the glory of the setting sun, the broad tranquil
masses of foliage, the long evening shadows, and the effect of dark
forms silhouetted against the radiant light.