GIORGIONE
The Palazzo Giovanelli--A lovely picture--A superb innovator--Pictures
for houses--_The Tempest_--Byron's criticism--Giorgione and the
experts--Vasari's estimate--Leonardo da Vinci--The Giorgionesque fire--A
visit to Castel Franco--The besieging children--The Sacristan--A
beautiful altar-piece--Pictures at Padua--Giorgiones still to be
discovered.
It will happen now and then that you will be in your gondola, with the
afternoon before you, and will not have made up your mind where to go.
It is then that I would have you remember the Palazzo Giovanelli. "The
Palazzo Giovanelli, Rio di Noale," say to your gondolier; because this
palace is not only open to the public but it contains the most
sensuously beautiful picture in Venice--Giorgione's "Tempest".
Giorgione, as I have said, is the one transcendentally great Venetian
painter whom it is impossible, for certain, to find in any public
gallery or church in the city of his adoption. There is a romantic scene
at the Seminario next the Salute, an altar-piece in S. Rocco, another
altar-piece in S. Giovanni Crisostomo, in each of which he may have had
a hand. But none of these is Giorgione essential. For the one true work
of this wistful beauty-adoring master we must seek the Palazzo
Giovanelli.
You can enter the palace either from the water, or on foot at the
Salizzada Santa Fosca, No. 2292. A massive custodian greets you and
points to a winding stair. This you ascend and are met by a typical
Venetian man-servant. Of the palace itself, which has been recently
modernized, I have nothing to say. There are both magnificent and pretty
rooms in it, and a little boudoir has a quite charming floor, and
furniture covered in ivory silk. But everything is in my mind
subordinated to the Giorgione: so much so that I have difficulty in
writing that word Giovanelli at all. The pen will trace only the letters
of the painter's name: it is to me the Palazzo Giorgione.
The picture, which I reproduce on the opposite page, is on an easel just
inside a door and you come upon it suddenly. Not that any one could ever
be completely ready for it; but you pass from one room to the next, and
there it is--all green and blue and glory. Remember that Giorgione was
not only a Venetian painter but in some ways the most remarkable and
powerful of them all; remember that his fellow-pupil Titian himself
worshipped his genius and profited by it, and that he even influenced
his master Bellini; and then remember that all the time you have been in
Venice you have seen nothing that was unquestionably authentic and at
the most only three pictures that might be his. It is as though Florence
had but one Botticelli, or London but one Turner, or Madrid but one
Velasquez. And then you turn the corner and find this!
[Illustration: THE TEMPEST
FROM THE PAINTING BY GIORGIONE
_In the Giovanelli Palace_]
The Venetian art that we have hitherto seen has been almost exclusively
the handmaid of religion or the State. At the Ducal Palace we found the
great painters exalting the Doges and the Republic; even the other
picture in Venice which I associate with this for its pure
beauty--Tintoretto's "Bacchus and Ariadne"--was probably an allegory of
Venetian success. In the churches and at the Accademia we have seen the
masters illustrating the Testaments Old and New. All their work has
been for altars or church walls or large public places. We have seen
nothing for a domestic wall but little mannered Longhis, without any
imagination, or topographical Canalettos and Guardis. And then we turn a
corner and are confronted by this!--not only a beautiful picture and a
non-religious picture but a picture painted to hang on a wall.
That was one of Giorgione's innovations: to paint pictures for private
gentlemen. Another, was to paint pictures of sheer loveliness with no
concern either with Scripture or history; and this is one of his
loveliest. It has all kinds of faults--and it is perfect. The drawing is
not too good; the painting is not too good; that broken pillar is both
commonplace and foolish; and yet the work is perfect because a perfect
artist made it. It is beautiful and mysterious and a little sad, all at
once, just as an evening landscape can be, and it is unmistakably the
work of one who felt beauty so deeply that his joyousness left him and
the melancholy that comes of the knowledge of transitoriness took its
place. Hence there is only one word that can adequately describe it and
that is Giorgionesque.
The picture is known variously as "The Tempest," for a thunderstorm is
working up; as "The Soldier and the Gipsy," as "Adrastus and Hypsipyle,"
and as "Giorgione's Family". In the last case the soldier watching the
woman would be the painter himself (who never married) and the woman the
mother of his child. Whatever we call it, the picture remains the same:
profoundly beautiful, profoundly melancholy. A sense of impending
calamity informs it. A lady observing it remarked to me, "Each is
thinking thoughts unknown to the other"; and they are thoughts of
unhappy morrows.
This, the Giovanelli Giorgione, which in 1817 was in the Manfrini palace
and was known as the "Famiglia di Giorgione," was the picture in all
Venice--indeed the picture in all the world--which most delighted Byron.
"To me," he wrote, "there are none like the Venetian--above all,
Giorgione." _Beppo_ has some stanzas on it. Thus:--
They've pretty faces yet, those same Venetians,
Black eyes, arched brows, and sweet expressions still
Such as of old were copied from the Grecians,
In ancient arts by moderns mimicked ill;
And like so many Venuses of Titian's
(The best's at Florence--see it, if ye will),
They look when leaning over the balcony,
Or stepped from out a picture by Giorgione,
Whose tints are Truth and Beauty at their best;
And when you to Manfrini's palace go,
That picture (howsoever fine the rest)
Is loveliest to my mind of all the show;
It may perhaps be also to _your_ zest
And that's the cause I rhyme upon it so,
'Tis but a portrait of his Son and Wife,
And self, but _such_ a Woman! Love in life;
Love in full life and length, not love ideal,
No, nor ideal beauty, that fine name,
But something better still, so very real,
That the sweet Model must have been the same;
A thing that you would purchase, beg, or steal,
Wer't not impossible, besides a shame;
The face recalls some face, as 'twere with pain.
You once have seen, but ne'er will see again;
One of those forms which flit by us, when we
Are young, and fix our eyes on every face:
And, oh! the Loveliness at times we see
In momentary gliding, the soft grace,
The Youth, the Bloom, the Beauty which agree,
In many a nameless being we retrace
Whose course and home we knew not nor shall know.
Like the lost Pleiad seen no more below.
The Giovanelli picture is one of the paintings which all the critics
agree to give to Giorgione, from Sir Sidney Colvin in the _Encyclopædia
Britannica_ to the very latest monographer, Signor Lionello Venturi,
whose work, _Giorgione Giorgionismo_, is a monument to the diversity of
expert opinion. Giorgione, short as was his life, lived at any rate for
thirty years and was known near and far as a great painter, and it is to
be presumed that the work that he produced is still somewhere. But
Signor Lionello Venturi reduces his output to the most meagre
dimensions; the conclusion being that wherever his work may be, it is
anywhere but in the pictures that bear his name. The result of this
critic's heavy labours is to reduce the certain Giorgiones to thirteen,
among which is the S. Rocco altar-piece. With great daring he goes on to
say who painted all the others: Sebastian del Piombo this, Andrea
Schiavone that, Romanino another, Titian another, and so forth. It may
be so, but if one reads also the other experts--Sir Sidney Colvin,
Morelli, Justi, the older Venturi, Mr. Berenson, Mr. Charles Ricketts,
Mr. Herbert Cook--one is simply in a whirl. For all differ. Mr. Cook,
for example, is lyrically rapturous about the two Padua panels, of which
more anon, and their authenticity; Mr. Ricketts gives the Pitti
"Concert" and the Caterina Cornaro to Titian without a tremor. Our own
National Gallery "S. Liberate" is not mentioned by some at all; the
Paris "Concert Champêtre," in which most of the judges believe so
absolutely, Signor Lionello Venturi gives to Piombo. The Giovanelli
picture and the Castel Franco altar-piece alone remain above suspicion
in every book.
Having visited the Giovanelli Palace, I found myself restless for this
rare spirit, and therefore arranged a little diversion to Castel Franco,
where he was born and where his great altar-piece is preserved.
But first let us look at Giorgione's career. Giorgio Barbarelli was born
at Castel Franco in 1477 or 1478. The name by which we know him
signifies the great Giorgio and was the reward of his personal charm and
unusual genius. Very little is known of his life, Vasari being none too
copious when it comes to the Venetians. What we do know, however, is
that he was very popular, not only with other artists but with the fair,
and in addition to being a great painter was an accomplished musician.
His master was Giovanni Bellini, who in 1494, when we may assume that
Giorgione, being sixteen, was beginning to paint, was approaching
seventy.
Giorgione, says Vasari in an exultant passage, was "so enamoured of
beauty in nature that he cared only to draw from life and to represent
all that was fairest in the world around him". He had seen, says the
same authority, "certain works from the hand of Leonardo which were
painted with extraordinary softness, and thrown into powerful relief, as
is said, by extreme darkness of the shadows, a manner which pleased him
so much that he ever after continued to imitate it, and in oil painting
approached very closely to the excellence of his model. A zealous
admirer of the good in art, Giorgione always selected for representation
the most beautiful objects that he could find, and these he treated in
the most varied manner: he was endowed by nature with highly felicitous
qualities, and gave to all that he painted, whether in oil or fresco, a
degree of life, softness, and harmony (being more particularly
successful in the shadows) which caused all the more eminent artists to
confess that he was born to infuse spirit into the forms of painting,
and they admitted that he copied the freshness of the living form more
exactly than any other painter, not of Venice only, but of all other
places."
Leonardo, who was born in 1452, was Giorgione's senior by a quarter of a
century and one of the greatest names--if not quite the greatest
name--in art when Giorgione was beginning to paint. A story says that
they met when Leonardo was in Venice in 1500. One cannot exactly derive
any of Giorgione's genius from Leonardo, but the fame of the great
Lombardy painter was in the air, and we must remember that his master
Verrocchio, after working in Venice on the Colleoni statue, had died
there in 1488, and that Andrea da Solario, Leonardo's pupil and
imitator, was long in Venice too. Leonardo and Giorgione share a
profound interest in the dangerous and subtly alluring; but the
difference is this, that we feel Leonardo to have been the master of his
romantic emotions, while Giorgione suggests that for himself they could
be too much.
It is not, however, influence upon Giorgione that is most interesting,
but Giorgione's influence upon others. One of his great achievements was
the invention of the _genre_ picture. He was the first lyrical painter:
the first to make a canvas represent a single mood, much as a sonnet
does. He was the first to combine colour and pattern to no other end but
sheer beauty. The picture had a subject, of course, but the subject no
longer mattered. Il fuoco Giorgionesco--the Giorgionesque fire--was the
phrase invented to describe the new wonder he brought into painting. A
comparison of Venetian art before Giorgione and after shows instantly
how this flame kindled. Not only did Giorgione give artists a liberty
they had never enjoyed before, but he enriched their palettes. His
colours burned and glowed. Much of the gorgeousness which we call
Titianesque was born in the brain of Giorgione, Titian's fellow-worker,
and (for Titian's birth date is uncertain: either 1477 or 1487) probably
his senior. You may see the influence at work in our National Gallery:
Nos. 41, 270, 35, and 635 by Titian would probably have been far
different but for Giorgione. So stimulating was Giorgione's genius to
Titian, who was his companion in Bellini's studio, that there are
certain pictures which the critics divide impartially between the two,
chief among them the "Concert" at the Pitti; while together they
decorated the Fondaco dei Tedeschi on the Grand Canal. It is assumed
that Titian finished certain of Giorgione's works when he died in 1510.
The plague which killed Giorgione killed also 20,000 other Venetians,
and sixty-six years later, in another visitation of the scourge, Titian
also died of it.
Castel Franco is five-and-twenty miles from Venice, but there are so few
trains that it is practically a day's excursion there and back. I sat in
the train with four commercial travellers and watched the water give way
to maize, until chancing to look up for a wider view there were the blue
mountains ahead of us, with clouds over them and here and there a patch
of snow. Castel Franco is one of the last cities of the plain;
Browning's Asolo is on the slope above it, only four or five miles away.
The station being reached at last--for even in Italy journeys end--I
rejected the offers of two cabmen, one cabwoman, and one bus driver, and
walked. There was no doubt as to the direction, with the campanile of
the duomo as a beacon. For a quarter of a mile the road is straight and
narrow; then it broadens into an open space and Castel Franco appears.
It is a castle indeed. All the old town is within vast crumbling red
walls built on a mound with a moat around them. Civic zeal has trimmed
the mound into public "grounds," and the moat is lively with ornamental
ducks; while a hundred yards farther rises the white statue of Castel
Franco's greatest son, no other than Giorgione himself, a dashing
cavalier-like gentleman with a brush instead of a rapier. If he were
like this, one can believe the story of his early death--little more
than thirty--which came about through excessive love of a lady, she
having taken the plague and he continuing to visit her.
Having examined the statue I penetrated the ramparts to the little town,
in the midst of which is the church. It was however locked, as a band of
children hastened to tell me: intimating also that if anyone on earth
knew how to effect an entrance they were the little devils in question.
So I was led to a side door, the residence of a fireman, and we pulled a
bell, and in an instant out came the fireman to extinguish whatever was
burning; but on learning my business he instantly became transformed
into the gentlest of sacristans, returned for his key, and led me,
followed by the whole pack of children, by this time greatly augmented,
to a door up some steps on the farther side of the church. The pack was
for coming in too, but a few brief yet sufficient threats from the
sacristan acted so thoroughly that not only did they melt away then but
were not there when I came out--this being in Italy unique as a merciful
disappearance. More than merciful, miraculous, leading one to believe
that Giorgione's picture really has supernatural powers.
The picture is on a wall behind the high altar, curtained. The
fireman-sacristan pulled away the curtain, handed me a pair of opera
glasses and sat down to watch me, a task in which he was joined by
another man and a boy who had been cleaning the church. There they sat,
the three of them, all huddled together, saying nothing, but staring
hard at me (as I could feel) with gimlet eyes; while a few feet distant
I sat too, peering through the glasses at Giorgione's masterpiece, of
which I give a reproduction on the opposite page.
It is very beautiful; it grows more beautiful; but it does not give me
such pleasure as the Giovanelli pastoral. I doubt if Giorgione had the
altar-piece temperament. He was not for churches; and indeed there were
so many brushes for churches, that his need never have been called upon.
He was wholly individual, wistful, pleasure-seeking and
pleasure-missing, conscious of the brevity of life and the elusiveness
of joy; of the earth earthy; a kind of Keats in colour, with, as one
critic--I think Mr. Ricketts--has pointed out, something of Rossetti
too. Left to himself he would have painted only such idylls as the
Giovanelli picture.
[Illustration: ALTAR-PIECE
BY GIORGIONE
_At Castel Franco_]
Yet this altar-piece is very beautiful, and, as I say, it grows more
beautiful as you look at it, even under such conditions as I endured,
and even after much restoration. The lines and pattern are Giorgione's,
howsoever the re-painter may have toiled. The two saints are so kind and
reasonable (and never let it be forgotten that we may have, in our
National Gallery, one of the studies for S. Liberale), and so simple and
natural in their movements and position; the Madonna is at once so sweet
and so little of a mother; the landscape on the right is so very
Giorgionesque, with all the right ingredients--the sea, the glade, the
lovers, and the glow. If anything disappoints it is the general colour
scheme, and in a Giorgione for that to disappoint is amazing. Let us
then blame the re-painter. The influence of Giovanni Bellini in the
arrangement is undoubtable; but the painting was Giorgione's own and his
the extra touch of humanity.
Another day I went as far afield as Padua, also with Giorgione in mind,
for Baedeker, I noticed, gives one of his pictures there a star. Of
Padua I want to write much, but here, at this moment, Giotto being
forgotten, it is merely as a casket containing two (or more) Giorgiones
that the city exists. From Venice it is distant half an hour by fast
trains, or by way of Fusina, two hours. I went on the occasion of this
Giorgione pilgrimage by fast train, and returned in the little tram to
Fusina and so, across the lagoon, into Venice, with the sun behind me,
and the red bricks of Venice flinging it back.
The picture gallery at Padua is crowded with pictures of saints and the
Madonna, few of them very good. But that is of no moment, since it has
also three isolated screens, upon each of which is inscribed the magic
name. The three screens carry four pictures--two long and narrow,
evidently panels from a cassone; the others quite small. The best is No.
50, one of the two long narrow panels which together purport to
represent the story of Adonis and Erys but do not take the duty of
historian very seriously. Both are lovely, with a mellow sunset lighting
the scene. Here and there in the glorious landscape occurs a nymph, the
naked flesh of whom burns with the reflected fire; here and there are
lovers, and among the darkling trees beholders of the old romance. The
picture remains in the vision much as rich autumnal prospects can.
The other screen is more popular because the lower picture on it yet
again shows us Leda and her uncomfortable paramour--that favourite
mythological legend. The little pictures are not equal to the larger
ones, and No. 50 is by far the best, but all are beautiful, and all are
exotics here. Do you suppose, however, that Signor Lionello Venturi will
allow Giorgione to have painted a stroke to them? Not a bit of it. They
come under the head of Giorgionismo. The little ones, according to him,
are the work of Anonimo; the larger ones were painted by Romanino. But
whether or not Giorgione painted any or all, the irrefutable fact
remains that but for his genius and influence they would never have
existed. He showed the way. The eyes of that beautiful sad pagan shine
wistfully through.
According to Vasari, Giorgione, like his master Bellini, painted the
Doge Leonardo Loredan, but the picture, where is it? And where are
others mentioned by Vasari and Ridolfi? So fervid a lover of nature and
his art must have painted much; yet there is but little left now. Can
there be discoveries of Giorgiones still to be made? One wonders that it
is possible for any of the glowing things from that hand to lie hidden:
their colours should burn through any accumulation of rubbish, and now
and then their pulses be heard.