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Giorgione and the High Renaissance in Venice

Shown from the chest up against a black background, two men with peachy skin, one holding a brass-colored sphere made up of interlocking bands, fill this horizontal portrait painting. To our left, a boy or young man looks at us with dark eyes and his coral-pink lips are parted. His curly brown hair falls to his shoulders, and he wears a floppy, denim-blue hat. His emerald-green tunic is lined around the neck, shoulders, and down the front with bands of ruby red, and the neck is tied with a pale purple ribbon. A white shirt underneath shows at the neck and down a slit along the shoulder we can see. Along the bottom edge of the composition, the boy grips a paint brush, a quill pen, a flute, and a compass in his left fist. The man to our right leans toward the boy almost in profile. The second man has ash-brown, curly hair and the suggestion of a short beard on his chin. He has hooded eyes, a prominent nose, and his downturned lips are also parted. He wears a honey-yellow tunic over a white undergarment. A swath of scarlet red over his left shoulder, to our right, could be a cloak. In the space between the people, he holds up the armillary sphere, made up of overlapping bands to create an orb, in his right hand, on our left. A long, white scroll curls around the handle of the sphere, the man’s hand, and down near his wrist. The scroll is inscribed, “NON VALET. INGENIVM.NISI FACTA VALEBVNT.” He looks at the sphere and points to it with his other hand.

Overview

A search for luminous color and intuitive responses to nature—a pursuit, above all, of the sensuous—occupied painters in Venice for centuries. While artists in central Italy concentrated on the more intellectual aspects of form and structure, Venetian painters, beginning with Giovanni Bellini and his students, focused their attention on the surface of things, on color and texture, even on the paint itself.

With the work of Giorgione, one of Bellini's students, the Venetian High Renaissance truly began. Although he died very young, Giorgione's influence was enormous. For the private enjoyment of cultivated patrons he introduced new subjects: mythological scenes and pastorals with elusive meaning. To an unprecedented extent, mood is the primary "subject" of his works. Like Italian poetry of the time, the lyricism of his paintings was designed to delight and refresh. Light and shadow move imperceptibly into one another, and a soft atmosphere unifies landscape and figures, giving both a kind of mystery. For Giorgione more than any artist before him, the landscape became an end in itself. It was no longer a mere backdrop to the action of the figures but an equal actor in creating his poesia.

Giorgione is credited with several technical innovations as well. Although Bellini had mastered the new medium of oil pigments, some of his practices remained those of a tempera painter. He planned carefully, defining every element of his compositions in advance. By contrast, Giorgione worked directly and without detailed preparatory drawings. Many of his paintings show evidence of rethinking; radiographs reveal figures that were changed, added, or removed. Giorgione also increasingly favored canvas over wood panel as a painting support, a switch that brought about its own set of technical changes. Instead of painting from light to dark on a light ground, Giorgione used a darker ground and painted progressively from darker to lighter tones. Light seems to emerge from the darkness. The woven canvas encouraged a looser pattern of brushwork, one that breaks up the surface with light-reflecting textures, some thick, others of transparent thinness.

Attributed to Giorgione Giorgione, Italian, 1477/1478 - 1510, Giovanni Borgherini and His Tutor, oil on canvas, Gift of Michael Straight, 1974.87.1

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Bacchus is typically portrayed as a young man wreathed with vines, his body slouched with the intoxicating effect of drink. This young child, who wears an ivy wreath and holds a wine pitcher, must also represent the god of wine. As a god of agriculture, Bacchus was sometimes depicted as aging along with the seasons, in much the same way that the new year comes in as a baby and goes out as an old man. In winter, when crops were just starting to grow, Bacchus took the guise of a young boy—as pretty, Roman poets said, as a curly-haired girl.

Bellini used this same figure in the Feast of the Gods, also in the Gallery’s collection. In that painting, made for Alfonso d’Este of Ferrara, the youth of Bacchus might suggest the duke’s winter wedding to Lucrezia Borgia. Not until Bellini was close to eighty years old could he be persuaded, even by strong-willed patrons such as the Este family, to paint mythological scenes. He preferred instead the religious subjects and portraits that had occupied his long career. Remaining open to innovation, however, Bellini’s style, and ultimately his subject matter, responded to influences from younger artists, including his own pupils.

Giovanni Bellini, Italian, c. 1430/1435 - 1516, The Infant Bacchus, probably 1505/1510, oil on panel transferred to panel, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1961.9.5

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An old man and a young woman holding an infant are seated together in the center of this almost square painting. All three people have pale, peachy skin. To our left, the man sits on a low, tan brick wall with his head bowed to look at the baby on the woman’s lap. A periwinkle-blue cloak is wrapped around the kelly-green robe that covers his shoulders, back, and legs. One hand grips a short staff planted on the ground. His receding white hair and beard are thin and scraggly with tufts sticking out over his ears. The woman sits next to and slightly in front of him, to our right, on a low rock, her body angled toward the man. A long, cobalt-blue cloak is draped around her shoulders and covers her knees over her rose-pink gown. Her honey-brown hair is parted in the middle and gathered at the back of her head. Her brown eyes look down at the infant, who is blond with brown eyes. A long white shawl is tucked into the neckline of her dress, drapes over her shoulders, and wraps under the baby as she cradles his body with one hand under his backside and the other behind his head. The baby lies on his back with his head turned toward the woman, and he points to her with one outstretched arm. The dirt ground is scattered with pebbles that make a loose ring around the trio, with moss-green growth to either side. A brown brick wall fills the upper half of the composition behind the people and extends off the top edge. A rounded arch pierces the back wall to our right of the woman. On the other side of the opening, trees with copper-brown leaves grow up along the left and the landscape beyond opens onto rocky hills with a white, square tower. In the deep distance, the silhouette of a town is painted in robin’s egg-blue against a pale peach horizon line. Thin, white clouds skim across the blue sky above.

Knowledge of Giorgione's life and career is in inverse proportion to his importance. He remains one of the least documented and most influential of all Renaissance painters. A single signed painting exists. Beyond that, scholars must attempt to identify his works on the basis of style and on sixteenth-century household inventories, which provide only brief indications of subject matter. Many of Giorgione's paintings were made for private patrons, so that records, which typically document large civic and religious commissions, are not available. Difficulty also arises in distinguishing the early work of Giorgione from that of near contemporaries like Sebastiano del Piombo and Titian, who were also pupils of Bellini and whose early styles were likewise heavily influenced by their teacher.

This painting must be one of those early works. The figures, especially the aged, bearded Joseph, closely resemble those of Bellini. Joseph sits on an unfinished wall, while mother and child are seated on a humble rock that emphasizes Christ's humility and humanity. The symbolism of the unfinished wall also refers to the incomplete and imperfect era before Christ's birth. The precision of detail, particularly of the plants and rocks in the foreground, suggests the influence of paintings from northern Europe, which could be seen in Venice in large numbers and were also known through prints.

Giorgione, Italian, 1477/1478 - 1510, The Holy Family, probably c. 1500, oil on panel transferred to hardboard, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1952.2.8

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Four people with pale skin are gathered to our right in a landscape, their heads bowed down toward an infant who lies on a white cloth on the ground in this horizontal painting. The nude baby has a rounded belly, chubby limbs, and short blond hair. To our right and near the edge of the panel, a woman kneels with her hands in prayer, looking toward the baby so she faces our left in profile. She wears a lapis-blue robe over a rose-pink dress, and a white cloth covers her head and shoulders. Behind her and to our left, a man with a white beard, wearing a golden yellow robe, sits or kneels next to a rock at the mouth of a cave cut into a rocky outcropping that extends off the top of the composition. To the left of the baby and at the center of the foreground, a pair of men wear tattered clothing and hold shepherd’s staffs. The man closer to us kneels with his hands pressed together in prayer as the man behind him bends his knee as if to kneel. The landscape recedes deep into the distance on the left half of the painting with a winding river, houses and other buildings, grassy hills, and mountains beneath a blue sky. A small winged angel wearing white looks down on the scene from the upper left corner.

The Virgin has a calm, quiet beauty, and Joseph's domed head is washed in light, his gray hair picked out with delicate highlights. Barely visible behind them, the ox and ass stand in a dark cave, as humble men gaze down on the infant. The Adoration of the Shepherds was a common theme for public altars, but Giorgione has transformed it—making it more intimate and emotionally resonant.

Landscape became Giorgione's overriding concern as a painter and a primary means of creating mood. X-ray examination of this panel has revealed extensive changes to the sides and background that opened up the space and drew attention into the distance. (Giorgione was unusual in his time for not making preparatory drawings, often working out designs directly on the panel or canvas.) Compare The Holy Family, painted earlier, where the landscape is contained within a window. In The Adoration, by contrast, setting and figures are integrated and suffused with a poetic ambiance that unifies the entire composition. Landscape—and light—shape our experience, emphasizing the painting's meditative, rather than narrative, dimension. Some elements of the picture may have been suggested by poems that celebrated the beauties of nature and rustic life: distant shepherds; the light at the horizon, glowing a soft yellow; a tiny fire sparking under an archway; and clear water flowing in a glassy stream.

Giorgione, Italian, 1477/1478 - 1510, The Adoration of the Shepherds, 1505/1510, oil on panel, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1939.1.289

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Shown from the chest up behind a stone ledge, a light-skinned man with a mustache, beard, and shoulder-length brown hair, wearing a black garment with voluminous sleeves, tilts his head back to look at us from the corners of his eyes in this vertical portrait painting. His body is angled to our left but he tips his head back to look past his rounded nose at us with dark eyes from under arched brows. His right fist, on our left, rests on a closed book bound in moss green, which is fastened with a metal clasp. The book rests on the ivory-white stone ledge, which steps up to a higher level to our right. He clenches a wad of nickel-gray cloth in the hand on the book, and his other arm rests by his side, extending out of view behind the ledge. His black, long-sleeved jacket has full sleeves and is open at the neck over a collarless white shirt. A squared opening is cut into the elephant-gray stone wall behind him to our left. A cityscape beneath a pale blue sky is visible in the distance out the window. The Roman characters “VVO” appear to be carved into the front face of the ledge, at the bottom edge of the canvas.

The expression of calculating, almost cruel, appraisal—amplified by his closed fist—gives this man an aggressive air, but we do not know his identity. The inscription on the parapet does not help. These letters, VVO, have been interpreted as a form of the Latin vivo (in life). This would suggest that the portrait was painted from life and that it confers on both subject and painter a measure of immortality. It may more likely, however, be an abbreviation of a humanist motto, perhaps virtus vincit omnia (virtue conquers all).

Like other paintings associated with Giorgione, this one presents difficulties of attribution. Both Titian and Sebastiano are know to have completed works that remained unfinished when Giorgione died prematurely in his early thirties. (It was said that Giorgione contracted the plague from his mistress.) A second hand seems to be at work in this painting. The portrait's format, with subject glancing sidelong at the viewer from behind a parapet, was developed by Giorgione, and the soft, shadowy gradations of tone also recall his style. However, its aggressive mood points to a painter with a bolder brush and more active, worldly outlook, like Titian.

Giorgione, Italian, 1477/1478 - 1510 and Titian, Italian, c. 1490 - 1576, Portrait of a Venetian Gentleman, c. 1510, oil on canvas, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1939.1.258

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Set on a strip of land under a cloud-filled sky and in front of a stormy sea, a nude, light-skinned satyr reclines to our right as a nude, pale-skinned, blond child crouches over some objects on the dirt ground to our left in this vertical landscape painting. The satyr has with a man’s body and shaggy, goat’s legs. He leans over and peers into a golden urn, which has a round bottom and tall, flaring sides about the height of his torso. One hand holds the single handle and the other wraps around the body of the urn. The tips of the satyr’s ears are elongated and pointed, and the corner of his mouth curves up into an exaggerated smile in his brown beard. Red liquid pours from an object, perhaps an overturned urn, near the satyr’s outstretched leg and white liquid pours from another urn between us and the satyr. Next to the satyr, at the center of the painting, a thick, upright tree trunk is broken off abruptly but one shoot grows tall with emerald-green leaves. A translucent, shield-shaped object decorated with an open-mouthed, human face hangs from a pink ribbon around the broken trunk near the branch. A second shield outlined in red with a rearing, white lion against a royal-blue field leans against the foot of the tree to our left. Nearby, the pale, naked child holds a pair of sticks, possibly a compass, and reaches for other objects on the ground near the shield, including a white disk, a pair of small, red-covered books, a square and possibly a plumb line, a flute, pan pipes, and a scroll of paper. The ground and landscape around each person are distinctly different. To our left, the dirt ground under the child is littered with small rocks. Beyond a row of larger boulders, a sweeping field of lemon-lime green sweeps up into a bank of clouds. A small nude person with dark forms, perhaps representing wings, on their shoulders, arms hips, and ankles ascends a path up toward the clouds. To our right, the satyr reclines on green grass in front of a screen of three lush trees. Beyond, across the entire landscape, a choppy sea extends into the far distance beneath the steel-gray clouds above. A masted ship is swallowed by waves behind the satyr, to our right.

This small panel originally functioned as a cover for a portrait. Covers not only protected the painting underneath, but allowed the artist to expand symbolically on particular facets of the patron's personality and concerns. This allegorical scene covered a portrait, now in Naples, of Bernardo de' Rossi, bishop of Trevisio.

Rossi had only recently survived an assassination attempt when Lotto painted him. This scene presents a view of the bishop's virtue and perseverance—and the ultimate award available to those who choose a difficult path over more immediate and worldly gratifications. The panel is clearly divided in two halves by the central tree. On the right side, a drunken satyr peers into a wine pitcher, the intoxicating liquid already spilled around him. His surroundings are lush and green, but farther in the distance a storm rises and a ship sinks below the waves. On the other side, where we find Rossi's coat-of-arms leaning against a tree, an industrious child busies himself with tools. Here the land is parched and rocky, but in the distance the same child, now with an angel's wings, climbs a hill toward a brilliant radiance. Even the tree sprouts with new life, but on the left side only. It may refer to Job 14:7: "For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again." The bishop, like Job beset by troubles, would also flourish through steadfast virtue.

The clarity of Lotto's landscape has little to do with the soft dreaminess recently introduced by Giorgione. It shows instead the continuing influence of the kind of precision found in northern art, especially that of the German Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), who traveled to Venice and whose works were widely known through printed engravings.

Lorenzo Lotto, Italian, c. 1480 - 1556/1557, Allegory of Virtue and Vice, 1505, oil on panel, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1939.1.156

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A young woman with a pale, peachy skin is shown from waist up, wearing a shimmering, royal-blue dress in this vertical painting. Her body is angled to our right as she holds a metal object, perhaps a vessel or incense burner, in her hands by her chest. She turns and tilts her head to our left, but then looks back across her body, off to our right with flint-gray eyes. She has a full, oval-shaped face with a straight nose, smooth cheeks, and her pale pink lips are closed. A gray pearl earring hangs from the ear we can see. Her auburn-brown hair is parted down the middle, and loosely pulled back into a braid that brushes her left shoulder, to our right. The blue dress has a square neckline and a fitted bodice. Light glints off the fabric, shading it from royal to sapphire blue. A voluminous white sleeve is rolled back to her right elbow, to our left. That arm and hand nearly span the width of the painting as she holds the vessel, which has a conical top, near the lower right corner of the composition. The background is solid black.

The story of the wise and foolish virgins is told in the biblical book of Matthew. Preparing for marriage, five wise virgins carefully provided oil for their lamps and awaited the bridegroom. Five foolish virgins, on the other hand, missed the bridegroom when they left their homes in search of more oil. The parable was often interpreted in terms of the Last Judgment and the need to be constantly prepared for the Second Coming.

Otherwise unusual for early sixteenth-century Italy, this subject would have had obvious significance for brides, and this painting is possibly an idealized portrait intended as a wedding gift. A faint inscription on the painting has often been interpreted as a reference to Vittoria Colonna, a poet best known for her friendship with Michelangelo. Perhaps the painting was done to commemorate her wedding in 1509. Several seventeenth-century editions of her works used engravings based on this painting as a frontispiece.

Vittoria, however, lived in Rome, and Sebastiano worked in Venice until 1511. Furthermore, paintings like this one were more popular in Venice than in Rome. Venetian works depicting beautiful young women with locks of hair tumbling to creamy shoulders and revealing necklines may have been idealized portraits or fanciful creations painted for a gentleman’s private enjoyment. The models for these bellezze may well have been the fabled courtesans of Venice.

Sebastiano del Piombo, Italian, 1485 - 1547, Portrait of a Young Woman as a Wise Virgin, c. 1510, oil on hardboard transferred from panel, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1952.2.9

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On the right side of this horizontal painting, two light-skinned men stand close to us on a spit of land separated from the rest of the scene by stretch of water that leads back to a town on the far shore. People gather on and around two boats floating in the water between the spit of land to our right and a copse of trees to our left. Beginning with the pair of men to our right: one man looking toward us has a broad forehead and grizzled blond beard. He wears a brick-red and canary-yellow turban, a yellow and crimson-red striped doublet with puffy sleeves, and a red codpiece. His scarlet-red hose have decorative slashes down the thigh to show yellow fabric underneath. He holds one long sword in his left hand, to our right, so the blade rests on that shoulder, and another sword hangs in a scabbard on his waist. Facing him, to our right, is the second man. He has a dark beard and a broad red hat trimmed with white feathers. He wears a doublet with wide red and white horizontal stripes and a white codpiece. His close-fitting white hose have thin, dark lines running from his waist to his feet, like pinstripes. He rests the back of his left hand, closer to us, on his hip. The tip of a long sword rests between his feet, and his far hand holds the hilt, which is as tall as his shoulder. Both men wear slipper-like shoes. Beyond this pair, near the center of the composition, a dozen men work on the wooden ships in the waterway. The trees to our left have feathery canopies of dense green foliage highlighted with butter yellow. A red pennant flutters in the wind near the left edge of the painting. About two dozen men, women, and children sit and stand closely under the trees. They wear capes, robes, turbans, and headdresses in aquamarine blue, marigold orange, burgundy red, cream white, and laurel green. Several of them are turned toward a woman dressed in blue holding an infant. Along the far shoreline, to our right, a city with tan-colored, stone towers glows under a soft topaz-blue sky, mirrored in the luminous blue water, as a ship with a billowing white sail passes by. On the distant horizon, high mountain peaks are faintly visible through a steel-blue haze.

In a set of paintings made for Duke Alfonso d’Este of Ferrara, Dosso illustrated Virgil’s Aeneid. The scenes were installed friezelike on the walls of Alfonso’s private study, the camerino d’alabastro, where Bellini’s Feast of the Gods also hung.

This painting is from that set and is usually thought to illustrate the moment when the luckless Trojans rebuild their wrecked ships after storms, unleashed at the bidding of the goddess Juno, drove them to the coast of Africa. Walking along the beach with Carthage in the distance, Aeneas tells his friend Achates, “Sorrow is implicit in the affairs of men. . . .” (The painting, however, has been cut down and perhaps no longer includes the figure of Aeneas. The two conversants at the right seem too old for the young Aeneas and Achates.) Dosso imparted a sense of immediacy to the ancient literary subject by clothing the Trojans in the latest Italian fashions and by giving them ships of the kind that were then exploring the New World.

Little is known about Dosso’s early career. Possibly he was a native of Ferrara, where he became court painter to the powerful Este family. Although his painting style shows influences from Venice and Rome, his work is strongly original, with feathery landscapes and scenes of everyday life tinged with whimsy. Quick brushwork, intense colors, and strong patterns of light give them unusual vitality.

Dosso Dossi, Italian, active 1512 - 1542, Aeneas and Achates on the Libyan Coast, c. 1520, oil on canvas, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1939.1.250

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