Giorgione
The creator of enigmatic mood.
Giorgione died young of the plague and left few secure works. His Tempest is one of the first paintings in which landscape and mood are the main subject.
Giorgione’s real name was Giorgio, and he came from Castelfranco in the Veneto, where he was born around 1477–78. The nickname means roughly “big George”. According to Vasari he was a pupil of Giovanni Bellini in Venice, and he is described as charming, musical and popular in society. Almost everything else about his life is uncertain.
His life was very short. He died of the plague in Venice in the autumn of 1510, probably in his early thirties. Only a handful of paintings are considered securely his, and scholars have long debated which works should be given to him and which are by the young Titian or others. One of the secure ones is the altarpiece in Castelfranco Cathedral. He also painted frescoes on the façade of the German merchants’ trading house in Venice, together with Titian, but only fragments of them remain.
His most famous work is The Tempest in the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice. It shows a soldier and a woman nursing a child in a landscape where a flash of lightning illuminates the sky. No one knows for certain what the subject is, and perhaps it was never meant to be explained. The picture is more about mood than narrative. Other important works are The Three Philosophers in Vienna and the Sleeping Venus in Dresden, which according to an early source was completed by Titian after Giorgione’s death.
Giorgione painted directly on the canvas, without detailed preparatory drawings. He let soft transitions between light and shadow create form and atmosphere. The landscape becomes part of the feeling. His pictures were often small and made for private collectors, who wanted poetic and enigmatic works to talk about.
Although he left so little behind, his influence was enormous. He renewed Venetian painting, and the young Titian built on his style. Giorgione has become a symbol of the poetic and mysterious side of the Renaissance.