Giorgione

“ 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. ”

“ The figures, with their compactly built and rounded limbs, are such as Giorgione loved to model, the sweep of draperies and the splendid line indicate a consummate master, the idyllic landscape framing episodes from the life of Adonis is just such as we see in the Louvre picture and elsewhere, the glow and splendour of the whole reveal a master of tone and colouring. ”

“ He uses atmosphere to enhance the mood, but Giorgione carries his unison of landscape with human feeling much further than Perugino; he observes the delicate effects of light, and limpid air circulates in his distance. The sun rising over the sea throws a glamour and purity of early morning over a scene meant to glorify the memory of a young life. ”

“ Giorgione's face regained its look of good-humor. "But you are foolish, Titian, foolish! Paint doges, if you will, paint [159] popes and dukes—paint gold. But never paint an artist—an artist and a gentleman!"
They laughed merrily and the boat glided on—out into the lagoon and the broad, flooding moonlight.
"Sing something," said Giorgione. He raised the flute to his lips, breathing into it a gay, gentle air. The lute and cithara, from the opposite side, took it up. Presently the tenor voice joined in, carrying the air with sweet, high notes. ”

“ In this splendid group there is a masculine energy, a fulness of life, and a grandeur of representation which carries le grand style to its furthest limits, and if Giorgione actually completed the picture before his death, he anticipated the full splendour of the riper Renaissance. To him is certainly due the general composition, with its superb lines, its beautiful curves, its majestic and dignified postures, its charming sunset background, to him is certainly due the splendid chiaroscuro and magic colour-chord ”

“ 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. ”

“ Most entirely central and typical of all Giorgione’s extant works is the Sleeping Venus at Dresden, first recognized by Morelli, and now universally accepted, as being the same as the picture seen by the Anonimo and later by Ridolfi in the Casa Marcello at Venice. An exquisitely pure and severe rhythm of line and contour chastens the sensuous richness of the presentment: the sweep of white drapery on which the goddess lies, and of glowing landscape that fills the space behind her, most harmoniously frame her divinity. ”

“ The intellect had had and was having a large share in art. But in that part which was new, and which was launching art upon an untried course, Giorgione is more intense, more one-idea’d than Titian. What he does he does with a fervour and a spontaneity that marks him as one who pours out the language of the heart. ”

“ The Renaissance, the rejuvenation of art, seems to have slowly developed until at length it culminated in Giorgione. He was the man who opened the door, the one great modern genius of his period, whose influence remains and is felt to this day. Velasquez would never have been known but for Giorgione. Imagine this young man with his new ideas and his sweeps of golden colouring suddenly appearing in a studio full of men, all painting in the correct severe style established at the period. Such a man must needs influence all his fellows. ”

“ The splendour of curve, the beauty of unbroken contour, the rhythm and balance of composition is attained at a cost of academic correctness; but the long-drawn horizontal lines heighten the sense of repose, and the eye is soothed by the sinuous undulations of landscape and figure. The artistic effect is further enhanced by the relief of exquisite flesh tones against the rich crimson drapery, and although the atmospheric glow has been sadly destroyed by abrasion and repainting, we may still feel something of the magic charm which Giorgione knew so well how to impart. ”

“ The earliest Titians show the sultry shadows of Giorgione, and are distinguishable from his work only by a more linear quality, and by a greater explicitness of mood. Titian’s poetry is direct and rarely ambiguous. What ardors of flesh and spirit are suggested in his early portraits of men! The portrait of a bearded man in London, Figure 261, is conceived entirely in Giorgione’s fashion, as a short bust showing the hands, and the mysterious envelopment in warm shadow is Giorgione’s as is the sensitiveness of touch and characterization. But with all his gentle beauty, the man is formidable. ”

“ Much of the work on which Giorgione's immediate fame depended, work done for instantaneous effect, in all probability passed away almost within his own age, like the frescoes on the façade of the fondaco dei Tedeschi at Venice, some crimson traces of which, however, still give a strange additional touch of splendour to the scene of the Rialto. And then there is a barrier or borderland, a period about the middle of the sixteenth century, in passing through which the tradition miscarries, and the true outlines of Giorgione's work and person are obscured. ”

“ The boat came slowly to rest at the foot of the great building that rose white [157] and gray and new in the half light. Giorgione's eye ran lovingly along the front. "To-morrow," he said, "we begin the last frescos. You, Titian, on the big façade to the south, and Zarato and I—" He laid his hand affectionately on the arm of the young man at his side, "Zarato and I on the inner court."
The youth started and looked up. His eyes studied the massive walls, with the low, arching porticos and long unbroken lines. "A noble piece of work," he said.
Giorgione nodded. "German and Venetian mixed." ”

“ But there, emerging from the warm shadows like the embodiment of youthful ardor itself, is the young man with hat beplumed and flowing locks, the glowing flower of adolescence which Giorgione created under the influence of a reflection from that Hellenic myth whence arose the ideal form of Hermaphrodite. He is there, present, yet a stranger, separated from the others, like a being that cares only for his own welfare. The music exalts his inexpressible dream, and seems to multiply indefinitely his capacity to enjoy. ”

“ Not a touch but what can be paralleled in a dozen other works—the feathery trees against the luminous sky, the glow of the horizon, the splendid effects of light and shadow, the impressive grandeur of the wild scenery, the small figures in mid-distance, even the cast of drapery and shape of limbs are repeated elsewhere. Let anyone contrast the delicacy and the glow of this little panel with several similar productions of the Venetian school hanging in the same gallery, and the gulf that separates Giorgione from his imitators will, I think, be apparent. ”

“ All this very naturally fits the portrait of a poet, and at a time when it was customary to label every portrait with a celebrated name, what more appropriate than Ariosto, the court poet of Ferrara? But this dreamy reserve, this intensity of suppressed feeling is characteristic of all Giorgione's male portraits, and is nowhere more splendidly expressed than in this lovely figure. ”

“ Giorgione was of a finer fibre, and more happily, it may be, combined all the subtlest qualities of the painter and the poet, in his creation of a phase of art the penetrating exquisiteness of which has never in the succeeding centuries lost its hold on the world. But then Titian, saturated with the Giorgionesque, and only less truly the poet-painter than his master and companion, carried the style to a higher pitch of material perfection than its inventor himself had been able to achieve. ”

“ Positive proofs of Giorgione's hand are found in the way the hair is rendered—that lovely dark auburn hair so often seen in his work,—in the radiant oval of the face, contrasting so finely with the shadows, which are treated exactly as in the Cobham picture, only that here the chiaroscuro is more masterly, in the delicate modelling of the features, the pose of the head, and in the superb colour of the whole. ”

“ But the question remains, What is Giorgione's position among the world's great men? Is he intellectually to be ranked with the Great Thinkers of all time? Can he aspire to the position which Titian occupies? I fear not Beethoven is infinitely greater than Schubert, Shakespeare than Keats, and so, though in lesser degree, is Titian than Giorgione. ”

“ To form our opinion therefore of Giorgione's chiaroscuro from a few portraits or single figures, if legitimate, often restored, or from the crumbling remnants of his decayed frescoes, would be to form an estimate of a magnificent fabric from some loose fragment or stone: to do full justice to his powers we must have recourse to his surprising work in the School of S. Marco at Venice; a composition whose terrific graces Vasari descants on with a fervour inferior only to the artist's own inspiration, though he unaccountably ascribes it to the elder Palma. ”

“ The disciples extended their arms toward the master with an effusion of gratitude, an impulse of love, for he had illumined their souls as with a torch. In each lived again Giorgione's creation: the youth with the beautiful white plumes, who advanced toward the rich mass of spoils; and each fancied as multiplied to infinity his own power to enjoy all things. Their cry expressed so plainly their perturbation of spirit, that the master felt an inward tremor and [66] the inrush of a wave of sadness as he thought of the ashes of this sudden fire, and of the cruel wakening of the morrow. ”

“ Casa Loschi pictures; its modelling vividly recalls the central figure of the Pitti "Concert," the painting of sleeve and gloves is like that in the National Gallery and Querini-Stampalia portraits just discussed. The general pose is most like that of the Borghese "Lady." The parapet, the wavy hair, the high cranium are all so many outward and visible signs of Giorgione's spirit, whilst none but he could have created such magnificent contrasts of colour, such effects of light and shade. This is indeed Giorgione, the great master, the magician who holds us all fascinated by his wondrous spell. ”

“ I have spoken of Giorgione's versatility, his precocity, and the natural inequality of his work. There is another characteristic which commonly exists when these qualities are found united, and that is Productiveness. Giorgione, according to all analogy, must have produced a mass of work. It is idle to assert, as some modern writers have done, that at the utmost his easel pictures could have been but few, because most of his short life was devoted to painting frescoes, which have perished. ”

“ Peculiar, however, to an artist of genius is the subtlety of composition, which is held together by invisible threads, for nowhere else, perhaps, has Giorgione shown a greater mastery of line. The diagonal line running from behind the nude figure on the left down to the foot so cunningly extended of the seated youth, is beautifully balanced by the line which is formed by the seated figure of the woman. ”

“ And now, finally, let me illustrate some of the characteristics of this School of Giorgione, as we may call it, which, for most of us, notwithstanding all that negative criticism of the "new Vasari," will still identify itself with those famous pictures at Florence, at Dresden and Paris. A certain artistic ideal is there defined for us- -the conception of a peculiar aim and procedure in art, which we may understand as the Giorgionesque, [149] wherever we find it, whether in Venetian work generally, or in work of our own time. ”

“ The whole difficulty, as it seems to me, arises from the deep-rooted misapprehension in the minds of most critics of the character of Giorgione's art. In their eyes, he is something so perfect as to be incapable of producing anything short of the ideal. ”

“ Giorgione, as we have seen, could not have been more than eighteen years in active practice, yet in that short time he gained successes in all these various fields. His many-sidedness shows him to have been a man of wide sympathies, whilst the astonishing rapidity of his development testifies to the precocity of his talent. His versatility and his precocity are, in fact, the two most prominent characteristics to be borne in mind in judging his art, for much that appears at first sight incongruous, if not utterly irreconcilable, can be explained on this basis. ”

“ In such a work as the Louvre "Concert," Giorgio has become Giorgione; he is riper in experience and richer in feeling, and his art assumes a corresponding exuberance of style, his forms become larger, his execution grows freer. Nay, more, that strain of carelessness is not wanting which so commonly accompanies such evolutions of character. And so this "Pastoral Symphony" becomes a characteristic production—that is, one which a man of Giorgione's temperament would naturally produce in the course of his developing. ”