The Road To Venice

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

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Justly famous by right of his own paintings, Giovanni is also renowned as the master of some of the greatest painters Venice ever saw, chief among his pupils being Giorgione and Titian. The first was born at Castelfranco in 1470, and was christened Giorgio, but ‘from his stature and the greatness of his mind he was afterwards known as Giorgione,’ that is to say, ‘Great George.’ Though of peasant origin, contemporaries say he was ‘well bred and polished all his life.’ He was of a loving disposition and exceedingly fond of the lute, ‘playing and singing divinely,’ and this love of music became the new note which Giorgione definitely contributed to art, for not only did he frequently introduce music as a subject in his pictures (e.g ‘The Concert’ at Dresden, and the man playing a mandolin in ‘The Golden Age’ at the National Gallery, and the ‘Fete Champetre’ or Musical Party in the Louvre), but all his pictures, as Walter Pater wrote, ‘constantly aspire to the condition of music.’ By this it is meant that everything in a Giorgione is subordinated to beauty, and that his first concern is to create melody of line and harmony of color.

The gentle nature of the artist, who found grace and loveliness in all men and all things, can be traced in every work of his that has survived the storms of time. In his great altar-piece ‘Madonna Enthroned, with St. Liberale and St. Francis,’ for his native hill town of Castelfranco, painted before he was thirty, Giorgione charms us alike by the rhythm and balance of the whole composition and by the lovableness of his types. The sweet simplicity of young womanhood in the Virgin, the naturalness of the Child, the knightliness of the soldier-saint Liberale, the welcoming gesture of the nature-loving Saint who could preach to birds and fishes and call them his brethren—all these things are manifest in the illustration of this beautiful picture.

It is a great misfortune that so many of Giorgione’s paintings have been lost or destroyed in the course of centuries. Barely a score are known for certain to exist today, but among them are some of the most splendid portraits in the world. His ‘Young Man’ in the Berlin Gallery and his ‘Unknown Man’ in the Querini-Stampalia Collection at Venice are examples of his power in portraiture.

Vasari tells us that Giorgione ‘did a picture of Christ bearing the Cross and a Jew dragging him along, which after a time was placed in the Church of St. Rocco, and now works miracles, as we see, through the devotion of the multitudes who visit it.’ We can form some idea of what the exceeding beauty of this painting must have been from the unforgettable head of ‘Christ bearing the Cross,’ which still exists in the private collection of Mrs Gardner, of Boston, USA.

But, alas! not a fragment has survived of the famous picture which Giorgione painted to prove the superiority of painting to sculpture. While Verrocchio was in Venice engaged upon the bronze horse of his splendid Colleone Monument, his admirers argued that sculpture, which presented so many aspects of a figure, was superior to painting. Giorgione maintained that a painting could show at a single glance all the aspects that a man can present, while sculpture can only do so if one walks about it, and thus he proved his contention:

‘He painted a nude figure turning its shoulders; at its feet was a limpid fount of water, the reflection from which showed the front. On one side was a burnished corselet, which had been taken off and gave a side view, because the shining metal reflected everything. On the other side was a mirror showing the other side of the figure.’

The scarcity of Giorgione’s work is partly explained by the fact that he died young. In 1510 he was deeply in love with a Venetian lady, who caught the plague, but ‘Giorgione, being ignorant of this, associated with her as usual, took the infection, and died soon after at the age of thirty four, to the infinite grief of his friends, who loved him for his talents, and to the damage of the world which lost him.’