Titian: His Life and the Golden Age of Venice. Sheila Hale
that upstart.
The story, true or false, is interesting as being the first about rivalry between Venetian artists. Biographies of artists in other times and places are liberally spiced with anecdotes about artistic competition. Apelles and Protogenes competed to see who could draw the thinnest line. Wu Tao-tzu, the greatest Chinese painter of the Tang dynasty, murdered a rival, just as Andrea Castagno was supposed by Vasari to have assassinated his friend and collaborator Domenico Veneziano (who in fact outlived him by four years). Donatello strove to outdo Brunelleschi and made wittily disparaging comments about the work of Nanni di Banco and Paolo Uccello. Michelangelo, the arch-rival of Raphael, destroyed pictures by Dürer out of envy. And so on.10 But the rivalrous instinct, and the artist’s passionate identification with his work that it implies, seems to have been lacking in conservative, family-oriented Venetian studios until Titian’s independent and competitive spirit kick-started the rapid development of Venetian art.11
Giorgione’s posthumous reputation did not merely survive the setback; it mushroomed after his death, when he became increasingly famous as the most enigmatically romantic of Renaissance painters, in a way that is without parallel in the history of art. Apart from Vasari’s not entirely accurate ‘Life of Giorgione’, which was published four decades after the painter’s death, we know very little else about him, except that in the seventeenth century his family name was said to be Barbarella, that he was referred to in his lifetime as Giorgio rather than Giorgione, that the contents of his house suggest that he was by no means a rich man and lived in some disarray; and that he kept a separate studio.12
Although Vasari said Giorgione was born in Castelfranco in 1477 or 1478, he may in fact have been closer to Titian’s age because his first securely datable work is the Portrait of a Man of 1506, by which time, according to Vasari, he would have been nearly thirty. He died during a plague in 1511, not in 1510 as Vasari claimed. Vasari was, however, right in saying that, by giving his pictures more softness and greater relief, he was the first Venetian artist to create the ‘modern style’, far outstripping Giovanni Bellini and all other Venetian painters of the older generation, and that the finished pictures of Giorgione and Titian were for a while so similar as to be indistinguishable. In fact, although the mood of their pictures is similar, there were differences in the way they planned and painted them. The Three Philosophers, for example, which is one of the paintings that is confidently attributed to Giorgione at least in part – and one of the most closely studied by modern scientific investigations – reveals underdrawings, some in bold outlines using a large brush, some loosely drawn in stiffer lines. This careful planning is very different from the cursory drawings beneath Titian’s earliest paintings, which were conceived almost entirely in paint.
The problem of attribution to one or the other, or to Sebastiano Luciani, or to other artists some of whose names have not survived, continues even today to exercise scholars, critics, museum curators and dealers. They were all painted for young Venetians whose imaginations had been recently liberated by the classical stories and pastoral romances published by the Aldine Press, and who were ready for a new, unconventional way of painting. Ridolfi wrote that their portraits were also difficult to distinguish: ‘many portraits are identified with some confusion and no distinction, now as the work of one, now as the work of the other’. But since neither Vasari nor Ridolfi nor any other early writer was specific about the portraits in question, the only two that can be given to Giorgione on sound evidence are the Portrait of Laura, so called from the spray of laurel branches behind her head, and possibly the first of the Venetian portraits of anonymous seductive women, which is inscribed on the back of the panel, ‘On 1 June 1506 this was made by the hand of maestro Giorgio from Castelfranco the colleague of maestro Vincenzo Catena’; and the Portrait of a Man, which is also signed on the reverse, and seems to be a portrait of the physician Gian Giacomo Bartolotti da Parma, who was also the subject of a later portrait by Titian.
Apart from those two portraits, the public commissions for the Fondaco frescos and the lost painting for the doge’s palace, there are two other pictures that are so distinctive that they can be identified from the notes of a Venetian nobleman, Marcantonio Michiel, who wrote, mostly in the late 1520s, about the pictures he saw in eleven collections in Venice and Padua.13 One is the Tempesta, then in the collection of Gabriele Vendramin, which Michiel described as ‘The little landscape on canvas with a storm, with a gypsy and a soldier … By the hand of Giorgio of Castelfranco’. The other is the Three Philosophers, which he saw in the house of his friend Taddeo Contarini in 1525 and described as ‘The canvas in oil of Three Philosophers in a Landscape, two standing and another seated, who contemplates the rays of the sun, with a painted rock that is miraculously rendered. It was begun by Zorzo of Castelfranco and finished by Sebastiano the Venetian.’ Both descriptions are so precise that they put the attributions beyond reasonable doubt, although modern scientific studies show no evidence that the Three Philosophers was finished by Sebastiano.
The Giorgione or Titian question14 remains so contentious that professional art historians use the phrase ‘according to my Giorgione’ in wry acknowledgement of the inevitable subjectivity of attributing any painting to a particular artist by connoisseurship alone. The problem is complicated by other possible contenders, some anonymous because Venetian painters seem rarely to have entered into notarized contracts for their work, as was the norm in the rest of Italy, or if they did the notarial records have survived less well than elsewhere. Giorgione, furthermore, worked mostly for high-born patrons, and the earliest accounts of his style were written by people, Vasari included, who did not have easy entrée to patrician collections and therefore didn’t know what his cabinet pictures looked like. The exception was Marcantonio Michiel, who, as a nobleman himself, had access to patrician collections, although his laconic notes were not always accurate. Michiel recorded fourteen Giorgiones. Vasari gave him about twelve. In the next century Ridolfi mentioned about sixty-five, already an impressive opus for an artist cut off in his prime by death.15
Over successive centuries the volume of Giorgiones expanded, the inflationary optimism of connoisseurs fuelled by a burgeoning art market whose interests were served by exploiting the fascinating qualities of early sixteenth-century Venetian painting that are difficult to define – except as ‘Giorgionesque’, meaning a style characterized by informal grouping of figures, gentle transitions of colour, dreamy landscapes and idiosyncratic or enigmatic subject matter that seem to reflect the mood of the pastoral poetry of the period. Giorgione, as a connoisseur of Venetian painting observed in 1877,16 had become ‘a sort of impersonation of Venice itself, its projected reflex or ideal, all that was intense or desirable in it crystallising about the memory of this wonderful young man’. By the early nineteenth century it is said that some 2,000 ‘Giorgiones’ passed through the London salerooms. They included paintings now more securely attributed to other artists including Titian. It was only from the second half of the nineteenth century, when more informed connoisseurship was facilitated by the invention of photography, the spread of railways, the growth of public museums and the opening of the Italian state archives, that the Giorgione bubble began to deflate.17 By the early twentieth century some ‘Giorgiones’ had been restored to the artists who painted them, and the numbers have continued to decline with colour photography, loan exhibitions and the expansion of art history as an academic subject. But there are still a number of paintings that art historians have continued to shift back and forth between Giorgione and the young Titian, and sometimes Sebastiano, or to a collaboration of two of them or all three.
Depending on the Giorgione of which modern scholar you consult, there could be anything up to about forty surviving works. They include a number that some scholars prefer to give to Titian, including the Christ Carrying the Cross (Venice, Scuola di San Rocco), the Allendale Nativity (Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art); and the Sleeping Nude in a Landscape (Dresden, Gemäldegalerie), which is the first extant reclining nude in Western art and one of the most famous of early sixteenth-century paintings. It has traditionally