Giorgione (c. 1477 in Castelfranco Veneto, Italy, d. 1510 in Venice,
Italy) is the familiar name of Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco, one of
the most important artists in the Venetian Renaissance. Giorgione is known
for the elusive poetic quality of his work, and for the fact that only
very few (around six) paintings are known for certain to be his work. At
his sudden death from plague he probably left some works unfinished, which
may have been completed by his colleagues Titian or Sebastiano del Piombo.
The resulting uncertainty about the identity and meaning of his art has
made Giorgione one of the most mysterious figure in Europeanpainting.
Giorgione came from the small town of Castelfranco Veneto, outside Venice.
His name is sometimes spelled Zorzo. The variant 'Giorgione' or 'Zorzon'
means 'Big George'.
While still in Castelfranco he painted the Castelfranco Madonna, a fairly
conventional sacra conversazione painting--Madonna throned, with saints on
either side. However, it marks a departure in Venetian art, with its
curiously introverted saints and its delicate color modulations. This is
painted with the tiny disconnected spots of color that Giorgione brought
into oil painting, derived from manuscript illumination techniques. These
gave Giorgione's works the 'magical' glow of light for which they were
famous.
The Tempest is Giorgione's most famous work. The meaning of this painting
is unclear, but its artistic mastery is apparent. The Tempest portrays a
soldier and a breast-feeding woman on either side of a stream, amid a
city's rubble and an incoming storm. The multitude of symbols in The
Tempest offer many interpretations, but none are wholly satisfying.
Theories that the painting is about duality (city and country, male and
female) have been dismissed since radiography has shown that in the
earlier stages of the painting the soldier to the left was a seated female
nude.[1]
The Three Philosophers is equally enigmatic. The three figures stand near
a dark empty cave. These seem to be symbols of Plato's cave and of the
Three Magi, but it remains unclear.
Another Giorgione masterpiece is the Sleeping Venus (attributed 1505-9).
The use of an external landscape to frame a nude is innovative; but in
addition, to add to her mystery, she is shrouded in sleep, spirited away
from accessibility to her conscious expression. Stanley Freedberg in his
encyclopedic monograph, Painting in Italy 1500-1600 (Penguin, 1983),
departs from his usual analytical style to extol this Venus in a dizzying
poetic abstraction:
"The shape of being is the visual demonstration of a state of being
in which idealized existence is suspended in immutable slow-breathing
harmony. All the sensuality has been distilled off this sensous presence,
and all incitement; Venus denote not the act of love but the recollection.
The perfect embodiment of Giorgione's dream, she dreams his dream
herself."
His portraits were the first to be painted in the "modern
manner", and are full of dignity, truth of characterization,
simplicity, and a misty non-linear surface. Giorgione discovered sfumato
or chiaroscuro--the delicate use of shades of color to depict light and
perspective--around the same time as Leonardo da Vinci. The precocious and
versatile young man was the first to paint landscapes with figures, the
first to paint genre — movable pictures in their own frames with no
devotional, allegorical, or historical purpose — and the first whose
colours possessed that ardent, glowing, and melting intensity which was so
soon to typify the work of all the Venetian School. Giorgione was the
first to discard detail and substitute breadth and boldness in the
treatment of nature and architecture; and he was the first to recognize
that the painter's chief aim is decorative effect. He never subordinated
line and colour to architecture, nor an artistic effect to a sentimental
presentation. The most famous of his portraits, Laura (1506) is his only
signed and dated work known to exist.
His life was described in Giorgio Vasari's Vite.
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It uses material from the Wikipedia
article "Italian Renaissance".