Giorgione da castelfranco biography sample
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Oils allowed for the creation of a more luminous, textured canvas and offered a means by which to affect a higher dramatic potential in the painted scene.
The nineteenth-century critic Walter Pater dubbed this trio of painters, along with later painters, Velázquez and Manet, "The School of Giorgione." With Caravaggio and Rubens, Giorgione is one of the few figures in art history to have entered a wider cultural consciousness in such a way as to lead to the development of the adjective Giorgionesque, usually applied to such depictions of beautiful nude women, and used by the French novelist Proust, for example, to describe a maid that he has long lusted-after in his work In Search of Lost Time as "wildly Giorgionesque."
Oil on canvas - Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden
c.1508-10
La Vecchia (Portrait of an Old Woman)
An old woman, her grey hair only partially covered by her white cap, emerges from a black background.
The elder figure seems to be tending the wounds of the younger, who has set down his walking stick. With one hand she moves her garments to reveal the soft curve and pale skin of her right breast. 1506, one of the first Venetian paintings focusing on landscape and atmospheric effects)
Legacy
Giorgione's untimely demise at the age of 33-34 prematurely ended a brilliant career.
From a document listing his possessions compiled shortly after his death, we learn the name of his father, Giovanni Gasparini, and that his mother (unnamed) died while Giorgione was a young child. By depicting his subject as turning to meet our gaze, and by moving beyond the ledge that divides us, Giorgione sets up a new relationship that invites us to consider the young man's personality and his state of mind.
Where it differs from his master's formal, "detached," style of portraiture is in the interaction it encourages between sitter and spectator. He entered the workshop of Giovanni Bellini in 1506, having already created several works. Only one other work by Giorgione carries a similar inscription documenting its creation (in which, however, the date is illegible), making this portrait invaluable in dating Giorgione's works (of which art historians believe possibly up to forty now exist).
Although a reminder of the brevity of life and the passage of time, this vividness makes this portrait a memento senescere (what it is "to grow old") rather than a memento mori ("remember you will die"). Behind her, rise the branches and leaves of a laurel (lauro in Italian), a tree associated in Italian literature and art with "Laura" being the beloved of the poet Petrarch.
Our knowledge of his career is confined to a few contemporary references, from the years 1506-10, and only a handful of paintings are undisputedly attributed to him, including the Castelfranco Altarpiece (in the church of San Liberate in the town of his birth), the portrait of Laura and The Three Philosophers (Vienna), and the Tempest (Venice, Accademia).
Shown in profile, her eyes escape our gaze. She asked the agent to procure a painting of a night scene by Giorgione that she has heard was very beautiful and original, and which could be found in his studio. Yet these suffice to secure him a fame nearly as great as that of the great leaders of the new [Venetian] movement." Indeed, Giorgione's reputation only seems to have profited from his untimely demise.
The application of color in Giorgione's paintings bear Bellini's influence though the student is thought to have quickly surpassed his master in technique and in the way he brought a greater sense of cerebral complexity to his work.
Mature Period
By the time Vasari published the second, enlarged edition of his Lives in 1568, his view of Giorgione seems to have shifted from a talented pupil of the Bellini family to a master in his own right.
Little is known about his childhood, which is assumed to have been spent in Castelfranco, but without concrete evidence.
Artistic Training and Influences
The identity of Giorgione's teacher remains a mystery. The two pieces housed in the Uffizi Gallery, Moses Undergoes Trial by Fire, and Judgment of Salomon, share this dynamic.
The laurel that accompanies her can be interpreted as a symbol of chastity, and the baring of her breast her fecundity and potential for a fruitful marriage, lending itself to the theory that it may have been commissioned as a marriage portrait. He was ranked by Vasari with Leonardo da Vinci as one of the founders of modern painting.
The painting would become the archetype in fact for a whole genre of painting and the many variations that followed it by Venetian painters such as Titian, Palma Vecchio, and Paris Bordon. He is remembered primarily for his portraits and landscapes, and of the latter, there is some consensus amongst historians that his work led to the development of landscape as a legitimate genre in its own right.