The death of Giorgione from plague in 1511 is registered by all the oldest authorities. His body was conveyed to Castelfranco by members of the Barbarelli family and buried in the Church of San Liberale. In 1638 an epitaph was placed over his tomb by Matteo and Ercole Barbarelli.
Allowing that he was hardly more than twenty when his new manner began to gain a following, he had only some twelve years in which to establish his deep and lasting influence. We divine that he was a man of strong personality, such a one as warms and stimulates his companions. Even his nickname tells us something,—Great George, the Chief, the George of Georges,—it seems to express him as a leader. And we have no lack of proof that he was admired and looked up to. His style became the only one that found favour in Venice, and the painters of the day did their best to conform to it. Few authentic examples are left from his own hand, but out of his conscious and devoted and more or less successful imitators, there grew up a school, “out of all those fascinating works, rightly or wrongly attributed to him; out of many copies from, or variations on him, by unknown or uncertain workmen, whose drawings and designs were, for various reasons, prized as his; out of the immediate impression he made upon his contemporaries and with which he continued in men’s minds; out of many traditions of subject and treatment which really descend from him to our own time, and by retracing which we fill out the original image.”
Summing up all these influences, he has left us the Giorgionesque; the art of choosing a moment in which the subject and the elements of colour and design are so perfectly fused and blended that we have no need to ask for any more articulate story; a moment into which all the significance, the fulness of existence has condensed itself, so that we are conscious of the very essence of life. Those idylls of beings wrapped into an ideal dreamland by music and the sound of water and the beauty of wood and mountain and velvet sward, need all our conscious apprehension of life if we are to drink in their full fascination. The dream of the Lotos-eaters can only come with force to those who can contrast it adequately with the experience, the complication, and the thousand distractions of an over-civilised world. Rest and relaxation, the power of the deeply tinted eventide, or of the fresh morning light, and the calm that drinks in the sensations they are able to afford, are among the precious things of life. The instinct upon which Giorgione’s work rests is the satisfying of the feeling as well as the thinking faculty, the life of the heart, as compared to the life of the intellect, the solution of life’s problems by love instead of by thought. It was the Eastern ideal, and its positive expression is conveyed by means of colour, deep, restful, satisfying, fused and controlled by chiaroscuro rather than by form.
PRINCIPAL WORKS
| Berlin. | Portrait of a Man. |
| Buda-Pesth. | Portrait of a Man. |
| Castelfranco. | Duomo: Madonna with SS. Francis and Liberale. |
| Dresden. | Sleeping Venus. |
| Florence. | Uffizi: Trial of Moses (E.); Judgment of Solomon (E.); Knight of Malta. |
| Hampton Court. | A Shepherd. |
| Madrid. | Madonna with SS. Roch and Anthony of Padua. |
| Paris. | Fête Champêtre. |
| Rome. | Villa Borghese: Portrait of a Lady. |
| Venice. | Seminario: Apollo and Daphne. |
| Palazzo Giovanelli: Gipsy and Soldier. | |
| San Rocco: Christ bearing Cross. | |
| Boston. | Mrs. Gardner: Christ bearing Cross. |
| London. | Sketch of a Knight; Adoration of Shepherds. |
| Viscount Allendale: Adoration of Shepherds. | |
| Vienna. | Evander showing Æneas the Future Site of Rome. |
CHAPTER XVI
THE GIORGIONESQUE
Giorgione had given the impulse, and all the painters round him felt his power. The Venetian painters that is, for it is remarkable, at a time when the men of one city observed and studied and took hints from those of every other, how faint are the signs that this particular manner attracted any great attention in other art centres. Leonardo da Vinci was a master of chiaroscuro, but he used it only to express his forms, and never sacrifices to it the delicacy and fineness of his design. It is the one quality Raphael never assimilates, except for a brief instant at the period when Sebastian del Piombo had arrived in Rome from Venice. It takes hold most strongly upon Andrea del Sarto, who seems, significantly enough, to have had no very pronounced intellectual capacity, but in Venice itself it now became the only way. The old Bellini finds in it his last and fullest ideal; Catena, Basaiti, Cariani do their best to acquire it, and so successfully was it acquired, so congenial was it to Venetian art, that even second- and third-rate Venetian painters have usually something attractive which triumphs over superficial and doubtful drawing and grouping. It is easy to see how much to their taste was this fused and golden manner, this disregard of defined form, and this new play of chiaroscuro. The Venetian room in the National Gallery is full of such examples: the Nymphs and Amoretti of No. 1695, charming figures against melting vines and olives; “Venus and Adonis,” in which a bewitching Cupid chases a butterfly; Lovers in a landscape, roaming in the summer twilight; scenes in which neither person nor scenery is a pretext for the other, but each has its full share in arousing the desired emotion. Such pictures are ascribed to, or taken from Giorgione by succeeding critics, but have all laid hold of his charm, and have some share in his inspiration.