A history of Italian painting

by Frank Jewett Mather

Fig. 256. Giorgione. Judith.—Petrograd.

In 1508, working with Titian, Giorgione finished certain frescoes for the outside of the German Warehouse. The remaining red blurs, and Zanetti’s fragmentary copies, tell us that the postures begin to have the breadth and conscious counterpoise of the advancing Renaissance, but that the mood is still that of languor. Very like one of these figures is the fascinating Judith, at Petrograd, Figure [256]. After the horrors of the night, she stands dreamily. Her lovely left leg escapes from the courteous draperies, and the foot touches lightly the brow of the peaceful, severed head of Holophernes. The touch of the foot is almost careless, as if merely to assure herself that the portent is really true. Her head bends gently, her nerveless beautiful fingers barely feel her girdle or support her great sword. Behind her, morning forests and fields stretch towards a tranquil sea and sky. The gestures are those of one between sleeping and waking, irresolutely feeling for some basis in reality. We are in a realm where the most awful deeds and experiences count only as raw material for delicate imaginings.

Fig. 257. Giorgione. Pastoral Symphony.—Louvre.

In the later works problems multiply, and a critic is pretty well reduced to personal intuitions. No doubt, however, should attach to the pathetic and nearly effaced Christ of St. Roch. The Christ is nobler than the earlier example at Fenway Court, the feeling more expansive. Still nobody, not even the executioner, seems to will the atrocity of the deed. The thing is not an act but a vision, pervaded by a dreamy tenderness.

The completely repainted Pastoral Concert, Figure [257], at the Louvre is never the less fraught with Giorgione’s peculiar poetry. A courtly lover has struck a chord on the lute, and gazes intently, perhaps sadly, at a shepherd sitting close to him. A rustic, nude nymph whose back only is seen takes the pipe from her lips to listen. A proud beauty turns toward a fountain, light draperies slip away from her superb form, and with a graceful gesture of idleness she pours back into the fountain a tinkling jet from a crystal pitcher, while she bends to note the ripple and catch the pleasant, idle sound. This strange scene takes place on the edge of a vale that winds down to a glittering sea, affording a path to a shepherd and his flocks. The meaning? Modern criticism is loath to look beyond contrasts of nude and clothed forms, swing of tree-tops and of sky, subtle interplay of light and shade. My own reading is merely based on the contrast between the rustic and urban lovers, and an intuition that the courtier in peering so wistfully at the shepherd is merely seeing himself in a former guise. In lassitude, perhaps in satiety, beside a courtly mistress who is absent from him in spirit, there rises the vision of earlier simpler love and of a devoted shepherdess who once piped for him in the shade. The vision rises as his listless hand sweeps the lute strings in a chord unmarked by the far lovelier mistress at the fountain. The golden age of love, like Arcady itself, is ever in the past. Such may be the reading of this poesy. Indeed all Giorgione’s pictures are less facts than apparitions born of roving thought in idleness,—such stuff as dreams are made of.

The famous Concert, Figure [258], of the Pitti since Morelli’s time has been generally classed as an early Titian, I think erroneously. The precise and powerful execution of the Monk’s head is certainly his, but I question if the motive itself lay within the scope of his lucid and uncomplicated imagination. An Augustinian monk holds the initial harmony on the clavichord and turns towards the ’cellist while the singer waits impassively. And this simple theme becomes a universal symbol for thwarted desire. The player asks a kind of sympathy which this world rarely affords, which certainly these companions cannot give. As in the Pastoral Symphony, the music awakens impossible longings, is the accompaniment of inadequacy. Titian was too robust ever to have imagined such a thing, and I feel we need only modify the old tradition to the extent of giving Titian a hand in an unfinished Giorgione to account for this poignant and most characteristic masterpiece.

Fig. 258. Giorgione cum Titian. The Concert.—Pitti.

There remains old and good tradition for crediting Giorgione with the design of the altar-piece in San Giovanni Crisostomo. The execution is unquestionably by Sebastiano del Piombo. If this view be correct, Giorgione attained the external features of the coming Renaissance style, missing its athleticism. Certainly the abstraction of the saint and the unmotivated appearance of the three virtues, and their unrelated gracefulness, is entirely in Giorgione’s manner, while the whole invention is alien to Sebastiano’s heavy and forthright talent.