Giorgione

by Herbert Frederick Cook

CHAPTER VI

GIORGIONE'S ART, AND PLACE IN HISTORY

The examination in detail of all those pictures best entitled, on internal evidence, to rank as genuine productions of Giorgione has incidentally revealed to us much that is characteristic of the man himself. We started with the axiom that a man's work is his best autobiography, and where, as in Giorgione's case, so little historical or documentary record exists, such indications of character as may be gleaned from a study of his life's work become of the utmost value. Le style c'est l'homme is a saying eminently applicable in cases where, as with Giorgione, the personal element is strongly marked. The subject, as we have seen over and over again, is so highly charged with the artist's mood, with his individual feelings and emotions, that it becomes unrecognisable as mere illustration, and the work passes by virtue of sheer inspiration into the higher realms of creative art. Such fusion of personality and subject is the characteristic of lyrical art, and in this domain Giorgione is a supreme master. His genius, as Morelli rightly pointed out, is essentially lyrical in contradistinction to Titian's, which is essentially dramatic. Take the epithets that we have constantly applied to his pictures in the course of our survey, and see how they bear out this statement—epithets such as romantic, fantastic, picturesque, gay, or again, delicate, refined, sensitive, serene, and the like; these bear witness to qualities of mind where the keynote is invariably exquisite feeling. Giorgione was, in fact, what is commonly called a poet-painter, gifted with the artistic temperament to an extraordinary degree, essentially impulsive, a man of moods. It is inevitable that such a man produces work of varying merit; inequality must be a characteristic feature of his art. In less fortunate circumstances than those in which Giorgione was placed, such temperaments as his become peevish, morose, morbid; but his lines were cast in pleasant places, and his moods were healthy, joyous, and serene. He does not concern himself with the tragedy of life, with its pathos or its disappointments. In his two renderings of "Christ bearing the Cross"[^[138]] the only instances we have of his portrayal of the Man of Sorrows—he appeals more to our sense of the dignity of humanity, and to the nobility of the Christ, than to our tenderer sympathies. How different from the pathetic Pietàs of his master, Giambellini! This shrinking from pain and sorrow, this dislike to the representation of suffering is, however, as much due to the natural gaiety and elasticity of youth as to the happy accident of his surroundings. We must never forget that Giorgione's whole achievement was over at an age when some men's life-work has hardly begun. The eighteen years of his activity were what we sometimes call the years of promise, and he must not be judged as we judge a Titian or a Michel Angelo. He is the wonderful youth, full of joyous aspirations, gilding all he touches with the radiance of his spirit. His pictures, suffused with a golden glow, are the reflection of his sunny life; the vividness and intensity of his passion are expressed in the gorgeousness of his colours.

I have elsewhere dwelt upon the precocity of Giorgione's talent, with its accompanying qualities of versatility, inequality, and productiveness, and I have pointed out the analogous phenomena in music and poetry. Giorgione, Schubert, and Keats are alike in temperament and quality of expression. They are curiously alike in the shortness of their lives,[^[139]] and the fever-heat of their production. But they are strangely distinct in the manner of their lives. The disparity of outward circumstances accounts for the healthy tone of Giorgione's art, when contrasted with the morbid utterances of Keats. Schubert suffered privations and poverty, and his song was wrung from him alike at moments of inspiration and of necessity. But Giorgione is all aglow with natural energy; he suffered no restraints, nor is his art forced or morbid. Confine his spirit, check the play of his fancy, set him a task prescribed by convention or hampered by conditions, and you get proof of the fretfulness, the impatience of restraint which the artist felt. The "Judgment of Solomon" and "The Adulteress before Christ," the only two "set" pieces he ever attempted, eloquently show how he fell short when struggling athwart his genius. For to register a fact was utterly foreign to his nature; he records an impression, frankly surrendering his spirit to the sense of joy and beauty. He is not seldom incoherent, and may even grow careless, but in power of imagination and exuberance of fancy he is always supreme.

In one respect, however, Giorgione shows himself a greater than Schubert or Keats. He has a profounder insight into human nature in its varying aspects than either the musician or the poet. He is less a visionary, because his experience of men and things is greater than theirs; his outlook is wider, he is less self-centred. This power of grasping objective truth naturally shows itself most readily in the portraits he painted, and it was due to the force of circumstances, as I believe, that this faculty was trained and developed. Had Giorgione lived aloof from the world, had not his natural reticence and sensitiveness been dominated by outside influences, he might have remained all his life dreaming dreams, and seeing visions, a lyric poet indeed, but not a great and living, influence in his generation. Yet such undoubtedly he was, for he effected nothing short of a revolution in the contemporary art of Venice. Can the same be said of Schubert or Keats? The truth is that Giorgione had opportunities of studying human nature such as the others never enjoyed; fortune smiled upon him in his earliest years, and he found himself thrust into the society of the great, who were eager to sit to him for their portraits. How the young Castelfrancan first achieved such distinction is not told us by the historians, but I have ventured to connect his start in life with the presence of the ex-Queen of Cyprus, Caterina Cornaro, at Asolo, near Castelfranco; I think it more than probable that her patronage and recommendation launched the young painter on his successful career in Venice. Certain it is that he painted her portrait in his earlier days, and if, as I have sought to prove, Signor Crespi's picture is the long-lost portrait of the great lady, we may well understand the instant success such an achievement won.

Here, if anywhere, we get Giorgione's great interpretative qualities, his penetration into human nature, his reading of character. It is an astonishing thing for one so young to have done, explicable psychologically on the existence of a lively sympathy between the great lady and the poet-painter. Had we other portraits of the fair sex by Giorgione, I venture to think we should find in them his reading of the human soul even more plainly evidenced than in the male portraits we actually possess.[^[140]] For it is clear that the artist was "impressionable," and he would have given us more sympathetic interpretations of the fair sex than those which Titian has left us. The so-called "Portrait of the Physician Parma" (at Vienna) is another instance of Giorgione's grasp of character, the virility and suppressed energy being admirably seized, the conception approaching more nearly to Titian's in its essential dignity than is usually the case with Giorgione's portraits. It is a matter of more regret, therefore, that the likenesses of the Doges Agostino Barberigo and Leonardo Loredano are missing, for in them we might have had specimens of work comparable to the Caterina Cornaro, which, in my opinion at all events, is Giorgione's masterpiece of portraiture.

I have given reasons elsewhere for dating this portrait at latest 1500. It is probably anterior by a few years to the close of the century. This deduction, if correct, has far-reaching consequences: it becomes actually the first modern portrait ever painted, for it is the earliest instance of a portrait instinct with the newer life of the Renaissance. And this brings us to the question: What was Giorgione's relation to that great awakening of the human spirit which we call the Renaissance? Mr. Berenson answers the question thus: "His pictures are the perfect reflex of the Renaissance at its height."[^[141]] If this be taken to mean that Giorgione anticipated the aspirations and ideals of the riper Renaissance, I think we may acquiesce in the phrase; but that the onward movement of this great revival coincided only with the artist's years, and culminated at his death, is not historically correct. The wave had not reached its highest point by the year 1510, and Titian was yet to rise to a fuller and grander expression of the human soul. But Giorgione may rightly be called the Herald of the Renaissance, not only by virtue of the position he holds in Venetian painting, but by priority of appearance on the wider horizon of Italian Art.

Let us take the four great representative exponents of Italian Art at its best, Raphael, Correggio, Leonardo, and Michel Angelo. Chronologically, Giorgione precedes Raphael and Correggio, though Leonardo and Michel Angelo were born before him.[^[142]] But had either of the latter proclaimed a new order of things as early as 1495? Michel Angelo was just twenty years old, and he had not yet carved his "Pietà" for S. Peter's. Leonardo, a man of forty-three, had not completed his "Cenacolo," and the "Mona Lisa" would not be created for another five or six years. Giorgione's "Caterina Cornaro," therefore, becomes the first masterpiece of the earlier Renaissance, and proclaims a revolution in the history of portraiture. In Venice itself we have only to look at the contemporary portraits by Alvise Vivarini and Gentile Bellini, and at the slightly earlier busts by Antonello da Messina, to see what a world of difference in feeling and interpretation there is between them and Giorgione's portraits. What a splendid array of artistic triumphs must have sprung up around this masterpiece! The Cobham portrait and the National Gallery "Poet" are alone left us in much of their pristine splendour, but what of the lost portraits of the great Consalvo and of the Doge Agostino Barberigo, both of which must date from the year 1500?

Giorgione is then the Herald of the Renaissance, and never did genius arise in more fitting season. It was the right psychological moment for such a man, and Giorgione "painted pictures so perfectly in touch with the ripened spirit of the Renaissance that they met with the success which those things only find that at the same moment wake us to the full sense of a need and satisfy it."[^[143]] This is the secret of his overwhelming influence on succeeding painters in Venice,—not, indeed, on his direct pupil Sebastiano del Piombo, and on his friend and associate Titian (who may fairly be called his pupil), but on such different natures as Lotto, Palma, Bonifazio, Bordone, Pordenone, Cariani, Romanino, Dosso Dossi, and a host of smaller men. The School of Giorgione numbers far more adherents than even the School of Leonardo, or the School of Raphael, not because of any direct teaching of the master, but because the "Giorgionesque" spirit was abroad, and the taste of the day required paintings like Giorgione's to satisfy it. But as no revolution can be effected without a struggle, and as there are invariably people opposed to any reform, whether in art or in anything else, we need not be surprised to find the academic faction, represented by the aged Giambellini and his pupils, resisting the progress of the Newer Art. In Giorgione's own lifetime, the exact measure of the opposition is not easy to gauge, but it bore fruit a few years later in the machinations of the official Bellinesque party to keep Titian out of the Ducal Palace when he was seeking State recognition,[^[144]] Nevertheless, Giambellini, even at his age, found it advisable to modulate into the newer key, as may be seen in his "S. Giovanni Crisostomo enthroned," where not only is the conception lyrical and the treatment romantic, but the actual composition is on the lines of the essentially Giorgionesque equilateral triangle. This great altar-piece was painted three years after Giorgione's death, and no more splendid testimonial to the young painter's genius could be found than in the forced homage thus paid to his memory by the octogenarian Giambellini.[^[145]]