Giorgione

Giorgione was a Venetian painter who was born at Castelfranco, some fifty kilometers from Venice, in 1473/74. His life ended tragically at the age of 36 on 17 September 1510, when he died of the plague. In contemporary documents his name is given in Venetian dialect as Zorzi da Castelfranco (George from Castelfranco), or as Zorzon (Big George), in recognition of the celebrity he enjoyed during his lifetime. Baldassare Castiglione, in his “Book of the Courtier,” in 1516, recognized Giorgione as one of the greatest artists of his age, along with Leonardo da Vinci, Mantegna, Raphael, and Michelangelo. In 1548 the Venetian theorist Paolo Pino defined Giorgione as the painter of poetic brevity, as the inventor of new Venetian mode of creation. In 1550, in his Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari endorsed this assessment and placed Giorgione as the artist who introduced the modern style of the High Renaissance to Venice. With the notable exception of some significant frescoes, only a few of which survive, and some devotional images, such as the important altarpiece in his birthplace, the Castelfranco Altarpiece, Giorgione is celebrated for creating cabinet paintings, such as The Tempest, The Three Philosophers, and the Dresden Sleeping Venus, for private patrons, which have proved to be more complex to interpret than many other works by Renaissance artists. It has also proven challenging to establish a corpus of works that may be securely attributed to him. In recent decades the scientific examination of paintings has provided new data about underdrawing, as well as the use of pigments, which may be revealing in defining new characteristics for attribution. The scientific analysis of underdrawing reveals many pentimenti or changes of mind when Giorgione was working out his compositions on canvas, adding additional complexity to iconographic explanations. Given these difficulties of interpretation and attribution, Giorgione has often been considered a mysterious and impossible artist to define. Following the article Anderson, et al. 2019 (cited under Earliest Sources: Documents), the bookends of Giorgione’s life are now known, unlike those for his mentor Giovani Bellini and his pupil Titian. There is a huge investment in the scholarship of Giorgione’s work, both emotional and intellectual, so that any discovery or interpretation related to him arouses passionate argument. The evidence is so thin and contested that anything new—especially of this significance—is immediately seized upon and pored over, as has occurred in the following case. A copy of Dante’s Commedia (Divine Comedy), printed in 1497, in the library of the University of Sydney contains a previously unpublished inscription giving Giorgione’s age at his death. The accompanying drawing in red chalk reveals Giorgione’s engagement with the intricate text of Dante’s Commedia, a discovery that opens up a new understanding for the complexity of Giorgione’s interpretation of religious subject matter. The discovery is a fitting beginning to a new evaluation of this extraordinary period in Venetian art.

Chaucer as Image-Maker

Chaucer chose to explore the power of images in the contested framework of medieval pilgrimage. In acknowledging the variety and multiplicity of holy objects and images at the centre of pilgrimage controversy, he deliberately entered a debate that ranged from approval of images as books for the laity to the necessary destruction of idols. His dramatic representation of religious images as objects of devotion as well as their problematic reception is informed by a traditional code of image response learned early in life in the parish. Representing image creation, devotion, and reception within the context of individual tales, Chaucer demonstrates that devotional images, like any other image, are inherently polymorphous and regenerative, as essential to cultic religion as to poetry in stimulating the power of imagination and memorial recollection; whether the feelings of devotion they stimulate are holy, however, is an issue he leaves for his reader to contemplate.

‘Make Your House like a Temple’: Gender, Space and Domestic Devotion in Medieval Florence

This article will discuss domestic devotions by framing them in terms of devotions carried out in the home, defined by its opposition to ecclesiastical, consecrated space. It will examine how women, considered the laity par excellence through their inability to ever attain sacerdotal authority, were advised spiritually by mendicant friars on how to lead a Christian life according to their status as wives, widows or virgins. It will look at the devotional literature that was widespread in mercantile homes and the devotional images designed to move the soul. This discussion will attempt to show the tensions between ecclesiastical and domestic spaces; between the clergy and the laity, and between the corporeal and spiritual worlds of late medieval devotion. It will argue that, despite clerical unease with the female and domestic space, the importance accorded to female piety by the mendicant orders at the close of the Middle Ages was such that women were entrusted with key educational roles in the family, even leading to the astonishing affirmation of them as ‘preachers’ within the borders of their households.

The Calm Centre

Chapter 2 opens the second section of the book, where the painting and its place in Leonardo’s body of work is considered. This chapter, on Leonardo and the ineffable, considers the way that he evoked the spiritual in his paintings, above all in his images of Christ. This stands in opposition to the image of Leonardo as a heretic, first suggested in the 1550 version of his Life by Giorgio Vasari. The documentation of Leonardo’s career and his last testament indicate that his Christianity was of a traditional kind. His library featured bibles and other standard religious texts. His statements indicate that the nature of the divine was not directly knowable, but manifested itself through the works created by God. In Leonardo’s devotional images and religious narratives, Christ and the Virgin act as calm centres expressing the elevated essence of supreme divinity. The Salvator Mundi and the late St John the Baptist are the most developed expressions of the otherness of the divine being, who knows secrets inaccessible to us.

Mary and Inculturation in Mexico and India

In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexico and India, the task of evangelization was in the hands of the missionaries, who mostly venerated the ‘Immaculate Virgin’. This Marianism is linked to the Counter-Reformation spirit in Europe and especially in the Iberian Peninsula. However, goddess cults were already a central part of pre-Hispanic and Indian religions. This chapter explores how European missionaries responded to the popularity of the goddesses in the new colonized lands (Mexico and India) and how Mary’s image was carefully shaped according to what they encountered in the conquered lands. It asks how similar or different were the symbols used to represent the idea of a female divine in Catholic and natives’ religions. This analysis will be based on an examination of colonial writings and devotional images in both Mexico and India.

Masterpieces, Altarpieces, and Devotional Prints: Close and Distant Encounters with Michelangelo’s Vatican Pietà

Focussing on the response to the Vatican Pietà and perversely using as a point of departure a 1549 remark on Michelangelo as an ‘inventor of filth,’ this article aims to present Michelangelo as an involuntary inventor of devotional images. The article explores hitherto unconsidered aspects of the reception of the Vatican Pietà from the mid-sixteenth into the early seventeenth century. The material includes mediocre anonymous woodcuts, and elaborate engravings and etchings by renowned masters: Giulio Bonasone, Cornelis Cort, Jacques Callot and Lucas Kilian. A complex chain of relationships is traced among various works, some referring directly to the Vatican Pietà, some indirectly, neither designed nor perceived as its reproductions, but conceived as illustrations of the Syriac translation of the New Testament, of Latin and German editions of Peter Canisius’s Little catechism, of the frontispiece of the Règlement et établissement de la Compagnie des Pénitents blancs de la Ville de Nancy—but above all, widespread as single-leaf popular devotional images.

Performance and the parish: space, memory, and material devotion

Individual women employed performance in parish settings, as well; in Metz, such practices permitted female performers to “write” fresh meanings upon the histories of existing bodies, objects, and spaces. Catherine Gronnaix made sizable foundations at her parish church of St-Martin and at a nearby Celestine monastery; together, these formed an integrated program of liturgy that represented Catherine in the context of personal, family, and public memory. The resulting performances mapped social and spatial geographies onto the buildings and streets of Metz in ways that connected the various family identities that Catherine could claim. Confraternal devotion and material culture also played equally vibrant roles in the parish performances of women, however. Catherine participated in two religious associations at St-Martin and founded masses to be celebrated in their chapels. This chapter brings together these collective practices with the surviving late-medieval elements of the church: sculpture, murals, and windows. Building on recent work that positions devotional images as active objects within performance, it traces the impact of female “matter” and personal practice upon a shared sphere. At St-Martin, bodily performance situated women within privileged places and integrated them into a larger environment of memory, while distinguishing individuals through social and devotional hierarchies.

Prayer, Meditation, and Retreat

A penchant for retreat permeates baroque devotion. Prayer is key, and withdrawal from the world corroborates sincere prayer. Some believers retreat to the cloister for an existence of permanent absorption, but believers are generally enjoined to retreat for a few days annually to follow a devotional program, or for moments of prayer across the day. While verbal prayer is seen as a basic expression of devotion, mental prayer is generally deemed more efficacious, demanding as it does the believer’s full attention. Chapels, chambers, and gardens are privileged sites of devout absorption; prayer books, rosaries, and devotional images sustain the inward turn; manuals teach the practice; and written and drawn portraits show those who master it. This chapter presents the ideal of devotional retreat in prayer as well as some of its spatial, spiritual, corporeal, and material corollaries.