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.
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