catalogues under the name of Giorgio Barbarelli or Barbarella. This tradition has, however, on close examination been proved baseless. On the other hand mention has been found in a contemporary document of an earlier Zorzon, a native of Vedelago, living in Castelfranco in 1460. Vasari, who wrote before the Barbarella legend had sprung up, says that Giorgione was of very humble origin. It seems probable that he was simply the son or grandson of the afore-mentioned Zorzon the elder; that the after-claim of the Barbarelli to kindred with him was a mere piece of family vanity, very likely suggested by the analogous case of Leonardo da Vinci; and that, this claim once put abroad, the peasant-mother of Vedelago was invented on the ground of some dim knowledge that his real progenitors came from that village.
Of the facts of his life we are almost as meagrely informed as of the circumstances of his birth. The little city, or large fortified village, for it is scarcely more, of Castelfranco in the Trevisan stands in the midst of a rich and broken plain at some distance from the last spurs of the Venetian Alps. From the natural surroundings of Giorgione’s childhood was no doubt derived his ideal of pastoral scenery, the country of pleasant copses, glades, brooks and hills amid which his personages love to wander or recline with lute and pipe. How early in boyhood he went to Venice we do not know, but internal evidence supports the statement of Ridolfi that he served his apprenticeship there under Giovanni Bellini; and there he made his fame and had his home. That his gifts were early recognized we know from the facts, recorded in contemporary documents, that in 1500, when he was only twenty-three (that is if Vasari gives rightly the age at which he died), he was chosen to paint portraits of the Doge Agostino Barberigo and the condottiere Consalvo Ferrante; that in 1504 he was commissioned to paint an altarpiece in memory of Matteo Costanzo in the cathedral of his native town, Castelfranco; that in 1507 he received at the order of the Council of Ten part payment for a picture (subject not mentioned) on which he was engaged for the Hall of the Audience in the ducal palace; and that in 1507–1508 he was employed, with other artists of his own generation, to decorate with frescoes the exterior of the newly rebuilt Fondaco dei Tedeschi or German merchants’ hall at Venice, having already done similar work on the exterior of the Casa Soranzo, the Casa Grimani alii Servi and other Venetian palaces. Vasari gives also as an important event in Giorgione’s life, and one which had influence on his work, his meeting with Leonardo da Vinci on the occasion of the Tuscan master’s visit to Venice in 1500. In September or October 1510 he died of the plague then raging in the city, and within a few days of his death we find the great art-patroness and amateur, Isabella d’Este, writing from Mantua and trying in vain to secure for her collection a night-piece by his hand of which the fame had reached her.
All accounts agree in representing Giorgione as a personage of distinguished and romantic charm, a great lover, a great musician, made to enjoy in life and to express in art to the uttermost the delight, the splendour, the sensuous and imaginative grace and fulness, not untinged with poetic melancholy, of the Venetian existence of his time. They represent him further as having made in Venetian painting an advance analogous to that made in Tuscan painting by Leonardo more than twenty years before; that is as having released the art from the last shackles of archaic rigidity and placed it in possession of full freedom and the full mastery of its means. He also introduced a new range of subjects. Besides altarpieces and portraits he painted pictures that told no story, whether biblical or classical, or if they professed to tell such, neglected the action and simply embodied in form and colour moods of lyrical or romantic feeling, much as a musician might embody them in sounds. Innovating with the courage and felicity of genius, he had for a time an overwhelming influence on his contemporaries and immediate successors in the Venetian school, including Titian, Sebastian del Piombo, the elder Palma, Cariani and the two Campagnolas, and not a little even on seniors of long-standing fame such as Giovanni Bellini. His name and work have exercised, and continue to exercise, no less a spell on posterity. But to identify and define, among the relics of his age and school, precisely what that work is, and to distinguish it from the kindred work of other men whom his influence inspired, is a very difficult matter. There are inclusive critics who still claim for Giorgione nearly every painting of the time that at all resembles his manner, and there are exclusive critics who pare down to some ten or a dozen the list of extant pictures which they will admit to be actually his.
To name first those which are either certain or command the most general acceptance, placing them in something like an approximate and probable order of date. In the Uffizi at Florence are two companion pieces of the “Trial of Moses” and the “Judgment of Solomon,” the latter the finer and better preserved of the two, which pass, no doubt justly, as typical works of Giorgione’s youth, and exhibit, though not yet ripely, his special qualities of colour-richness and landscape romance, the peculiar facial types of his predilection, with the pure form of forehead, fine oval of cheek, and somewhat close-set eyes and eyebrows, and the intensity of that still and brooding sentiment with which, rather than with dramatic life and movement, he instinctively invests his figures. Probably the earliest of the portraits by common consent called his is the beautiful one of a young man at Berlin. His earliest devotional picture would seem to be the highly finished “Christ bearing his Cross” (the head and shoulders only, with a peculiarly serene and high-bred cast of features) formerly at Vicenza and now in the collection of Mrs Gardner at Boston. Other versions of this picture exist, and it has been claimed that one in private possession at Vienna is the true original: erroneously in the judgment of the present writer. Another “Christ bearing the Cross,” with a Jew dragging at the rope round his neck, in the church of San Rocco at Venice, is a ruined but genuine work, quoted by Vasari and Ridolfi, and copied with the name of Giorgione appended, by Van Dyck in that master’s Chatsworth sketch-book. (Vasari gives it to Giorgione in his first and to Titian in his second edition.) The composition of a lost early picture of the birth of Paris is preserved in an engraving of the “Teniers Gallery” series, and an old copy of part of the same picture is at Budapest. In the Giovanelli Palace at Venice is that fascinating and enigmatical mythology or allegory, known to the Anonimo Morelliano, who saw it in 1530 in the house of Gabriel Vendramin, simply as “the small landscape with the storm, the gipsy woman and the soldier”; the picture is conjecturally interpreted by modern authorities as illustrating a passage in Statius which describes the meeting of Adrastus with Hypsipyle when she was serving as nurse with the king of Nemea. Still belonging to the earlier part of the painter’s brief career is a beautiful, virginally pensive Judith at St Petersburg, which passed under various alien names, as Raphael, Moretto, &c., until its kindred with the unquestioned work of Giorgione was in late years firmly established. The great Castelfranco altarpiece, still, in spite of many restorations, one of the most classically pure and radiantly impressive works of Renaissance painting, may be taken as closing the earlier phase of the young master’s work (1504). It shows the Virgin loftily enthroned on a plain, sparely draped stone structure with St Francis and a warrior saint (St Liberale) standing in attitudes of great simplicity on either side of the foot of the throne, a high parapet behind them, and a beautiful landscape of the master’s usual type seen above it. Nearly akin to this masterpiece, not in shape or composition but by the type of the Virgin and the very Bellinesque St Francis, is the altarpiece of the Madonna with St Francis and St Roch at Madrid. Of the master’s fully ripened time is the fine and again enigmatical picture formerly in the house of Taddeo Contarini at Venice, described by contemporary witnesses as the “Three Philosophers,” and now, on slender enough grounds, supposed to represent Evander showing Aeneas the site of Troy as narrated in the eighth Aeneid. The portrait of a knight of Malta in the Uffizi at Florence has more power and authority, if less sentiment, than the earlier example at Berlin, and may be taken to be of the
