Volume 38, Number 4 · February 14, 1991
Storm over the Storm
By Charles Hope
Giorgione's 'Tempest': Interpreting the Hidden Subject
by Salvatore Settis, translated by Ellen Bianchini
University of Chicago Press, 189 pp., $29.95
One of the best sellers of Renaissance Europe was Baldassare Castiglione's Book of the Courtier. This manual of social conduct, first published in 1528 but written some years earlier, was in the form of an imaginary conversation set at the court of Urbino in 1507. In a discussion about literary style near the beginning of the book one of the speakers proposed an analogy with painting. 'Consider that in the field of painting Leonardo da Vinci, Mantegna, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Giorgio da Castelfranco are outstanding,' he said. 'None the less they all have different methods of working, and it is well known that each of them has a style that lacks nothing, because one can see that each is altogether perfect in his own way.' While we are well informed about the other four artists, we know almost nothing about Giorgio da Castelfranco, or Giorgione (big George), as he is called in later texts. Documents tell us that he painted a canvas of an unspecified subject for the Doge's Palace in 1507–1508, that in 1508 he painted some frescoes on the outside of the German warehouse in Venice, of which one very damaged fragment survives, and that in the autumn of 1510 he died of plague. Shortly afterward Isabella d'Este, the marchioness of Mantua, tried to acquire 'a painting of a night scene, very beautiful and unusual,' which she wrongly thought was still in his studio. It turned out that two Venetians owned works of this type, but neither was prepared to sell.
Review, 3453 words
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