Giorgione's sunset
Il Tramonto or The Sunset is one of the few paintings attributed to Giorgione although it is not exempt of controversy and theories supporting alternative authorships.
The controversy of the painting begins with its rediscovery in 1933 where it was found completely neglected in the basement of a Venetian villa and bought by a private collector. In a ruinous state, the more legible areas were the foreground with the male figures and the background in general, presenting severe loses in the rest of the canvas. Diverse restorations have been carried out since then, reconstructing the loses areas although at times too imaginatively. Nowadays, both the monsters in the pond -except the beaky creature- and the knight with the dragon are considered restorer’s additions. The bearded old man inside a cave in the right side of the scene, however, is not completely clear to be an addition but has been retouched.
All this makes very difficult the interpretation of the subject matter. Moreover, Giorgione is an artist known for the originality of his scenes and the puzzlement his works produced on the viewer, even on scholars and experts. Giorgione’s most famous paintings such as The tempest (c. 1506-8) and the Three Philosophers (c.1505-9) present similar problems. The most accepted interpretation identifies the two figures in the foreground as Saint Roch being cured by Saint Gothardus, while the monsters are allegories of plague or decease. The knight is identified with Saint George killing the dragon and the eremite as Saint Anthony Abbot. The painting would serve as an offering for the overcoming of one of the numerous outbreaks of plague occurred in Venice during these decades. Leaving the restorer’s additions, the other interpretation is a mythological one, with the young figure in blue clothes identified as the Greek hero Philoctetes being assisted due to a viper’s bite. In both cases, the interpretations pose incongruencies that cannot be resolved. In the light of this, the most reasonable interpretation considers the two main figures as two shepherds or pilgrims resting in their trip although the beaky monster would remain without a clear explanation.
What it is undoubtedly clear is the conceptual change of Il Tramonto in comparison to the Saint Francis in the desert (c. 1476-78) by Giovanni Bellini, also included in this virtual exhibition. Whereas in Bellini’s painting the landscape is an innovative significant element, here the figures had been reduced in size, bestowing to the landscape a significant role. The stories told by the figures loses importance and what it has been the unquestionable purpose of the painting across the entire fifteenth century, the story, becomes now secondary or complementary to the landscape.
The ongoing dusk along with the new oil technique of sfumato which blurs the contours, create a kind of ‘mood’ permeate the entire scene. Alike to Bellini’s painting which transmits a ‘religious mood’ for meditations on the saint’s life and God’s creations, Il Tramonto has a subtler or less clear purpose, allowing to unleash the viewer’s imagination. The sun or beams of light are no longer a manifestation of the divine, but a poetic element and the blurred forms produce an atmosphere closer to a dream or a memory.
GIORGIONE
Giorgio or Zorzo Barbarelli da Castefranco called Giorgione (ca. 1482-1510) is one of the main figures in the Venetian painting of the Renaissance and a central artist who leaded to the denominated High Renaissance style. Very little is known with certainty about him and even the Florentine painter and art theorist Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) who published Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori in 1550 had very little idea about the personal life of Giorgione.
He was likely born in 1478 in the small town of Castelfranco in North Italy and spent his youth in Venice. According to Vasari, Giorgione had -like many other artists in that age- a great dexterity in drawing but also in singing and playing musical instruments, specially the lute. He most likely was apprenticed to Giovanni Bellini (1433-1516), the most important local artist of the city. There he would learn the principles of painting and the innovations bring for Giovanni in landscape. Vasari strongly stressed the fact of the young Giorgione seeing some works by hand of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), who spent part of the year 1500 in the city.
It seems that since the first years of Giorgione as an independent painter he was not lacking commissions of religious nature at the beginning and later also as a painter for the wealthy classes of the Venice. Nevertheless, his most important commission was the redecoration of one of the façades Fondaco dei Tedeschi on the Grand Canal, destroyed in 1505 by a fire. Vasari tells us that Giorgione preferred to rely on his own imagination (fantasia) instead of on a popular or conventionalist iconology. Although only few decades after Giorgione painted it, Vasari already acknowledges that he could not interpret the cycle represented as well as any other whom he asked about. Scarce material evidence came down to us nowadays to be able to interpret it. This element already developed by his master Giovanni Bellini, was taken further to compete in importance with the figures within it. As examples of this new conception of landscape can be mentioned Il Tramonto or The Sunset at the National Gallery of London, selected for this virtual exhibition; The sleeping Venus (c. 1510) from the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden; and perhaps Giorgione’s most popular painting, The tempest (c. 1508) held at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, among others.
Ironically, the most documented moment of Giorgione’s life is his death. The only contemporary document regarding to him is a letter addressed to the Mantuan Duchess Isabella d’Este (1474-1549) by one of her agents travelling through the peninsula. In reply to her wishes of getting a painting by hand of Giorgione, the agent communicates the Duchess that the artist recently passed away victim of the last outbreak of the plague in the city in 1510.
Nevertheless, in his short life and even shorter artistic activity, Giorgione was -and he is still- considered one of the most innovative artists who paved the way to the denominated High Renaissance style with diverse followers such as the young Titian, Domenico Campagnola or Sebastiano del Piombo.
