Part One

It was in Blog#57 that I wrote about toasting myself in Italy beneath the Chernobyl sun, and how by rights I probably should have died by frying ages ago. However, in the week before playing this game of sunshine Russian (now Ukrainian) roulette, I stayed with my then-girlfriend in the city of dreams, Venice.

One day the weather finally turned sunny and warm. We caught the train and headed to the little-known town some fifty minutes north of Venice called Castelfranco. It is indeed little known, off the tourist track. But if it is known for anything, it is as the birthplace of the Renaissance artist Giorgione.

On my bookshelf at home I have a companion volume to 'The Complete Works of Caravaggio', which featured in the most recent blog. Sitting next to the Caravaggio, there it is: 'L'Opera Completa di Giorgione.' Whether an English-language edition exists nowadays I do not know. But at the time of my purchase, mid-1980s I guess, it was Italian or nothing. 

If details of the life and times of Caravaggio are somewhat sparse, those of Giorgione are far more so. Everything about him is mysterious. Despite being considered one of the most influential artists of the Italian Renaissance, Giorgione is regarded consensually by the 'experts' as the definite author of only a small handful of paintings. The rest are 'often' or 'sometimes' attributed. And this may be one of the mysteries: why is an artist of whom so little is known, and who painted so few paintings for sure, so influential?

Part Two

It was late morning by the time the train pulled in at Castelfranco station. The small town proved to be simultaneously peaceful and lively. A sense of well-being pervaded the atmosphere of its main street. It was springtime, and everywhere was in full yet mellow bloom. All seemed well with the world.  

First stop was the 'Casa Giorgione', 'the House of Giorgione'. It is reckoned by some to be the actual birthplace of the artist, and nowadays functions as a museum. It also houses the earliest-known works by the artist.

It was commotion on the ground floor when we arrived: an exhibition on local history or something was taking place there, and half the kids in Castelfranco were having a great time on their morning out of school. We made our way rapidly upstairs, and eventually found what we were looking for. A long, almost bare, room, with a frieze part-way round the ceiling. On this were the young Giorgione's depictions of a bizarre mixture of, well, stuff and things. Sun and moon; sun and moon in eclipse; musical instruments; helmets and geometrical symbols. You get the idea. 'The liberal and mechanical arts' is what the books will tell you. What it was all really about, I had no idea..... 

The thing, however is this. What you get if you gaze into a work of Giorgione, whatever it is - portrait, landscape, strange images round the top of a room - is stillness, silence. I do, anyway. It is unique and a little bizarre.

The better-known work by Giorgione in Castelfranco is an altarpiece. It is located in the Church of San Liberale, which we were unable to find, until it turned out that this church is also the Duomo - cathedral -, which we had walked past a dozen times already in our fruitless pursuit.

The main door was locked, but we discovered a side door, and inside a man doing the vacuum-cleaning. He stopped and amicably showed us to the painting. It was not possible to get close, as metal bars had been erected at a distance, as a safety measure, I suppose. No mind. It is more typically 'Giorgionesque'. A dream-like landscape behind, with figures in the foreground. It is there in some of Giorgione's paintings: the people seem to be gazing into.... nowhere. But they are not blankety-blank mindless robots. It's more that they are not here. They are somewhere, but not here; they are off, somewhere else. Children of the dream; or of a dream. Or in a dream, not of their own making. 

And the other quality that became apparent was that the figures, rich in colour, seem to glow. They glow from inside. A light of sorts comes through, but it's not a light as normally conceived. Warm, soft, vital and ethereal at the same time.

Part Three

Plenty is written about Giorgione and the 'Giorgionesque'. What it is and what it isn't. All those words are, sometimes by self-admission, of little help. Indeed, words are, in the final analysis, limited. There are dimensions to existence which they are unable to fathom. But some of the words you will find if you read about Giorgione include these: mystery, dreamlike, contemplative, stillness, atmospheric, poetic, lyrical, magical, enigmatic, mysterious, mysterious, mysterious.

When I first took to looking at paintings from the Italian Renaissance, it was the Florentines who appealed. There are plenty of them: Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Raphael, Michelangelo are among the best-known. Take a stroll on a Sunday afternoon down to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, London, as I used to do, and hang out with Botticelli's Nativity. It's ethereal; it takes you up, up, up. Primed by the hours of meditation I was doing at the time, I was prepared for slipping into higher states of consciousness, courtesy of Botticelli's angels. In truth, it was often more effective than the formal meditation practices themselves.

The Venetians, by contrast, - Giorgione, Titian, Veronese - were sensuous, indulgent, decadent. But as time passed so did my feelings change. The more idealised paintings from Florence began to seem stiff, stilted, too formalised. Titian and Giorgione were more free, spontaneous, rich and colourful. Like the Giorgione altarpiece, they would glow. 

Back in those heady days of the 1980s, there would be free lunchtime lectures at the National Gallery on some of the art and the paintings. I learnt a lot from them. Among the lecturers was one Colin Wiggins, and he once explained so simply and elegantly the main differences between Florentine and Venetian Renaissance art.

Florentine art was a case of drawing first, then colouring in the outlines. Whereas Venetian painters tended to dispense with the drawing, and would just paint. The results would be very different. I realised that this was why Venetian painting might generate a greater sense of wholeness: it was whole. People, landscapes, foreground, background: all were created from the same matter, the same medium. While Florentine art was more like cut-out characters stuck onto a background.

I've looked at precious little art for many many years, but may be experiencing a mini-revival. If pressed, I would say that Giorgione and the early works of Titian (which are almost indistinguishable, to the point where certain people who deem it to be a worthwhile use of their time on Earth, spend inordinate hours debating the authorship of various pieces of art) remain my number one.  

"(Giorgione) appears rather as a myth than as a man. No poet's destiny compares to his on Earth. Everything, or almost everything, is unknown about him, and some go so far as to deny his existence. His name is not written in any work, and some do not acknowledge any certain work to him." Gabriele D'Annunzio, 1928.

Giorgione died sometime in his thirties of the plague.   

Images: Tempest, Giorgione's best-known work; Bits from the Giorgione frieze, Casa Giorgione; Giorgione Altarpiece, Castelfranco; Madonna, Florentine style - Botticelli; Madonna, Venetian style - Titian.