(b Castelfranco Veneto, ?1477–8; d Venice, before 7 Nov
1510).
Italian painter. He is generally and justifiably regarded as the founder
of Venetian painting of the 16th century. Within a brief career of no
more than 15 years he created a radically innovative style based on a
novel pictorial technique, which provided the starting-point for the art
of Titian, the dominant personality of the 16th century in Venice.
Although he apparently enjoyed a certain fame as a painter of external
frescoes, Giorgione specialized above all in relatively small-scale
pictures, painted for private use in the home. A high proportion of his
subjects were drawn from, or inspired by, mythology and secular
literature. Landscape played an important role in many of his
compositions, and particular attention was often paid to the
representation of storms, sunsets and other such natural phenomena.
Giorgione was evidently also prized as a painter of portraits, many of
them ‘fancy’ portraits, or views in close-up of the kind of poetic or
mythological figure also seen in his narratives. His exploitation of a
taste for such works within a circle of aesthetically sophisticated
Venetian patricians in turn provided the context for the creation of an
entirely novel range of pictorial images.
Portrait of a Young Man
Wood, 69,4 x 53,5 cm
Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Madonna and Child Enthroned between St Francis and St
Liberalis
c. 1505
Oil on wood, 200 x 152 cm
Duomo, Castelfranco Veneto
Adoration of the Magi
Oil on canvas
National Gallery, London
Madonna with the Child, St Anthony of Padua and St Roch
Oil on canvas, 92 x 133 cm
Museo del Prado, Madrid
Adoration of the Shepherds
1505-10
Oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington
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