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| Giorgione La Tempesta ca. 1505 oil on canvas Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice |
Enigmas
Giorgione falls into the group of painters about whom little is known. The great Renaissance art historian Giorgio Vasari testifies to the widespread fame of the artist in his own day, yet only one picture can now be attributed with documentary certainty – an altarpiece created for a church in the village of Castelfranco, where Giorgione was born. All the rest of his œuvre has required patient reconstruction. There continue to be endless debates over these paintings.
Some artists have themselves kept records of their output, which forestalls many problems – though without altogether eliminating doubts. Scholars can frequently uncover contemporary records, which provide a reasonable level of confidence. In certain cases, reliable bodies of authorities have been established to determine the attribution of works to such and such a painter. Following this model, the Rembrandt society has denied autograph status to numbers of highly celebrated and genuinely glorious canvases, sometimes succeeding in assigning them instead to specific assistants or contemporaries. We think, for example, of the famous Man with a Golden Helmet in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, no longer attributed to Rembrandt, though in this case no other name has been accepted either.
The catalogue of works by Giorgione amounts to about twenty works distributed among various museums. The Pastoral Concert, one of the Louvre's recognized treasures, formerly credited to his hand, is now by some given to Titian, by others to Giovanni Bellini.
Iconography
Art historians are agreed concerning the authenticity of La Tempesta, which some prefer to call The Storm, since this is at best a mild tempest, with significant contrasts in the lighting. One detail sometimes interpreted as a lightning bolt may be no such thing; it may instead be a highlight along the edge of a cloud.
There is no agreement on deciphering the source of this picture. One of the advances made in the study of art history during the previous century was the new focus on "iconography" – a discipline which consists of discovering by means of emblems or attributes the identities of the characters or saints represented by the painter, and more specifically discovering the text or passage illustrated by the work. According to the opening of the Book of John, "in the beginning was the word." In Christianity the text is supreme; images are subordinate.
Iconography is based fundamentally on the Bible, but as artistic practice develops in the Renaissance there is increasing reliance on the literature of Antiquity, extending to that of contemporary Italy, particularly the works of Boccaccio, Ariosto, and Tasso.
Up to the present, research has not revealed a credible literary source for La Tempesta.
Conjunctions
We are offered a landscape set in the Italian countryside, with lovely trees on the outskirts of a town beneath a troubled sky. Elements of antique architecture appear at left – two unequal columns issuing from a rectangular base, a symbolic ruin – to the right, a rustic building, with an unfinished or partly destroyed roof; in the background, a wooden bridge without railings that crosses a river. The setting thus seems to suggest a genre picture.
Three protagonists are visible. At left a male figure, leaning on a large rod, perhaps a shepherd's staff, though he is dressed much too elegantly for that role. Could this man be a noble or prince disguised as a shepherd? He is in any case a handsome fellow, tenderly gazing at the undressed woman nursing a baby. She is shielded by a white cape thrown around her shoulders and is seated on a cloth, perhaps the garment she has removed. The atmosphere certainly suggests a narrative. Eventually someone is bound to discover a written source, quite possibly by digging through the full range of then-available allegories and alchemical emblems.
– translated and adapted from Le Musée imaginaire de Michel Butor: 105 œuvres décisives de la peinture occidentale (Paris: Flammarion, 2019)