Italian 1476-1510 Giorgione Galleries For his home town of Castelfranco, Giorgione painted the Castelfranco Madonna, an altarpiece in sacra conversazione form ?? Madonna enthroned, with saints on either side forming an equilateral triangle. This gave the landscape background an importance which marks an innovation in Venetian art, and was quickly followed by his master Giovanni Bellini and others.Giorgione began to use the very refined chiaroscuro called sfumato ?? the delicate use of shades of color to depict light and perspective ?? around the same time as Leonardo. Whether Vasari is correct in saying he learnt it from Leonardo's works is unclear ?? he is always keen to ascribe all advances to Florentine sources. Leonardo's delicate color modulations result from the tiny disconnected spots of paint that he probably derived from manuscript illumination techniques and first brought into oil painting. These gave Giorgione's works the magical glow of light for which they are celebrated. Most entirely central and typical of all Giorgione's extant works is the Sleeping Venus now in Dresden, first recognized by Morelli, and now universally accepted, as being the same as the picture seen by Michiel and later by Ridolfi (his 17th century biographer) in the Casa Marcello at Venice. An exquisitely pure and severe rhythm of line and contour chastens the sensuous richness of the presentment: the sweep of white drapery on which the goddess lies, and of glowing landscape that fills the space behind her, most harmoniously frame her divinity. The use of an external landscape to frame a nude is innovative; but in addition, to add to her mystery, she is shrouded in sleep, spirited away from accessibility to her conscious expression. It is recorded by Michiel that Giorgione left this piece unfinished and that the landscape, with a Cupid which subsequent restoration has removed, were completed after his death by Titian. The picture is the prototype of Titian's own Venus of Urbino and of many more by other painters of the school; but none of them attained the fame of the first exemplar. The same concept of idealized beauty is evoked in a virginally pensive Judith from the Hermitage Museum, a large painting which exhibits Giorgione's special qualities of color richness and landscape romance, while demonstrating that life and death are each other's companions rather than foes. Apart from the altarpiece and the frescoes, all Giorgione's surviving works are small paintings designed for the wealthy Venetian collector to keep in his home; most are under two foot (60 cm) in either dimension. This market had been emerging over the last half of the fifteenth century in Italy, and was much better established in the Netherlands, but Giorgione was the first major Italian painter to concentrate his work on it to such an extent ?? indeed soon after his death the size of such paintings began to increase with the prosperity and palaces of the patrons.  Related Paintings of Giorgione :. | Castelfranco Veneto | The Budapest Portrait of a Young Man | The Tempest | Adoration of the Magi | The Berlin Portrait of a Man |
Related Artists:
RAEBURN, Sir Henry
Scottish Romantic Painter, 1756-1823 Scottish painter. He is perhaps the best known of all Scottish painters, with a critical reputation rivalling that of Allan Ramsay. He was almost exclusively a portrait painter, and his work did much to define Scottish society in a period of immense vigour and intellectual distinction. The demand for his work was sufficient to sustain a career wholly in Scotland, although he occasionally regretted his lack of first-hand knowledge of portrait painting in London. His working life, which was largely confined to Edinburgh
Jean Decourt
Jean de Court, an enamel painter of Limoges, succeeded François Clouet as painter to the king in 1572, and was in turn succeeded by his son, Charles de Court, in 1584 or 1589. Jean de Court painted in 1574 a portrait of Henry III, then Duke of Anjou.
Simon de Vos
Simon de Vos (Antwerp, 20 October 1603-15 October 1676, Antwerp) was a Flemish Baroque painter of genre and cabinet pictures. De Vos studied with Cornelis de Vos (1603-76), to whom he is not related, from 1615 until 1620. In 1620 he joined Antwerp's guild of St. Luke, and then he probably travelled to Rome where he came under the influence of the "low-life" genre paintings of the Bentvueghels and the bambocciate. A Caravaggesque influence, by way of the German painter Johann Liss active in Italy during the 1620s is discernible in De Vos's paintings from this time on. In contrast to the earlier "low-life" paintings, works from the late 1620s until around 1640, which were made after returning to Antwerp, are mostly small "merry company" and courtly genre scenes reminiscent of contemporary Dutch painters Dirck Hals and Pieter Codde. After 1640, De Vos turned away from genre scenes altogether and painted mostly small cabinet paintings of history subjects, influenced stylistically at first by Peter Paul Rubens and then increasingly by Anthony van Dyck. Examples include The Beheading of St. Paul (1648) in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp. He married Catharina van Utrecht, the sister of Adriaen van Utrecht, in 1628.