Repeat prescription

Walter Sickert was once shown a room full of paintings by a proud collector, who had purchased them on the understanding that they were authentic Sickerts. The painter took one look around, then announced genially, none of these are mine, ‘But none the worse for that!’ Were Giorgione to return to life, and take a stroll around the Sackler Galleries at the Royal Academy, he might echo those words.

Few of the works on show, in all probability, were actually executed by Giorgione, but they are none the less magnificent for that. This is — wisely — not an exhibition that attempts to reassemble the artistic personality of that enigmatic figure (there have been quite a few of those over the years). It is concerned with a moment, one of the most fascinating in Western art.

Multiple influences came together in Venice in the first decade of the 16th century — those of Leonardo and Albrecht Dürer, both of whom briefly passed through La Serenissima, of classical antiquity and of the local maestro Giovanni Bellini.