On 7 February 1506, Albrecht Dürer wrote home to his good friend Willibald Pirckheimer in Nuremberg. The great artist was having a mixed time in Venice: on the one hand, as Dürer explained, he was making lots of delightful new acquaintances, among them ‘good lute-players’ and also ‘connoisseurs in painting, men of much noble sentiment and honest virtue’. However, there was also a very different type lurking in the early 16th-century Serenissima: ‘the most faithless, lying, thievish rascals such as I scarcely believed could exist on earth’.
Dürer hints that among these latter were painters, perhaps including some whose works will be seen in a forthcoming exhibition at the Royal Academy, In the Age of Giorgione. Conceivably one who got on the wrong side of Dürer was the shadowy genius himself, Giorgione of Castelfranco.
Of the great masters of the early 16th century, Giorgione (c.1477/8–1510) is by some way the most elusive. Unfortunately, he did not write home to Castelfranco — a fine fortified town in the Veneto — or if he did no correspondence exists. Indeed, not much survives at all, either in the way of evidence or of art. He died young, probably in his early thirties and of the plague. Giorgio Vasari, author of the great Lives of the Artists, tells us that he ‘took unceasing delight in the joys of love’, which is plausible enough given the amorously poetic mood of some pictures by — or attributed to — him, and his development of a new sort of nude.
Apparently, it was Giorgione, whose name just means ‘big George’, who first combined the anatomy of a classical marble Venus with the delicately fleshly sensuality made possible by the oil medium (especially practised in the softer-focused fashion he may also have pioneered).
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