In the Age of Giorgione, not really a review.




Portrait of a Man : Giorgione
 

I recently went to the exhibition at the Royal Academy entitled "In the Age of Giorgione" which was a lovely little exhibition but although this piece was inspired by the show it certainly isn't a review of  it I really just want to use it as a starting point for writing a little in praise of Venetian art at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries and to suggest why I think it is the case that in and around that glorious city at that time, oil painting reached its highest point, perhaps matched only at one or two other times in history, but never surpassed.

But first, a brief history of Italian Renaissance painting. It was born in Florence, came to maturity in Venice and died in Rome.

Don't you wish all histories could be so succinct? It is, admittedly a personal view, (though far from original) and based to a large extent on my own travails and development as a painter. To explain briefly: there are two great elements of paint which together provide most of the charm and power of a picture and those are colour and tone, or in Munsell terms, (which I will stick with hereafter) hue and value. Beautiful colour and powerful chiaroscuro are the two main tools at an artist's disposal but the great quandary for practicing artists is that you must choose one or the other to be your lead instrument, try as you might you can't have both. This may not immediately be obvious to non painters but the fact is a colour is only at its full, or fullish, strength ie high chroma, at a narrow range of value, if you lighten or darken it more than a fraction you inevitably lose a lot of its strength in the process. Therefore if you wish to utilize the great force of strong value contrasts you have to sacrifice much of the beauty of full colour, or, on the other hand, if you want to play with the full range of chroma and use strong forceful colour, the power of chiaroscuro is then to a large extent denied you.






Filippo Lippi Annunciation
 

Florentine painting for most of the fifteenth century put the emphasis squarely on hue. The painting of the first masters of the Renaissance proper, Masaccio and then the great triumvirate of Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi and Botticelli were masters first and foremost of colour. They achieved harmony in a picture and that elusive quality of pictorial unity which artists call breadth, by line yes, to an extent, but primarily by beautiful well matched colour. They limited their use of the contrasts of light and shade to provide just enough of form to give their figures a sense of three dimensionality and this gave them far greater flexibility with their range of chroma. In short they sacrificed naturalism to gain greater (as they saw it) artistic beauty.



Andrea del Sarto: Disputation on the Trinity
 

The second generation of great artists starting with Leonardo and continuing with Raphael, del Sarto, and others initiated the great development of chiaroscuro, they developed the heightened use of light and shade to reveal form. There is no doubt that these artists produced some beautiful pictures. Del Sarto is a little known painter amongst the general public but deserves to be ranked amongst the greatest. The same called also be said of Bernadino Luini, a pupil of Leonardo who in the nineteenth century was often considered to be the superior artist of the two.  He is a favourite of mine so I will digress for a moment to show this lovely little picture as an instance of his talent.



Bernadino Luini : Madonna and Child
 

This use of chiaroscuro seemed to be such a marvellous advance that all artists of the time adopted it to a greater or lesser extent with the  one exception amongst first rate artists of Botticelli. It will be noted that all the artists so far mentioned were Florentines, or at least Tuscans  (save Luini) who made their name in Florence and it was not until Raphael and then Michaelangelo went to Rome and started working primarily for the Vatican that the Roman High Renaissance manner of over developed chiaroscuro  became the new dominant style. Up till then (and of course there was no definite point at which one style superseded the other but a gradual transition)  the competing