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
needs of colour and chiaroscuro were more or less held in balance The first great picture which can be seen as a significant turning point when chiaroscuro started to become dominant at the expense of beautiful colour was perhaps Raphael's Transfiguration and this development continued through the sixteenth century to the stagey theatrics of Salvator Rosa and the Bolognese artists Carracci and Guido Reni and finally end with the gloomy tenebrism of Carravagio.



Raphael: The Transfiguration
 

Meanwhile in Venice things had taken a different turn, there is not a lot of difference in style between the early Venetian masters  such as the Vivarini and Gentile Bellini , even the work of the younger Giovanni Bellini, and their contemporaries in Tuscany or northern Italy. But with the first development of the use of light and shade the Venetians developed their own style which led to some of the greatest art works ever created. I say "light and shade" but really it would be truer just to say light, because it is the flickering, caressing light of the lagoon which makes these works so wonderful to behold five centuries on.



Giovanni Bellini : Madonna and Child

By far the greatest number of great works of this period were produced by artists associated directly or indirectly with the studio of Giovanni Bellini, these artists being many of those featured in the Royal Academy exhibition, ie Giorgione, Titian, Sebastiano del Piombo and Palma Vecchio who all worked in Bellini's studio and two who did not although their work was clearly influenced by him ie Lorenzo Lotto and Cima da Conegliano. One of the interesting points about this exhibition is how many works are not definitely attributed to one specific artist, there was something of a school style for sure and the problem of attribution is further confused not only by students working on the master's canvases but also on each others. The "Concert Champetre" in the Louvre once attributed to Giorgione, then Titian, and now (hesitatingly) both, being only the most famous case. Del Piombo is slightly apart from these other artists as having been trained by Bellini, he went to Rome and came strongly under the influence of Michelangelo, who, it is believed, designed the figures for more then one of his pictures and thus he is seen by art historians today as being something of a link between the Venetian and Roman schools.




Cima da Conegliano:  The Incredulity of St.Thomas



Sebastiano del Piombo: The Raising of Lazarus

The other artists named above  for a period of about a quarter of a century painted a succession of pictures which by utilizing the beautiful softly enveloping light of Venice produced a unique solution   to the problem of balancing colour and chiaroscuro. As the light gently washes over the forms it is allowed to give just enough form definition to make the figures look solid and three dimensional but it is never allowed to mar the beauty of local colour by swallowing forms up in all embracing shadow. The single central light which became the touchstone of academic dogma in a later period is here replaced by several soft lights. It is not, despite appearances, a realistic light, true outdoor light would have to wait another three centuries or more before it appeared faithfully reproduced on canvas, here each figure is lit independently, but so softly and delicately as to disguise the basic artificiality of the scene. A comparison between two works by Titan painted 50 years apart makes this distinction clear. In the "Rape of Lucretia" the scene is lit as though by a single theatrical spot light which is concentrated on the main point of interest, Lucretia's face and the arm and dagger of her assailant. All four corners of the picture are more or less in murky shadow (the reproduction here is not good and lightens the whole scene). Consequently the only strong colour possible in the picture is a flash of red on the man's legs, the rest has to be downplayed as it is either in strong highlight or shadow, neither of which reveal colour at anything like its full intensity. Compare this with the Bacchus and Ariadne, where two pairs of complementaries, blue and gold and red and green dominate and unite the picture. The light flickers across  every object from the stars in the sky to the gold cup on the ground  and each has the chance to reveal the full beauty of its colour with a full range of chroma.



Titian: Rape of Lucretia
 



Titian: Bacchus and Ariadne
 

It is this kind of picture which reminds me of Ruskin's quote "the purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most". To my mind pictures which display this love of colour must therefore rank among the great art treasures of the world. I think non artists sometimes have the impression that artists just paint what they see and what colour an object "is" is the colour it will appear on the canvas. Of course this is a long way from being the case, all artists know there is no correct answer to the question "what colour is it?" and even if there were, there would be no necessity to paint it that colour. How a picture looks depends not so much on the intrinsic qualities of the objects depicted but on a thousand and one artistic decisions many of which may be taken at an unconscious level but all of which will influence that thing called "style" If an artist is motivated, formally at least, by a true and measured love of colour then he approaches the task of painting a picture asking himself the question "how can I best paint this picture to reveal the beauty of colour". It is my contention that the truest and most noble answer to this question was provided perhaps during three short periods in European history, once in the late nineteenth century by many artists across the continent, once in the middle years of the fifteenth century by artists both in central Italy and Flanders and Northern France and thirdly by this relatively  small group of artists working in Venice and the Veneto around the turn of the sixteenth century. I would go as far as to say that if all art of the western world were to perish in some future catastrophe and yet the best from these periods survive, future generations would be obliged to recognise that our civilization would at least be worth mourning.

  It is of course absurd to talk of the greatest picture of all time, but if there were such a thing it would surely come from one of these three periods, and from the one at hand, early sixteenth century Venice this altarpiece by Giovanni Bellini has always seemed to me to lay claim  to embodying all those necessary qualities for a great work. Many arguments could be put for other pictures to match it  but I can think of none that surpass it. Its painter is rightly considered as the father figure of Venetian art and if one picture can be used to sum up the glory that was Venice, well then I think it could well be this one.




Giovanni Bellini San Zaccharia alterpiece
 



Detail of above