To Loosen the Tongue of Mute Poetry: Giorgione's Self-Portrait 'as David' as a Paragone Demonstration

Article 06 Mar 2009

Giorgione's self portrait as David is lost in the original but known through copies. This article suggests an intellectual and artistic context, in which it might have been read in terms of the paragone between the arts. Taken from Poetry on Art: Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Thomas Frangenberg Donnington, 2003.

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Department: Art History
Country: Italy
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The grandiloquent title of this paper is designed to recall, first and obviously, Simonides's 'painting is mute poetry; poetry is vocal painting';[1] secondly, more obliquely, a phrase from the Codex Urbinas, in which Leonardo, polemically contrasting painting to the other arts, pits it in particular against poetry:

Ma per non sapere li suoi operatori dire la sua ragione, [la pittura] 'e restata longo tempo sanza advocati, perché essa non parla, ma per sé si dimostra e termina ne' fatti; e la poesia finisce in parole, co le quali come briosa sé stessa lauda.

But because its practitioners do not know how to state its case, painting has remained a long time without advocates, because painting does not speak, but shows itself through itself and goes no further than the facts; but poetry's end is words, with which, and vigorously, it praises itself.'

That 'per sé si dimostra, e termina ne' fatti' rings down to the present, for in the absence of 'parole' the interpretation we choose to place upon Renaissance paintings has as its only evidence the paintings themselves, uncorroborated; and even when we give them their lines to speak, obdurately mute is what the paintings themselves remain. The interpretation I wish to put upon a certain painting by Giorgione is more than can be proved, and perhaps more than may be found likely, despite some circumstantial evidence to assist it. It may even not be accepted that the work is so anomalous as to demand an interpretation. However, Leonardo's remark may support the idea that the work might have been painted deliberately in order to 'rival' poetry and the intention, not being sympathetic to later viewers, might subsequently have been lost - or obscured, for Giorgione's interest in the paragone between the arts is a fact of the sources, and has been accepted and further investigated by current scholarship.'

FOOTNOTES

1 As from Plutarch, De Gloria Atheniensium, HI, 346f-47c.

2 Codex Urbinas 1270, fol. 28v; Leonardo da Vinci, The Literary Works, J. P. and I. A. Richter (Eds), 3rd edition, London 1970, item 20.

3 For Giorgione and the paragone, see most recently G. Helke, 'Giorgione als Maler des Paragone', Jahrbuch des Kiinstbistorischen Museums Wien, N.F. 1, 1999, pp. 11-79 (published after this article was written).