Giorgione's Tempest or 'little landscape with the storm with the gypsy': more on the gypsy, and a reassessment

It is possible, though not verifiable, that Mantegna's Satyress was not merely seated but, like Giorgione's gypsy, half‑seated and half‑kneeling; while her right calf was upright, as the Louvre drawing reveals, with the leg bending sharply at the knee, she may have rested her left knee on the ground. If so, she would have echoed the pose of Zeuxis's centauress, whose ‘feet in front were not yet stretched out, as of one lying on her side, but one of them was bent with the hoof turned under, like one crouching, while the other was raised and taking a grip on the ground, as when horses try to leap up’. In any case an antique statue in the same pose, the so-called Doidalsas type of kneeling nude, with one leg folded under the body and the other raised was known and imitated at Mantua in the last years of the fifteenth century.[70] Antico, with whom Mantegna shared both tastes and patrons, had made a statuette for bishop Ludovico Gonzaga known as ‘la nuda della bissa scudelara’ (the nude of the tortoise) some time before 1498; examples are in the Thyssen Collection, the
Liebieghaus and Capodimonte (plate 12).[71] The statuette took its name from the tortoise on which Venus knelt in a marble version of the Doidalsas type that is first recorded about 1500 in the possession of the Massimi family in Rome, but which Antico would have seen on a visit in 1495 or in 1497, and Mantegna his earlier visit in 1488–89.[72] Furthermore, Antico and bishop Ludovico had the idea of partnering the nude with a statuette of a satyr, himself derived from a second antique source, the Pan of the Pan and Daphnis group now in the Uffizi. (The Daphnis would be the basis of an early sixteenth‑century Venetian picture of a nude boy playing the flute In Munich, sometimes attributed to Palma.)[73] Perhaps in order to make the figures fit better together, Antico evolved a more upright half‑kneeling, half‑sitting figure (examples in the Victoria and Albert Museum and Kunsthistorisches Museum);[74] it is shown to be a variant by its similarity not only in the lower body but also in the arms and hands, with which the satyress originally sewed ‘a pair of trousers’ – the Victoria and Albert figure is currently identified as an Atropos. It is likely that Giorgione's is yet another variant of this classically derived pose. The half‑kneeling, half-sitting posture had a wide circulation, perhaps also inspiring the initial versions of Leonardo's Leda (plate 13),[75] and notably found on the verso of a North Italian drawing datable to about 1503 with the Apollo Belvedere on the recto. [76]

FOOTNOTES

70 Cf. A. Allison, 'Antique Sources of Leonardo's Leda', Art Bulletin, vol. 56, 1974, p. 375.

71 U. Rossi, 'I medaglisti del Rinascimento alla Corte di Mantova', Rivista italiana di numismatica, vol. 1, 1888, 1, p. 25; 11, p. 161; 11 (cont.), p. 433, at p. 171; H.J. Hermann, 'Pier Jacopo Alari‑Bonacolsi, gennannt Antico', Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses, vol. 28, 1910, p. 201, at p. 261; Natur und Antike in der Renaissance, exh. cat., Liebieghaus, Frankfurt, 1985‑86, cat. nos. 114, 115.

72 Allison, 'Antique Sources'; Bober and Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists, cat. no. 18 (other statues).

73 Rossi, 'Medaglisti', p. 174; Hermann, 'Alari-Bonacolsi', p. 272; the picture is P. Rylands, Palma Vecchio, Cambridge, 1992, cat. no. 14.

74 Splendours of the Gonzaga, exh. cat., Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1981‑82, cat. no. 56.

75 Royal Library, Windsor, no. 12337r; cf. Allison, 'Antique Sources'; also, however, for a different  view, A. Smart and M. Kemp, 'Leonardo's Leda: Roman sources and a new chronology', Art History, vol. 3, 1980, p. 160.

76 British Museum 1946‑7‑13‑1262; Bober and Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists, pl. 97a. See also a print by Marcantonio Raimondi (Bartsch 313) and Licinio's picture at Ainwick Castle of a sculptor and pupils, in which the sculptor holds a statuette of the type, and a pupil holds a drawing after it (L. Vertova, Bernardino Licinio, in I pittori bergarnaschi dal XIII al XIX secolo: Il Cinquecento, I, Bergamo, 1975, p. 373, cat. no. 1). Another drawing after the nude in the Accademia in Venice that might have been associated has now been attributed to Andrea Solari and dated to his time in Rome after 1514 (D.A. Brown, Andrea Solario, Milan, 1987, cat. no. 64).