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

The changes revealed by X‑rays would therefore have had a stylistic direction as well as a compositional purpose: Giorgione substituted a more classicizing pose for the one with which he began. The development the change implies is parallelled in Jacopo de' Barbari, for his seated gypsy woman seems shortly to been succeeded by a seated Sleeping nymph (incorrectly known as Cleopatra because the tree root above her head has been mistaken for a snake), a figure that is surely based on a classical prototype, either the ‘Caffarelli’ Nymph, now in the Uffizi, or perhaps some sarcophagal hippocamp‑rider.[77] Glorgione, having used the Doidalsas type perhaps a little crudely in the Tempest, seems subsequently to have reworked and refined it in the more evidently classicizing drawing or drawings of which another artist made use for the flute‑playing nude the Louvre Concert champêtre.[78] Alternatively, the Dresden Venus may stand for the increasing classicism, anticipated in the Tempest, of the last few years of his prematurely terminated career.

We may now go on to speculate about the Tempest's original reception. In the only contemporary indication of the basis of Giorgione's fame that survives – a letter written to Isabella d'Este immediately after his death – her correspondent reports that Giorgione's pictures were not ‘for sale at any price, because [their owners] had had them made because they wished to enjoy them for themselves’ (‘hanno fatte fare per volerle godere per loro’, a strongly and explicitly sensuous phrase).[79] The centrepiece of the Tempest is the figure of the mother with her baby, to whom both the father in the picture and, caught by her appellant glance, the viewer direct their gaze. In describing Mantegna's satyress, Sannazaro had appreciated especially the tenderness of the mother and child together: ‘… lattava un picciolo Satirello, e con tanta tenerezza il mirava, che parea di amore e di carità tutta si struggesse’ (she suckled a little satyrlet, and gazed on him with such tenderness, that she seemed completely consumed by love and charity). He had entered into the psychological details of the child's feelings: ‘e ‘l fanclullo ne l'una mammella poppava, ne l'altra teneva distesa la tenera mano, e con l'occhio si guardava, quasi temendo che tolta non gli fusse’ (and the child suckled on one breast, clinging to the other with tender outstretched hand, and watched it with one eye, as if he were frightened it would be taken from him).[80] In the pathetic glance and situation of Giorgione's gypsy mother, sheltering a child, there is a similar poignancy that the spectator may enjoy.

FOOTNOTES

77 Hind, Early Italian Engravings, vol. 5, Jacopo no. 27; Levenson, Jacopo de' Barbari, cat. no. 35; see also cat. nos. 36, 40, 41, 42; cf. H. Tietze and E. Tietze‑Conrat, The Drawings of the Venetian Painters, new edn, New York, 1979, cat. no, 62. A bronze statuette after the Caffarelli Nymph, dated 1486, is in the Wallace Collection, London; cf. Bober and Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists, cat. no. 61.

 78 See my article, 'The "pastorale" or "fête champêtre" in the early‑Sixteenth Century', in Titian 500, Studies in the History of Art 45, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, 1994, p. 245, where arguments that the fluteplaying nude might be based on a drawing by Giorgione are presented. For Giorgione's drawings and his classicism see also my article, 'Varieties of giorgionismo', F. Ames‑Lewis (ed.), in New Interpretations of Venetian Renaissance Painting, Birkbeck College, London, 1994, p. 31.

79 A. Luzio, 'Isabella d'Este e due grandi quadri di Giorgione', Archivio Storico d’arte, i, 1888, p. 47.

80 Sannazaro, Arcadia, ed. Mauro, p. 101.