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

Furthermore, the condition of Giorgione's gypsies, though they are young, beautiful and healthy and not scrawny, filthy or old, is not ‘soft’ but ‘hard’, because they are homeless and threatened by a storm. The storm emphasizes their pathetic, vulnerable aspect. Unlike wildmen, they do not rejoice in it. Like a pair of woodhouses, the Tempest couple are creatures united by their bond of love, but unlike them, they are human wanderers whom the storm afflicts, or is about to (neither rain nor wind are depicted; the viewer must have caught them at the moment before the storm breaks). In an abstract sense the storm is the attribute of the gypsies, or, if one wishes to believe that the storm was the picture's raison d’être, homeless gypsies are appropriate figures to place in a landscape with a storm. But the picture is made by the two together, for the gypsies illustrate the threat in the storm, and the storm compounds the poignancy of the gypsies’ condition.

Citation of Pliny's notice of the painting of a storm (Natural History, xxxv, 95–7) might have been an appropriate complement by a contemporary viewer, but is not likely to have been the picture's motivation, for besides the Tempest, Giorgione painted a lost Inferno with Aeneas and Anchises, a lost St Jerome by Moonlight, possibly the lost Rape mentioned, of which copies register a livid red sky, and the Three Philosophers, in which the uplifting rays of the sun are an element of the subject. More probably, Giorgione was more widely interested in an iconography introducing light and weather in sky and landscape (nor was he alone: witness Altobello Melone's masculine portrait against a background with two figures buffetted by the wind in the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo).[87] Writers who singled out such effects (for instance, Summonte writing to Michiel on Colantonio, or even Vasari) do not suggest classical emulation; if anything such effects were to be associated rather with Netherlandish or German art. A classical basis for Giorgione's adventure into the secular would better be found in Lucian, whose writings, first translated and published in Venice in 1494, consistently emphasize classical artists' invention. Lucian began his description of Zeuxis's centaur family, ‘… and among his other daring feats Zeuxis painted a female centaur …’.

FOOTNOTES

87 F. Rossi, Accademia Carrara, Bergamo: Catalogo dei dipinti, Bergamo, 1979, p. 134, plate at p. 109; I Campi, p. 87.