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

By these characteristics – and not only by the oriental turban or wide sunhat with which they were commonly, but not always, shown – it is easy to identify many more fifteenth- and sixteenth-century images of gypsy women, besides that in Giorgione's Tempest.[32] They appear almost invariably, for instance, among the audience in the numerous sixteenth-century Netherlandish representations of St John the Baptist preaching, sitting with their babies on the ground. There is a fine gypsy family in the centre foreground of Joos de Momper's landscape in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum.[33] Their earliest surviving image is a Gypsy Family by the Housebook Master (plate 2), of which there are copies by Master bxg and by Wenzel von Olmütz.[34] Here the child is free from the enveloping cloak, though at the mother’s neck. Underneath, the woman wears a shirt (camicia), distinctive for its broad sleeves, which recur in Desprez’s and Vecellio’s costume books.[35] Datable to about 1496–97, Dürer's engraving Bartsch 85, incorrectly titled The ‘Turkish’ or ‘Oriental’ Family – Dürer portrayed Turks in other works, and they do not look like this [36]  – represents a gypsy family, and has repeatedly been related to the Housebook Master's print. It was copied in Italy by Nicoletto da Modena (plate 3).[37]  In having no camicia Dürer's mother is unusual, but resembles Glorgione’s, and accords with some reports. Like the Housebook Master’s gypsy, the father is armed with a bow. The Housebook Master also made a pendant pair of prints of a gypsy man and gypsy woman suckling, bearing shields as wildmen might.[38] Giorgione's Venetian contemporary Jacopo de’ Barbari, too, made pendant prints (plates 4a, 4b) of figures that have not previously been identified as gypsies, but are closely related both to the Housebook Master’s image (the man has a similar hat, and the woman has a similar turban and wide-sleeved camicia) and (in reverse) to the Dürer (their essential poses, turns of the head, the positions of their arms).[39]  Jacopo's prints, dating from before 1504, will have immediately antedated Giorgione's Tempest.

FOOTNOTES

32 F. Vaux de Foletier, 'Iconographic des "Egyptiens": Precisions sur le costume ancien des Tsiganes', Gazette des Beaux-Arts, vol. 68, no. 2, 1966, p. 165; C.D. Cutler, 'Exotics in 15th Century Netherlandish Art: Comments on Oriental and Gypsy Costume', in Liber Amicoruni Herman Liebaers, Brussels, 1984, p. 423.

33 Inv. no. 1019.

34 Livelier than Life: the Master of the Amsterdam Cabinet or the Housebook Master, exh. cat., Rijksprentenkabinet, Amsterdam, 1985, cat. 65.

35 François Desprez, Recueil de la Diversité des Habits qui sont à présent en usage, Paris, 1567, p. 99; Vecellio, Habiti, p. 176.

36 Cf. J. Raby, Venice, Dürer and the Ottoman Mode, London, 1982, pp. 22–30.

37 A.M. Hind, Early Italian Engraving, London, 1938-48, vol. 5, Nicoletto da Modena no. 100.

38 Livelier than Life, cat. 82.

39 Hind, Early Italian Engraving, vol. 5, Jacopo de' Barbari nos. 16 and 17; J.A. Levenson, Jacopo de'Barbari and Northern Art of the Early Sixteenth Century, PhD thesis, New York University 1978 (published in the Garland series), cat. nos. 21, 22 and p. 69.