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

The woodcut portrait of Giorgione appended to his Life in Vasari's second edition (pl. 1) is evidently based on the Grimani self-portrait, and so, with independent knowledge of the original but adapted after the example of Vasarl's woodcut, is the portrait in Ridolfi's Life of Giorgione.[8] By the time Ridolfi was writing, the self-portrait had left Venice, and, according to Ridolfi, was in the collection of the brothers Van Veerle in Antwerp, still together with the 'general of armies' and the putto.[9] Hollar made engraved copies of nine of the Venetian works in this collection, including the Self-portrait, dated 1650 (Pl. 2);[10] his others, where they can be compared to the originals, are accurate in the detail if not in the proportions, and this copy agrees with Vasarl's woodcut and description, although Hollar's engraving is fuller and more precise, featuring a 'stepped' sill of the kind peculiar to pictures of Giorgione's circle. Thereafter, the picture itself disappears from view (along with its companions). The painting in the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum in Brunswick with which it has been identified (Pl. 3) is first recorded in 1744, as a copy after Glorgione.[11] There is a further derivation in Budapest;[12] there is also a copy in Hampton Court (Pl. 4), which is already mentioned in 1628.[13] One's immediate impression is surely that the Hampton Court picture (though it, too, is not complete) agrees with the Hollar engraving very closely, and that the Brunswick picture is a less accurate version.

The claim of the Brunswick picture to be the original portrait by Glorgione rests predominantly on X-ray evidence published in 1959. " X-rays revealed beneath the present surface a Madonna holding a child in an individual composition very like one by Catena. However, even if the Madonna dates from Giorgione's period, the present surface need not do so; indeed, the earlier composition is incomplete, and the support must therefore have been reduced before the present image in its supposed original form was painted over it. If the two complete compositions are reconstructed, they do not fit together (Pl. 5). There is, furthermore, a marked difference in technique and medium (tempera as opposed to oils) between the Madonna beneath and the portrait above. It seems more likely that a picture of the Madonna contemporary to Giorgione was cannibalized at some later time in order to create the Brunswick Self-portrait than that Giorgione had been involved in reproducing or inspiring another artist's composition, then, deciding to make a portrait of himself, cut the canvas down and changed the medium he was using. It is coincidental that Vincenzo Catena, the author of the composition beneath, has been revealed by an inscription on the back of Glorgione's 'Laura' in Vienna to have been Giorgione's 'cholega' (Pl. 8).[15]

FOOTNOTES

8 Carlo Ridolfi, Le Maraviglie d'Arte, D. von Hadeln (Ed.), Berlin 1914-24; T. Pignatti, Giorgione, London 1971, pl. 218.

9 See further K. Garas, 'Giorgione e Giorgionisme au siecle XVIIE, I', Bulletin du Musée Hongrois des Beaux-Arts, 25, 1964, pp. 51ff. (esp. p. 54).

10 Indexed under Verle in G. Parthey, Wenzel Hollar. Beschreibendes Verzeichnis seiner Kupferstiche, Berlin 1853, p. 309.

11 G. Adriani, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig: Verzeicbnis der Gemälde, Brunswick 1969, p. 65; Pignatti 1971 (as in n. 8 above), cat. Cl; Selbstbildnisse und Kiinstlerportraits von Lucas van Leyden bis Anton Raphael Mengs, exh. cat., Brunswick 1980, cat. 1, pp. 38-42; C. Hornig, Giorgiones Spitwerk, Munich 1987, cat. 24, p. 213; M. Lucco, Giorgione, Milan 1995, p. 140; J. Anderson, Giorgione: Peintre de la 'bièveté poétique, Paris 1996, pp. 306-7.

12 Garas 1964 (as in n. 9 above), p. 78, suggested that Vasarl's woodcut might have been based on this work (Pignatti 1971, as in n. 8 above, cat. C2; Anderson 1996, as in u. 11 above, p. 324), also recorded by Hollar; but though the costume agrees with Vasari's woodcut, the pose of the head, the facial expression and the hair do not; if Vasari knew and used another version, would he not have mentioned it? The attribution to Giorgione of the Budapest picture remains highly dubious.

13 See J. Shearman, The Early Italian Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen, Cambridge 1983, cat. 112.

14 C. Müiller-Hofstede, 'Untersuchungen iiber Giorgiones Selbstbildnis in Braunschweig', Mitteilungen des Kunsthistoriscben Institutes in Florenz, 8, 1957-9, pp. 13-34 (esp. p. 14). In May 1995 the curator Sabine Jacob kindly confirmed to me that no new technical examination had been undertaken since that time.

15 J. Wilde, 'Ein unbeachtetes Werk Giorgiones', Jahrbuch der preuszischen Kunstsammlungen, 52, 1931, pp. 91-100 (esp. p. 93). The inscription reads: '1506 a di primo zugno fo fatto questo de man de maistro Zorzi da Chastel fr[anco] cholega de maistro Vizenzo Chaena ad istanzia de miser giacomo ... [veniziano?]'. Instead of transliterating the last word, Giacomo's surname, Wilde put an ellipsis, implying, as appears to be generally believed, that the last word is lost. It is not, as can be seen from Wilde's photograph; but it is very difficult to read. At the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Sylvia Ferino kindly had the back re-exan-iined, whereupon the inscription was discovered to have faded; but it reappeared under infra-red light. The lettering readily corresponds with no known Venetian family name.