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

The idea that Giorgione may have depicted a'Laura' of the kind that the lover would find written, sculpted or painted in his own hear‑t may even be necessary to understanding the painting, because the image in the heart might be, indeed usually was, blatantly erotic, regardless of the real comportment of the beloved. One might say that the painting's sexual nudity marks it precisely as a vision of the heart (an erotic fantasy) and not as a real woman. Petrarch's visions of Laura are sometimes clearly erotic, without of course Laura herself, the material Laura, being unchaste. Petrarch also, not in his two sonnets on Simone's portrait of Laura, but in sonnet no. CXXX, himself had made the paragone that the image Love painted in his heart was more beautiful than the work of the artists of antiquity:[52]

... 
E sol ad una imagine m'attengo
che fe' non Zeusi o Prasitele o Fidia
ma miglior maestro e di piu alto ingegno

And only to one image I attach myself,
made not by Zeuxis or Praxiteles or Phidias,
but by a better master and one of higher genius

this 'better master' being Love, often invoked as the writer, painter or sculptor who impresses the beloved in the poet's imagination. (I have not undertaken a wider search specifically for this metaphor, but the notion is as extensively developed as one could wish at one point in Lorenzo de' Medici's Comento, and also utilized in Philip Sydney's Arcadia: see Appendix).

A context of paragone suggests the imputation of a further motivation to Giorgione's self‑portrait as David. As we have seen, showing himself as David visually encapsulates what had been stated in an inscription ‑ 'virtus vincit' in previous portraits, and by this device represents an invisible quality there intimated by a label. To represent the inner, invisible quality, however, is to trespass on the sphere of poetry and words, which alone are meant to be able to convey such abstractions in the discussion of the paragone conducted in the academy at Florence in the mid‑sixteenth century.[53] This does not appear to be an idea that Leonardo had come across or argued against, although it is clearly anticipated in the inscription beside Ghirlandalo's 1488 Portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni in the Thyssen Collection, and flirted with in humanist epigrams on portraiture particularly in Rome.[54] Given, though, that paragone was a topic In vogue, and that the same patron demonstrably had contacts to Leonardo, it is a reasonable hypothesis that in depicting himself as David Giorgione intended to 'demonstrate' that painting could in fact represent the inner, supposedly unrepresentable quality of vir‑tue. It is even possible that Giorgione's Vecchia in the Accademia in Venice was in 1567 called 'Giorgione's mother' by analogy with his self‑portrait;[55] and, just as La Vecchia herself seems actually to regret personally the universal of her aging condition, so, if we had the original of Giorgione's self‑portrait, we should surely see his virtuous character and spirit expressed pictorially as well as embodied iconographically.

FOOTNOTES

53 Most obviously Benedetto Varchi in the third dispute of his 'Della maggloranza delle arti', in Barocchi (Ed.) 1960‑2 (as in n. 5 above), vol. 1, pp. 55‑8.

54 Thyssen Collection; see for the epigram from Martial and for early sixteenth‑century contemporary comment on portraiture J. Shearman, Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance, Princeton 1992, ch. 3, 'Portraits and Poets'.

55 A. Ravi, 'Il camerino delle anticaglie di Gabriele Vendramin', Nuovo Archivio Veneto, 39, 1920, pp. 155ff. (esp. p. 178).