Title : Giorgione's Tempest or 'little landscape with the storm with the gypsy': more on the gypsy, and a reassessment
By : Paul Holberton
Date : 10 Sep 2010
URL : http://www.upublica.com/article_c/page_detail/53/107
Outline :

This article on the interpretation of Giorgione's Tempest was first published in Art History, vol. 18, no. 3, September 1995. In re-publishing the article here I intend to meet criticisms, update my citations, revise where necessary and solicit further discussion of points at issue.


Giorgione's Tempest: p. 1

No published author or critic of the sixteenth, seventeenth or eighteenth century mentions Glorgione's Tempest (plate 1). Although it was recorded in Marcantonio Michiel's manuscript notes on art around 1530 and has been traced in two inventories, of 1569 and 1601, the painting remained effectively unknown until some time after Morelli's publication of Michiel's manuscript Notizia in 1800.[1] In the annotation to his edition, Morelli did not associate Michiel's report with the painting then in the Manfrin collection, but he made the identification later, and at some time before his death in 1819 noted it in a personal copy of his publication, now in the Biblioteca Marciana.[2] In 1817 Byron saw a ‘Family of the Painter’ by Glorgione in the Manfrin collection, which without doubt was the picture seen by Michiel and formerly owned by the Vendramin family. [3] In 1875 the painting passed from the Manfrin to the Giovanelli collection, and from the Giovanelli collection was acquired for the Venice Accademia in 1932.

 

FOOTNOTES


1 Giorgione's painting is T. Pignatti, Giorgione, Venice, 1969, cat. 13; also C. Hornig, Giorgiones Spätwork, Munich, 1987, cat. 11. Apart from books or articles cited as appropriate below, some more recent bibliography on the subject is given in note 8 below.

2 Biblioteca Marciana, Venice, Archivio Morelliano 73 (= 12579), p. 80: ‘É nella Galleria del C[onte] Girolamo Manfrin.’

3 M. Calvesi, ‘La Tempesta di Giorgione come Ritrovamento di Mosè’, Commentari, July­–December 1962, p. 226, at note 2. Calvesi's idea that Byron saw some other picture with the same title and that the Tempest was acquired by Manfrin at some later date is misconceived and disproved by Morelli's note.

 

 

 


Giorgione's Tempest: p. 2

The subject of the Tempest had apparently ceased to be recognized by the end of the sixteenth century. Although Michiel identified the woman as a gypsy, as did the Vendramin inventory of 1569, the Vendramin inventory of 1601 gave an abstract description: ‘A painting of a landscape with a woman who suckles a child and another figure …’. [4] At some time thereafter the idea seems to have sprung up, to be repeated by Byron in 1817, Burckhardt in 1855 and Reinhart in 1866, that it represented the family of the painter.[5] While Reinhart did not find the title satisfactory, Wickhoff in 1895 was the first to suggest an alternative subject, initially gaining some acceptance (Justi refers to the Tempest as the Hypsipyle throughout his book of 1908).[6] Following its entry into the Accademia, Morassi in an article of 1939 set the terms of the post-war debate: was it a ‘history’ or story or was it ‘genre’, a conundrum recast by Settis in a book of 1978 on the question, did it or did it not have a ‘subject’?[7] There has been consensus that it must have one, but no subject seems convincing: hence a dead end, though contributions continue to appear.[8] Two articles in this journal of 1985 and 1986 argued for the presence of contextual references without discussing the figures.[9] The fact remains that although they differ in their descriptions of the man, both Michiel and the 1569 inventory identify the woman as a gypsy. To repeat Michiel's often quoted but seldom credited words, ‘The little landscape on canvas with the storm with the gypsy [zingana] and soldier [soldato] was by Glorgione.’[10] The 1569 inventory records ‘another picture of a gypsy [and] a shepherd [pastor] in a landscape with a bridge . . .’.[11] The identification of the woman can be corroborated. Placement of the man, whom the two sources perceived differently and identified less convincingly, was evidently less obvious; but no doubt at all should linger about the woman's identity: she is a gypsy (Italian zingana, German Zigeunerin, French tsigane or gitane).

 

FOOTNOTES


4 J. Anderson, 'A Further Inventory of Gabriel Vendramin's Collection', Burlington Magazine, vol. 131, October 1979, p. 639.

5 Cf. Calvesi, 'Ritrovamento', note 2; J. Burckhardt, Der Cicerone, ed. H. Wölfflin, Berlin and Leipzig, 1933, II, p. 332; H. Reinhart, 'Castelfranco und einige weniger bekannte Bilder Giorgione's', Zeitschrift für bildenden Kunst, vol. 1, 1866, p. 247.

6 F. Wickhoff, 'Giorgiones Bilder', 1895, in M. Dvorak (ed.), Die Schriften, II: Abhandlungen, Verträge und Anzeigen, Berlin, 1913; L. Justi, Giorgione, Berlin, 1908.

7 A. Morassi, 'Esame radiografico della "Tempesta" di Giorgione', Le Arti, vol. 1, no. 6, August–September 1939, p. 567; S. Settis, La Tempesta interpretata, Turin, 1978 (English translation Giorgione's Tempest: Interpreting the Hidden Subject, Cambridge, 1990). A review by this author appeared in Art History, vol. 14, no. 1, 1991, p. 126.

8 Contributions include P. Barolsky and N.E. Land, ‘The "Meaning" of Giorgione's Tempest’, Studies in Iconography, vol. 9, 1983, p. 53; F. Buttner, 'Die Geburt des Reichtums und der Neid der Götter, Neue Oberlegungen zu Giorgiones Tempesta', Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst, vol. 37, 1986, p. 113; A. Parronchi, Giorgione e Raffaello, Bologna, 1989; F. Cioci, La tempesta interpretata dieci anni dopo, Florence, 1991.

9 D. Howard, 'Giorgione's Tempest and Titian's Assunta in the Context of the Cambrai Wars', Art History, vol. 8, no. 3, 1985, p. 271; P. Kaplan, 'The Storm of War: the Paduan Key to Giorgione's Tempest', Art History, vol. 9, no. 4, 1986, p. 405.

10 M. Michiel, Notizia d'opere di disegno, ed. G. Frizzoni, Bologna, 1884, p. 218.

11 A. Ravà, 'll camerino delle anticaglie di Gabriele Vendramin', Nuovo Archivio Veneto, vol. 39, 1920, p. 155, at p. 177.


Giorgione's Tempest: p. 3

Michiel's is not the first surviving notice of a gypsy in a work of art, for Leonardo included the head of a gypsy ('zingana') in a list of his works of about 1482.[12] By his time gypsies were well known in Europe, where they had appeared, at the end of a gradual filtration westwards, in the second decade of the fifteenth century.[13] The earliest mention of gypsies in Italian literature seems to belong to the 1460s, in Pulci’s Morgante.[14] A standard perception of the nature and activities of gypsies seems to have formed quite rapidly after their appearance in western Europe. Having first been treated with the respect due to pilgrims, they soon came to be regarded as thieves and a nuisance, and during the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were banned almost universally by individual states and cities – from Milan, for example, in 1506.[15] Venetian edicts or parti prese of 1549 and 1588 speak of ‘great damage [molto danno]’ and ‘nuisance, damages and many upsets [molestia, danni e molti disturbi]’ by them.[16] Even the telling of fortunes was a means by which to thieve: a Bolognese chronicler, for example, reported in 1422, ‘And when some of those who wanted to have their fortunes told approached them, few went away without having been robbed of their purse or, among the women, without their clothes having been cut.’[17] Similar was reported at Forlì.[18] At Paris in 1427 they had the same reputation, whether or not it was true: ‘And, what was worse, while speaking to the creatures [during fortune‑telling], by magic or by other means they emptied people's purses … to tell the truth, I was there three or four times to talk to them, but I never became aware of having lost a penny, nor did I see them looking at people’s hands.’[19] As for their nomadic way of life, gypsies were commonly believed to be dogged by a fatal curse, which prevented them, poor wretches, from settling or taking any permanent refuge.[20] According to one story, they were condemned to wander because they had failed in hospitality towards the Holy Family in Egypt, their supposed land of origin. In a Renaissance carnival song such as the following the chorus of gypsy women typically present themselves as homeless:[21]

Deh qualche caritate a noi meschine
prive d'ogni conforto e pellegrine.
Zingare slam, come vedete, tutte,
per gran forza di pioggie, e neve, strutte.
Ad habitar con voi siam qui condutte
con questi figli in bracclo, sì meschine,
di paesi lontani, e di stran loco
.[22]

In a Sienese carnival play printed in 1520, a gypsy introduces herself to her female audience similarly: [23]

Dui vi contenti tutte,
le belle paparutte:
un puca caritate:
tu’ ventura ti vu’ dire


Semu natu nellu Egiptu;
nostru corpu abbiam afflittu
in stenti et in affanni,
consumandu i mesi et anni
a la neve, a l'acque et venti,
giurnu e notte in tanti stenti:
nostra casa è una grutta
. [24]

 

FOOTNOTES


12 Leonardo da Vinci, The Literary Works, ed. J.P. and I.A. Richter, 3rd edition, New York, 1970, item 680 (Cod. Atl. 324).

13 J. Bloch, Les Tsiganes, Paris, 1969, p. 15; F. Vaux de Foletier, Mille ans d'histoire des tsiganes, Paris, 1970 (Italian translation, Milan, 1978); cf. G. Soulis, The Gypsies in the Byzantine Empire and the Balkans in the Late Middle Ages, Dumbarton Oaks, 1961.

14 Canto xviii, 182 and elsewhere. Cf. N. Tommaseo and B. Bellini, Dizionario della lingua italiana, Turin, 1861, etc, s.v.

15 Vaux de Foletier, Mille ans, chap. 5.

16 Biblioteca Marciana, Venice, 131.d.163, nos. 140, 181 (21.12.1549, 1,5.07.1588).

17 L.A. Muratori (ed.), Rerum italicarum scriptores, new edition eds. G. Carducci and V. Fiorini, Città di Castello, 1900-17, vol. 18, p. 611.

18 Muratori, vol. 19, p. 890.

19 A. Mary (ed.), Journal d’un Bourgeois à Paris de 1409 à 1449, Paris, 1929, vol. 4, ix, p. 361.

20 Cf. L. Wiener, 'Gypsies as Fortune-Tellers and as Blacksmiths', Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, 2nd series, vol. 3, no. 1, 1909, p. 4 and vol. 3, no. 4, 1910, p. 253.

 21 C.S. Singleton (ed.) Canti carnascialeschi, Bari, 1936, p. 287.

22 'Come, some charity for us, unfortunate pilgrims deprived of every comfort. We are gypsies all, as you see, suffering under the heavy attack of rains and snows. We have been led here to live with you with these children on our arms, so wretched, from distant countries and strange places.'

23 Bastiani di Francesco Lanaiuolo, Contentione di un villano e d'una zingana, Siena, 1520.

24 'God content you all, my fine little geese: a little charity: I will tell you your fortune …. We were born in Egypt: we have afflicted our bodies in efforts and pains, spending the months and years in the snow, the rain and wind, day and night in such sufferings: our house is a cave.'

 


Giorgione's Tempest: p. 4

Like other female vagabonds and mendicants, gypsy women were commonly depicted carrying a baby; but gypsy women in particular held their child by a swaddling band or wrapped them in their cloaks. In his costume book of 1590, Cesare Vecellio remarks: ‘. . . con qualche figliuolino da qualche fascia legato al collo di essa vanno cosi vagando’ (with some little child bound by some band to their neck, that is how they wander about).[25] In the prologue to his play La zingara of 1545, Artemio Giancarli implies that the practice was distinctive:[26] ‘… il proprio figliuolo, qual'avea in collo al modo loro’ (her own son, which she had at the neck in the way they do). Vecellio further records that ‘they bind a cloak of woollen cloth [panno] over the shoulder, passing it under the other arm; and it is long enough to reach down to their feet.’ More than 150 years earlier the Paris chronicler had remarked:[27] ‘pour tout costume une vieille couverture très grossière attachée par un lien de drap ou de corde, et dessous, un pauvre corsage ou chemise pour toute parure’ (their only clothing is an old very coarse blanket attached to the shoulder by a strip of cloth or cord, and underneath a poor bodice or shirt – that is all they have to wear). Such a costume was frequently noted and depicted;[28] in Italy their overgarment or cloak was called a schiavina (‘a long garment of coarse wool, worn by pilgrims and hermits’),[29] and the expression ad armacollo used to describe the way they wore it, over one shoulder and under the other arm.[30]  More exactly, they might hold the baby by the strip that held the cloak to the shoulder.[31]

 

FOOTNOTES


25 C. Vecellio, Habiti antichi e moderni, Venice, 1590, p. 176.

26 G.A. Cibotto (ed.), Teatro veneto, Parma, 1960, p. 427.

27 Journal d'un Bourgeois, vol. 4, ix, p. 361.

28 So Bloch, Tsiganes, p. 10; Vaux de Foletier, Mille anni, p. 166.

29 Tommaseo and Bellini, Dizionario, s.v.

30 Cf. Muratori, vol. 18, p. 611.

31 Vaux de Foletier, Mille anni, p. 191.


Giorgione's Tempest: p. 5

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.


Giorgione's Tempest: p. 6

Other contemporary images of gypsy women include two prominent in the foreground in Bosch's Haywain in the Prado;[40] one in an early sixteenth-century south Netherlandish Calvary in the Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent; another in the background of a Descent from the Cross by Cornelis Engelbrechtsz in the same museum.[41] In Italian art there is one by Marcantonio Raimondi (Bartsch 450); one, with a woman whose fortune she tells, on the extreme right in Boccaccino's Calvary, in the National Gallery, London, usually dated around 1500;[42] another in Boccaccino's Visitation in Cremona cathedral, dated 1515;[43]  the small Head in the Pitti by Boccaccino has long been regarded as that of a gypsy girl.[44] (Boccaccino is recorded as having been lodged in Venice in 1506; he had probably been there since 1500, when his murder of his wife appears to have terminated his career in Ferrara.) The most complete contemporary portrayal of gypsy life is to be found in a set of three drawings by or after Hans Burgkmair, two in Stockholm and one in the Veste Coburg.[45] In one, male gypsies who have stolen chickens are being chased; in another, a female gypsy tells the fortune of a woman while behind her back gypsy children rob her; in the third, we see a gypsy family at rest, with the mother seated on the ground suckling and the father standing by her (plate 5). If the horse and dog and other women are subtracted, Burgkmair's drawing offers a close parallel to Giorgione’s picture.

 

FOOTNOTES


40 W. Starkie, ‘Jerome Bosch's The Haywain’, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, 3rd series, vol. 36, 1957, p. 83; M. Cinotti, L'opera completa di Bosch, Milan 1977, pl. 21; P. Vandenbroeck, Jheronimus Bosch: tussenvolksleven en stadcultür, Berchem 1987, pp. 69‑70.

41 Nos. 1900‑B, 1904‑D.

42 M. Tanzi, Boccaccio Boccaccino, Soncino, 1992, cat. no. 1.

43 A. Puerari, Boccaccino, Milan, 1957, pl. 114; Tanzi, Boccaccino, cat. no, 26f.

44 M. Gregori (ed.), I Campi e la cultura artistica cremonese del Cinquecento, exh. cat., Cremona, 1985, cat. no. 1.2.13; Tanzi, Boccaccino, cat. no. 15.

45 Nationalmuseum, inv. nos. 132/1918; inv. nos. 132/1918; 133/1918; the Veste Coburg drawing, formerly attributed to Dürer, is Winkler 175 (F. Winkler, Die Zeichnungen Albrecht Dürers, Berlin, 1936). Cf. P. Halm, 'Hans Burgkmair als Zeichner: I', Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst, III. Folge, vol. 13, 1962, p. 75, at p. 121, figs. 53, 54, 55, and T. Falk, Hans Burgkmair, Munich, 1968, p. 23.


Giorgione's Tempest p. 7

Neither Michiel nor the Vendramin inventories identify the male figure in the Tempest as a gypsy as well, but many parallels over and above those already cited suggest that he is her consort and the father of her child, and justify the tradition that the picture represented a family. The man stands by the woman and her child like the father beside his consort in representations after Lucian’s description of Zeuxis's picture of a family of centaurs, or like Adam beside Eve, or like a wildman beside his seated mate. Objections may be raised about the river, or gulf, between them; but a river ran down the centre of Giorgione's earlier Birth of Paris (plate 6), and commonly runs down the middle of the landscapes in Jacopo Bellini’s sketchbooks – indeed, the composition of the Tempest has essentially the same pattern as these.[46] He could be with her in a single bound. By contrast to his identification of the woman, Michiel's description of the man as soldier conflicts with the usual iconography:[47] he wears no breastplate and no visible weapon, though he could hang a dagger behind his back. He patently does not wear shepherd's clothing, either, though he has a staff resembling the kind shepherds often lean on. The staff, his single most prominent attribute, marks him as a traveller, wanderer or pilgrim, a gypsy by nature if not by race.

 

FOOTNOTES


46 Cf. Pignatti, Giorgione, cat. no. C3 and plate 225; B. Degenhart and A. Schmidt, Corpus der italienischen Zeichnungen 1300‑1450, part 2, vols. 5‑8: Venedig. Jacopo Bellini, Berlin, 1990, Paris sketchbook f. 24, pl. 27; f. 64v, pl. 82; London sketchbook f. 24v, pl. 166; f. 42r, pl. 201; f. 46r, pl. 209; f. 58v, pl. 234; f. 85v, pl. 288.

47 Cf. J. Hale, 'Michiel and the Tempesta: the Soldier in a Landscape as a Motif in Venetian Painting', in P. Denley and C. Elam (eds.), Florence and Italy. Renaissance Studies in honour of Nicolai Rubinstein, London, 1988, p. 405; J. Hale, Artists and Warfare in the Renaissance, New Haven and London, 1990, pp. 91‑92.


Giorgione's Tempest: p. 8

A second print by Jacopo de' Barbari (plate 7) also represents gypsies.[48] It has hitherto been taken to be a Holy Family, but the Virgin seldom wears a turban. Jacopo’s gypsy’s manner of holding and enveloping her child is closely related to Giorgione's, and the design of her schiavina is similar, particularly in the measure of stuff that comes over her left shoulder. This print by Jacopo is rather later than his earlier pair; executed after he had left Venice for Germany and perhaps dating from a year or two after the Tempest had been painted, it is one of a group of prints that show a renewed association with Venetian imagery, from which it has been deduced that Jacopo briefly returned to Venice in late 1509 or early 1509.[49] Particularly interesting is the similarity of pose between Jacopo’s image and that of the woman revealed by X‑rays beneath the man in Giorgione’s picture (plate 8).[50] The influence was probably from Giorgione to Jacopo rather than vice versa, for Giorgione's initial figure appears to have been taken from a previous work of his own, now lost, in which a similar nude was threatened by a soldier with a knife; the picture was attributed to Giorgione in Archduke Leopold Wilhelm's collection and recorded by Teniers (plate 9).[51]  In turn, the consort to Jacopo's sad mother, in pressing profile, seems to echo Giorgione's rapist. If the lost painting really was by Giorgione, which does not seem unlikely, given not only this correlation but also the resemblance of the large house in the landscape to that, for instance, in the background of the Castelfranco Madonna, then it was surely earlier: the nude in the lost picture has a simpler pose. The most plausible explanation of the X‑ray evidence is that Giorgione always intended a male and female couple, setting the female first on the left, then deciding to make her a gypsy, to alter her pose and to place her on the right; he would originally have expected to place the man on the right, but painted him in her vacated position after he had moved the woman. [52]

 

FOOTNOTES


48 Hind, Early Italian Engraving, vol. 5, Jacopo no. 4; Levenson, Jacopo de' Barbari, cat. no. 32.

49 Levenson, Jacopo de' Barbari, pp. 31‑35, 84‑87; D. Landau in The Genius of Venice, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1983, cat. no. P5, p. 310.

50 The first X‑rays were published by Morassi, 'Esame radiografico', in 1939; improved plates have since been taken; cf. also 'Riflettoscopia all'infrarosso computerizzata', Quaderni della Soprintendenza ai Beni Artistici e Storici di Venezia, vol. 6, 1984, and J. Plesters, ‘“Scientia e Restauro”: recent Italian publications on conservation’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 129, March 1987, p. 172.

51 Cf. Morassi, 'Esame radiografico'; K. Garas, 'Die Entstehung der Galerie des Erzherzogs Leopold Wilhelm', Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, N.F. vol. 27, 1967, p. 50, no. 76; Pignatti, Giorgione, p. 155; David Teniers, Jan Brueghel y los Gabinetes de Pinturis, exh. cat., Museo del Prado, Madrid, 1992, cat. 1, item 25.

52 Cf. Settis, Giorgione's Tempest, p. 72f.


Giorgione's Tempest p. 9

In his encyclopaedic Commentari Urbani of 1505, Raffaele Maffei characterized gypsies as an Oriental people ‘who live scattered through the world, especially Italy, in the manner of beasts, without law, without arts, only predicting the future.’[53] As such, gypsies were primitives, or on a par with primitives, who ‘wandered the world naked, shaggy and savage, in the manner of beasts, without a roof, without human intercourse, without any civilized custom …’ to quote Pietro Bembo's Asolani.[54] Glorgione's pair certainly resemble other primitives. For example, in Raphael's frontispiece for his illustrated edition of Vitruvius, which shows the invention of fire, there features a suckling mother seated on the ground, and such figures are usual in depictions of primitive.[55] By reversal, it seems that in his picture of the invention of the horse‑shoe (Vulcan and Aeolus) in the National Gallery, Ottawa (plate 10), Piero di Cosimo used what he knew of gypsies to represent the primitive: the smith, who, like his naked or semi‑naked companions, and like the builders of a wooden house behind him, belongs to an early stage of civilization, sits on the ground and has his companion blow the bellows in just the way that travellers report gypsy smiths doing at Modone in Greece.[56] The gypsy smith is appropriately accompanied by a giraffe and by a seated man in a turban and a crouching suckling mother, and by a man sleeping in the open.

Gypsies, like other primitives, were said to be hardy in the bearing of children. The Bolognese chronicler reported in 1422 that ‘one of them gave birth in the marketplace and within three days was going around with the other women’. [57] Of New World Indians Amerigo Vespucci reported: ‘The women are very fertile, and do not register any travail in their pregnancies; their births are so easy, that having given birth one day, they go out everywhere and especially to wash themselves in the rivers, and they are as healthy as fish.’[58] Gypsies are represented washing their children after birth in a river in one of the late fifteenth-century tapestries at Gaasbeek;[59] the same was reported of Scythian women in an ‘anthropological’ work published in Venice in 1502, and Teofilo Folengo had his mother Berta, exiled in the wilderness, do as much for the infant Orlando.[60]

 

FOOTNOTES

 


 

53 Raphaelis Volterranus, Commentari Urbani, Rome, 1506; edition used Basle, 1603, chap. 12, p. 399e‑f.

54 Pietro Bembo, Prose e rime, ed. C. Dionisotti, Turin, 1966, II, xix, p. 419.

55 Raffaello architetto, exh. cat., ed. C.L. Frommel, S. Ray, M. Tafuri, Milan, 1984, cat. 3.3.2; cf. E. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, New York, 1939, 1972 edition, figs. 19, 20, 22, 23.

56 Panofsky, Iconology, p. 44; M. Bacci, Piero di Cosimo, Milan, 1966, cat. no. 16; S. Fermor, Piero di Cosimo: Fiction, Invention and Fantasia, London, 1993, p. 62f; see E.O. Winstedt, 'The Gypsies of Modon and the "Wyne of Romaney"', Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, 2nd series, vol. 3, no. 1, 1909, p. 57; also Bloch, Tsiganes, p. 58; Vaux de Foletier, Mille anni, p. 18f.

57 Muratori, vol. 18, p. 611.

58 F.C. Marmucchi (ed.), Raccolta di viaggi dalla scoperta del nuovo continente, Prato, 1842, p. 3, Vespucci to Piero Soderini.

59 A.E. Hamill, 'A Fifteenth-Century Tapestry', Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, 3rd series, vol. 28, 1949, p. 82; Vaux de Foietier, 'Iconographie'; Vaux de Foletier, Mille anni, p. 231; P. Vandormael, The Castle of Gaasbeek, Gaasbeek, 1984, p. 23; Cutler, 'Exotics'.

60 Giorgio Interiano, La Vita & sito de Zichi: chiamati Ciarcassi: historia notabile, Venice, 1502; Teofilo Folengo, Opere, ed. C. Cordie, Milan and Naples, 1977, Orlandino, 7, xii, pp. 4‑5.


Giorgione's Tempest p. 10

The visual parallels between the Tempest gypsies and other primitive families have been noticed before. Pictures and drawings of wild (or woodhouse) families and satyr families by Cranach and Altdorfer have been adduced, and one might expect that Altdorfer's closely contemporary picture in Berlin, dated 1507, showing a satyr family looking on while a wildman attacks a traveller (plate 11), had an appeal much like Giorgione's picture.[61] A particularly charming print of a woodhouse family after the Housebook Master shows the mother and father sitting while the children play about them;[62] this is a composition anticipating Italian representations of satyr families. Homeless beings such as wildmen were similarly associated with bad weather.[63] With equal justification the Tempest has been compared to depictions of Adam and Eve after their Expulsion, who, cast out in the wilderness, at the beginning of the world, were necessarily primitives.[64] Glorgione's gypsies may further be compared to representations of New World Indians, or to other parents exiled with their child to the wilderness, like Milon and Berta with Orlando, or Hecuba with Paris in his own Birth of Paris.

The peculiar pose of Giorgione's gypsy may reinforce the parallel to satyr families in particular. As a pictorial subject, the satyr family was an Early Renaissance invention, based upon or adapted from the centaur family both reported in lost, and visible in surviving, classical art. Although no early translation has survived, Lucian's description in his Zeuxis of a painting by Zeuxis of a family of centaurs became a subject for artists in the 1490s.[65] Philostratus Elder also describes a painting of the subject, and it can be found on sarcophagi.[66] However, in the miniature depiction after Lucian's Zeuxis inserted into his Uffizi Calumny of Apelles, Botticelli changed the babies being led by the centaur mother into little satyrs, and again Dürer evolved his engraving of a Satyr Family from preliminary drawings of a centaur family evidently based on Lucian.[67] It is likely, too, that Mantegna's image of a suckling satyress recorded in a description in Sannazaro's Arcadia derived from Lucian, as Sannazaro, in his own description of ‘una ninfa ignuda, con tutti I membri bellissimi, dai piedi in fuori, che erano come quegli de le capre’ (a nude nymph, all of whose limbs were very beautiful, except for her feet, which were those of goats), echoes Lucian's Greek: ‘. . . but he made the upper part of the female [centaur] very beautiful, except for the ears; they were the only satyrish thing about her.’[68] Unfortunately, Mantegna's image is lost, although a drawing in the Louvre represents the neighbouring scene described by Sannazaro, with just the leg of the satyr mother visible,[69] and the upright satyr mother in Minerva expelling the Vices in the Louvre has the same physical characteristics (including goatish ears).

 

FOOTNOTES

 


 

61 E. Wind, Giorgione's Tempesta, Oxford, 1969, figs. 14, 15; cf. also L.F. Kaufmann, The Noble Savage, Satyrs and Satyr‑Families in Renaissance Art, Philadelphia, 1979; L. Silver, 'Forest Primeval: Albrecht Altdorfer and the German wilderness landscape', Simiolus, vol. 13, 1983, p. 4; C.S. Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape, London, 1993, pp. 97‑98. There is no agreement as to what exactly is going on in Altdorfer's picture; I give only my own interpretation.

62 Livelier than Life, cat. no. 93.

63 Cf. R. Bernheimer, Wildmen in the Middle Ages, Cambridge MA, 1952.

64 Settis, Tempesta interpretata, p. 85f. and figs.

65 A. Giuliano, 'La famiglia dei centauri', in Studi di storia in onore di Valeriano Mariani, Naples, 1972, p. 123; E. Mattioli, 'I traduttori umanistici di Luciano', in Studi in onore di Raffaello Spongano, Bologna, 1980, p. 205; M.J. Marek, Ekphrasis und Herrscherallegorie, Worms, 1985, p. 9.

66 Imagines, vol. 2, iii; example of a sarcophagus in F. Matz, Die dionysischen Sarkophage, Berlin, 1968‑75, vol. 3, no. 177.

67 R. Lightbown, Sandro Botticelli, London, 1978, revised edn London, 1990, cat. B79; Winkler, Zeichnungen Albrecht Dürer, cat. nos. 344 and 345; see further E. Panofsky, Albrecht Dürer, Princeton, 1948, I, p. 87.

68 Jacopo Sannazaro, Opere volgari, ed. A. Mauro, Bari, 1961, prosa xi, p. 101.

69 No. 5072, now 2854; cf. O. Kurz, 'Sannazaro and Mantegna', in Studi in onore di Riccardo Filangieri, Naples, 1959, vol. 2, p. 277; Andrea Mantegna, exh. cat., Royal Academy, London, and Metropolitan Museum, New York, 1992, cat. no. 149.


Giorgione's Tempest: p. 11

It is possible, though not verifiable, that Mantegna's Satyress was not merely seated but, like Giorgione's gypsy, half‑seated and half‑kneeling; while her right calf was upright, as the Louvre drawing reveals, with the leg bending sharply at the knee, she may have rested her left knee on the ground. If so, she would have echoed the pose of Zeuxis's centauress, whose ‘feet in front were not yet stretched out, as of one lying on her side, but one of them was bent with the hoof turned under, like one crouching, while the other was raised and taking a grip on the ground, as when horses try to leap up’. In any case an antique statue in the same pose, the so-called Doidalsas type of kneeling nude, with one leg folded under the body and the other raised was known and imitated at Mantua in the last years of the fifteenth century.[70] Antico, with whom Mantegna shared both tastes and patrons, had made a statuette for bishop Ludovico Gonzaga known as ‘la nuda della bissa scudelara’ (the nude of the tortoise) some time before 1498; examples are in the Thyssen Collection, the
Liebieghaus and Capodimonte (plate 12).[71] The statuette took its name from the tortoise on which Venus knelt in a marble version of the Doidalsas type that is first recorded about 1500 in the possession of the Massimi family in Rome, but which Antico would have seen on a visit in 1495 or in 1497, and Mantegna his earlier visit in 1488–89.[72] Furthermore, Antico and bishop Ludovico had the idea of partnering the nude with a statuette of a satyr, himself derived from a second antique source, the Pan of the Pan and Daphnis group now in the Uffizi. (The Daphnis would be the basis of an early sixteenth‑century Venetian picture of a nude boy playing the flute In Munich, sometimes attributed to Palma.)[73] Perhaps in order to make the figures fit better together, Antico evolved a more upright half‑kneeling, half‑sitting figure (examples in the Victoria and Albert Museum and Kunsthistorisches Museum);[74] it is shown to be a variant by its similarity not only in the lower body but also in the arms and hands, with which the satyress originally sewed ‘a pair of trousers’ – the Victoria and Albert figure is currently identified as an Atropos. It is likely that Giorgione's is yet another variant of this classically derived pose. The half‑kneeling, half-sitting posture had a wide circulation, perhaps also inspiring the initial versions of Leonardo's Leda (plate 13),[75] and notably found on the verso of a North Italian drawing datable to about 1503 with the Apollo Belvedere on the recto. [76]

 

FOOTNOTES


70 Cf. A. Allison, 'Antique Sources of Leonardo's Leda', Art Bulletin, vol. 56, 1974, p. 375.

71 U. Rossi, 'I medaglisti del Rinascimento alla Corte di Mantova', Rivista italiana di numismatica, vol. 1, 1888, 1, p. 25; 11, p. 161; 11 (cont.), p. 433, at p. 171; H.J. Hermann, 'Pier Jacopo Alari‑Bonacolsi, gennannt Antico', Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses, vol. 28, 1910, p. 201, at p. 261; Natur und Antike in der Renaissance, exh. cat., Liebieghaus, Frankfurt, 1985‑86, cat. nos. 114, 115.

72 Allison, 'Antique Sources'; Bober and Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists, cat. no. 18 (other statues).

73 Rossi, 'Medaglisti', p. 174; Hermann, 'Alari-Bonacolsi', p. 272; the picture is P. Rylands, Palma Vecchio, Cambridge, 1992, cat. no. 14.

74 Splendours of the Gonzaga, exh. cat., Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1981‑82, cat. no. 56.

75 Royal Library, Windsor, no. 12337r; cf. Allison, 'Antique Sources'; also, however, for a different  view, A. Smart and M. Kemp, 'Leonardo's Leda: Roman sources and a new chronology', Art History, vol. 3, 1980, p. 160.

76 British Museum 1946‑7‑13‑1262; Bober and Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists, pl. 97a. See also a print by Marcantonio Raimondi (Bartsch 313) and Licinio's picture at Ainwick Castle of a sculptor and pupils, in which the sculptor holds a statuette of the type, and a pupil holds a drawing after it (L. Vertova, Bernardino Licinio, in I pittori bergarnaschi dal XIII al XIX secolo: Il Cinquecento, I, Bergamo, 1975, p. 373, cat. no. 1). Another drawing after the nude in the Accademia in Venice that might have been associated has now been attributed to Andrea Solari and dated to his time in Rome after 1514 (D.A. Brown, Andrea Solario, Milan, 1987, cat. no. 64).


Giorgione's Tempest p. 12

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.

 


Giorgione's Tempest p. 13

For emotional effect the Tempest may be compared specifically to Cranach's exquisite small panel of The Holy Family in a Landscape in Berlin, of 1504 (plate 14), in which not only the Virgin looks out towards the viewer but St Joseph also, humbly doffing his hat, as it were in response to the viewer's peeking in at the refugee family with its precious child.[81] There is a marked similarity between the St Anne and her child of Jacopo de' Barbari's early print of The Holy Family in a Landscape and Glorgione's gypsy and her child.[82] Whether or not it was produced after he left Venice, Jacopo's engraving was evidently a response to Schongauer's and Dürer's prints of the Madonna in a landscape. Similarly, some influence on Giorgione from the north in the years between his earliest work c. 1500 and the Tempest is likely enough: artists such as Cranach or Altdorfer, immediately in the wake of Dürer, were tending just in the years around 1505 to liberate amorous subjects from their conventional moralizing framework and depict them sympathetically, humorously or ironically, but above all from observation; they were beginning as well to isolate effects achieved in religious art and to develop a secular iconography for them. It is no easier to characterize the reception of these works than of Giorgione's, but there is a parallel in the novel exploration of secular themes, and in the depiction of the ‘natural’ behaviour of creatures from the lower orders for the delectation of patrons high in society.

This interest was not properly or fully an attitude of 'soft primitivism'.[83] Although it was widely acknowledged in the Renaissance that wild beasts caring for their young demonstrated the virtue of charity,[84] that did not render their  condition desirable for a human being. The question was discussed, for example, by Bartolommeo della Fonte or Fonzio in his discourse On Human Excellence. Even though they might even outdo humankind in 'charity', creatures without reason, to quote Fonzio, ‘relate everything to pleasure [voluptatem], and would declare pleasure to be the one thing they desired and sought, if by the grace of nature they could speak.'[85] But pleasure was not the proper goal of Christian men. Although Giorgione's picture does not explicitly moralize, Giorgione's couple are depicted in their animal pleasures, which ultimately can only have been regarded with the same disapprobation as the pleasures of lovers in Love Gardens or as Mantegna's satyress, whom we find among the vices being expelled by Minerva in his Expulsion of the Vices. In compensation for the moralization dropping away, there is a distance between viewer and subject, who belong to different orders. One has the sensation before Giorgione's picture that the gypsy family is a vision carried to the viewer as if in a bubble, within the landscape to which they belong, where the viewer peeps in on them. Their world of landscape or nature is a separate world from the viewer's world of city, palace and garden – to echo a distinction made by Filenio Gallo in the dedication to his Venetian pastoral of the 1480s, Safira.[86] In Altdorfer's 1507 picture in Berlin the idyllic family in the foreground look over to a savage attack on a member of civilization.

 

FOOTNOTES


81 M.J. Friedländer and J. Rosenberg, Die Gemälde von Lucas Cranach, Basle 1979, cat. no. 10; D. Koepplin and T. Falk, Lukas Cranach. Gemilde, Zeichnungen, Druckgraphik, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum, Basle, 1974, p. 523.

82 Hind, Early Italian Engraving, vol. 5, Jacopo no. 5; Levenson, Jacopo de'Barbari, cat. no. 15.

83 Cf. A.O. Lovejoy and G. Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, Baltimore, 1935, chap. 1.

84 Cf. Wind, Giorgione’s Tempesta, p. 4 and notes; also, for example, Bartolommeo Fonzio, On Human Excellence, quoted C. Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness, London, 1970, p. 403, note 15, or Perottino in Gli Asolani, in Bembo, Prose e rime, ed. Dionisotti, I, x, p. 331, both testifying to 'charity' among wild beasts.

85 Quoted Trinkaus, Image and Likeness, p. 403, n. 1,5.

86 See M.A. Grignani, 'Un trio bucolico a Venezia', in Studi di filologia e letteratura  offerti a Carlo Dionisotti, Milan and Naples, 1973, p. 77; ed. M.A. Grignani, Filenio Gallo, Rime, Florence, 1973.


Giorgione's Tempest p. 14

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.

 


Giorgione's Tempest p. 15

The Tempest had no obvious sequel, although the small Soldier Family now in the Fogg Art Museum surely derived from it.[88] Instead, Giorgione moved from a venture into ‘ponentine’ (transalpine) subject-matter constituted by the interesting or exotic in the contemporary world back to a more classical iconography. Conceptually the Tempest is close to pastoral works such as Titian's Three Ages of Man in Edinburgh or the Louvre Concert champêtre,[89] as is also suggested by a seventeenth‑century Dutch drawing from the circle of Rembrandt in Chatsworth, which is with little doubt a copy of an early sixteenth‑century Venetian drawing (plate 15).[90] It recalls simultaneously the Tempest and its Fogg derivative, the Concert champêtre, the Ages of Man and southern German prints and drawings of amorous couples in the countryside.

It is my hope that this article will have closed one chapter in the history of the discussion of this famous picture and opened another. No doubt questions stemming from earlier approaches will continue to be asked – one that has not here been confronted, for example, is: What does the column symbolize? In my opinion it is no more symbolic than the trees: it must be appreciated that the architectural construct of which the column forms part is very much like the background motifs of Giorgione's lost frescos on the Fontego de’ Todeschi, and that it has an important role in establishing the perspectival recession. I hope, however, that less ingenuous and more interesting questions, that do not start from the basis that the picture is an enigma, can henceforth be raised. In conclusion, one tantalizing entry from Sanudo’s Diaries may dispel anachronistic notions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ and suggest a better founded idea of the Tempest’s historical context than has hitherto prevailed.[91]

 

FOOTNOTES

 


88 Pignatti, Giorgione, cat. A7; H.T. Goldfarb, 'An  Early Masterpiece by Titian rediscovered, and its stylistic implications’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 26, July 1984, p. 419; Hale, Artists and Warfare, p. 91.

89 In the Warburg Institute photograph library the Tempest has always been filed under 'Arcadian Life'.

90 No. 914; M. Jaffe, The Devonshire Collection of Italian Drawings, Venetian and North Italian Schools, London, 1994, cat. no. 921, 'after the Fondaco de' Tedeschi' (absurdly). Thanks to the courtesy of Peter Day, I was able to examine the original at Chatsworth.

91 Marin Sanudo, Diarii, eds. R. Fulin et al.,Venice, 1879‑1904, 16, col. 252.

 


Giorgione's Tempest p. 16

According to Sanudo, the reception given in Venice to Bartolomeo d’Alviano in May 1513 after his release from captivity and reinstatement as commander-in-chief of the Venetian forces included a tour of the city’s artistic landmarks. After seeing

'the treasures of St Mark in the sanctuary; and he also wanted to see the pala [d'Oro] … then he went for compline to the Minor Friars … finally they came to see the house of ser Andrea Loredan [now known as the Vendramin‑Calergi, on the Grand Canal, one of the greatest palaces in Venice, newly built by Mauro Codussi] and there he was given a meal. Item, yesterday, after supper, he was at vespers at San Biagio Catoldo [where the Stucky Mill now bulks] to hear the nuns sing, and afterwards to see the house of the Vendramini there on the Zudeca, and especially the mezadì, which is a marvellous thing.'

Mezadò or mezadì is a Venetian dialect equivalent to studiolo;[92] the Vendramin who owned a house on the Zudeca, with a beautiful art collection, were surely the brothers Federico, Filippo, Gabriel and Andrea Vendramin, who declared several houses on the Zudeca in 1524.[93] It is an entertaining speculation, that pictures by Giorgione, including the Tempest, which Michiel seventeen years later noted in Gabriel's possession, may have been among the treasures of Venice Bartolomeo was taken to see in 1513. Speculation though it is, if works by Giorgione may have featured in a state visit three years after the artist's death, the notion that Giorgione's works fall into a special, esoteric category becomes unsustainable and Castiglione's glowing mention of the artist in The Book of the Courtier more comprehensible.[94]

 

FOOTNOTES

 


92 G. Boerio, Dizionario del dialetto Veneziano, Venice, 1856 (reprinted Florence 1983), s.v.

93 D. Battilotti and M.T. Franco, 'Regesti dei committenti e dei primi collezionisti di Giorgione', Antichità Viva, vol. 17, nos. 4‑5, 1978, p. 58f, at p. 64.

94 Baldassare Castiglione, Il libro del cortigiano, I, xxxvii (ed. V. Cian, Florence, 1947, p. 93).