Italian 1476-1510 Giorgione Galleries For his home town of Castelfranco, Giorgione painted the Castelfranco Madonna, an altarpiece in sacra conversazione form ?? Madonna enthroned, with saints on either side forming an equilateral triangle. This gave the landscape background an importance which marks an innovation in Venetian art, and was quickly followed by his master Giovanni Bellini and others.Giorgione began to use the very refined chiaroscuro called sfumato ?? the delicate use of shades of color to depict light and perspective ?? around the same time as Leonardo. Whether Vasari is correct in saying he learnt it from Leonardo's works is unclear ?? he is always keen to ascribe all advances to Florentine sources. Leonardo's delicate color modulations result from the tiny disconnected spots of paint that he probably derived from manuscript illumination techniques and first brought into oil painting. These gave Giorgione's works the magical glow of light for which they are celebrated. Most entirely central and typical of all Giorgione's extant works is the Sleeping Venus now in Dresden, first recognized by Morelli, and now universally accepted, as being the same as the picture seen by Michiel and later by Ridolfi (his 17th century biographer) in the Casa Marcello at Venice. An exquisitely pure and severe rhythm of line and contour chastens the sensuous richness of the presentment: the sweep of white drapery on which the goddess lies, and of glowing landscape that fills the space behind her, most harmoniously frame her divinity. The use of an external landscape to frame a nude is innovative; but in addition, to add to her mystery, she is shrouded in sleep, spirited away from accessibility to her conscious expression. It is recorded by Michiel that Giorgione left this piece unfinished and that the landscape, with a Cupid which subsequent restoration has removed, were completed after his death by Titian. The picture is the prototype of Titian's own Venus of Urbino and of many more by other painters of the school; but none of them attained the fame of the first exemplar. The same concept of idealized beauty is evoked in a virginally pensive Judith from the Hermitage Museum, a large painting which exhibits Giorgione's special qualities of color richness and landscape romance, while demonstrating that life and death are each other's companions rather than foes. Apart from the altarpiece and the frescoes, all Giorgione's surviving works are small paintings designed for the wealthy Venetian collector to keep in his home; most are under two foot (60 cm) in either dimension. This market had been emerging over the last half of the fifteenth century in Italy, and was much better established in the Netherlands, but Giorgione was the first major Italian painter to concentrate his work on it to such an extent ?? indeed soon after his death the size of such paintings began to increase with the prosperity and palaces of the patrons.  Related Paintings of Giorgione :. | Pastoral ensemble | The Adoration of the Shepherds | La Tempesta | The Tempest | THe Tempest |
Related Artists:
Luca Penni
Florence 1500/04-Paris 1557
RICHTER, Johan
Swedish painter, Venetian school (b. 1665, Tukholma, d. 1745, Venezia).was a Baroque painter, born in Sweden, but painting mainly landscapes or veduta of Venice. Richter was born in Stockholm and died in Venice. He was known to be active in Venice by 1717. He was influenced by Luca Carlevarijs.
WITTE, Emanuel de
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, ca.1617-1691 Dutch painter. He was one of the last and, with Pieter Saenredam, one of the most accomplished 17th-century artists who specialized in representing church interiors. He trained with Evert van Aelst (1602-57) in Delft and in 1636 joined the Guild of St Luke at Alkmaar, but he was recorded in Rotterdam in the summers of 1639 and 1640. In October 1641 his daughter was baptized in Delft, where he entered the Guild of St Luke in June 1642 and lived for a decade, moving to Amsterdam c. 1652. He began his long career as an unpromising figure painter, as can be seen in the Vertumnus and Pomona (1644) and two small pendant portraits (1648; all Rotterdam, Mus. Boymans-van Beuningen). Jupiter and Mercury in the House of Philemon and Baucis (1647) and a Rembrandtesque Holy Family