The Art of Giorgione

Giorgione (born Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco; c. 1477/8–1510) was an Italian painter of the High Renaissance in Venice, whose career was cut off by his death at a little over 30. Giorgione is known for the elusive poetic quality of his work, though only about six surviving paintings are acknowledged for certain to be his work. The resulting uncertainty about the identity and meaning of his art has made Giorgione one of the most mysterious figures in European painting.

Together with Titian, who was slightly younger, he is the founder of the distinctive Venetian school of Italian Renaissance painting, which achieves much of its effect through colour and mood, and is traditionally contrasted with the reliance on a more linear disegno of Florentine painting.



The painting was originally attributed to Giorgione, but modern critics assign it more likely to his pupil Titiаn, due to the figures' robustness which was typical of his style. It is also likely that Giorgione (whose works included elements such as music, the pastoral idleness and simultaneous representation of the visible and invisible) began the work, and then, after his death in 1510, it was finished by Titian