In the time of Giovanni-Giorgione, the painters of Venice were like a fast-growing, leafy tree, and five hundred years later, if we want to see clearly the group of artists represented by this tree, we can only start from the tallest, strongest, most lush, and fullest branches, which in addition to the mysterious Giorgio inside and outside, there is also a famous disciple - Titian.
Giorgione left behind a mysterious "Tempest", which was more thorough than his teacher Bellini's 1459 tempera painting "Distress in the Garden", which is no longer a landscape figure painting, but can be seen as a landscape painting with characters.
Unfortunately, Giorgione died four years after completing the work, but the little disciple who adored him, Titian, was just beginning to emerge in the Venetian painting world.
A breakthrough in Giorgione's early works
In the previous section, I introduced Giorgione, the master of the Venetian school, and his earlier work, Castel Franco Altarpiece. This great painting was created before 1504, when he was not yet twenty-seven years old, and was custom-made by the lord of Castelfranco, the coat of arms on the pedestal of the Virgin's seat, named Tuzio. The family crest of the Lord of Constenzo.
The Virgin Mary in jesus' arms was high above, looking down under the altar, and she did not seem to pay attention to the scene in front of her, nor to the baby in the crook of her arm, but to the emotions of compassion because of the sacrifice and suffering that had been foreseen.
Beneath the altar, on the left side stands the heroic holy warrior S. Riberale. Liberale), on the right is the reserved and melancholy St. Francis.
Castel Franco Altarpiece before 1504
St. Francis gracefully spreads his left hand, like a poet who is reciting a newly completed work, inadvertently showing the audience his holy marks – god imprints on him the five scars of Jesus' crucifixion, in order to impress the world – in the past artist's portrayal of St. Francis, the gesture of showing his holy wounds is deliberate and exaggerated, never before has Giorgione handled it so lyrically, so elegantly and peacefully.
In terms of composition, he adopted a bold breakthrough, the altarpieces of the same period, either placing the seat of the Virgin in the landscape, or placing it in front of the curtain or in the building, such as Raphael's early "Colonna Altarpiece", and later the "Sistine Madonna", or like Giorgione's teacher Giovanni. Bellini's Virgin and Child and the Four Saints.
Raphael's Colonna Altarpiece circa 1504, collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Raphael, "Sistine Madonna", 1513
Bellini, Virgin and Child and the Four Saints, altarpiece of the church of San Zaccaria, 1505
But Giorgione took a very different approach to their composition, using a "pin" type of composition, so that the pedestal of the Virgin was high above, completely separated from the space where the two saints were located, especially in the treatment of the background, boldly using a wall covered with red tapestries as a separation, behind the wall is a natural landscape.
In terms of the treatment of color and light, he did not create a strong visual contrast relationship, although the color is rich, but the use of a soft relationship between light and dark, so that the characters and scenery in different spaces naturally blend.
When we compare the gray and white floor at the front of the picture and the scenery behind it, we can feel the high coordination between this soft light and color, and the overall picture gives people an idyllic lyrical impression.
How many of Giorgio's surviving works are not numerous, and most of them are controversial, and in Venice Giovanni and his own busy studio with Titian, how many are from himself, and how many are facsimiles and imitations by the painters who followed him? People have been hard to tell. The above work is one of the fewer controversial works at present, but it has also been continuously restored by later generations, at least five times in the contemporary era.
The Mysterious "The Tempest"
In this innovative altarpiece, we can already appreciate Giorgione's love and attention to the landscape. The most emblematic of his pioneering innovation in Western landscape painting is this mysterious style of "La Tempete".
The oil on canvas, now in the galleries of the Accademia de Venice, is 82 centimeters high and 73 centimeters wide, and most historians believe that the painting was completed around 1507. (Due to online review and other reasons, here is not to put the full map, please forgive)
Giorgione The Tempest Part 1505-07
The reason why it is mysterious is reflected in many aspects.
The first is the content of the painting: before an impending storm, a with a baby in her arms and a man in a red top appear in the wilderness outside the countryside. There is a stream between the man in red and the, and behind the man are the ruins of the building. Farther away, there is a bridge in the center of the picture, and in the sky after that, it is the dark clouds that roll over, and a lightning bolt clearly tears the sky apart.
Giorgione depicts the tense, dim, dull, and humid air that preceded the storm.
The highlights of the entire frame focus on the, the man in red, and the lightning bolt, which form an irregular triangle that gives the picture a certain balance in different, tension-like auras, in a strangely incongruous mix.
People have been trying to find a theme for this painting, a story that the picture (should) contain, but they have not found a suitable answer, and therefore the exact identity of the people in the painting has not been known.
Giorgione, The Tempest, Part 1505-07
More than two decades after the painting was born, some people describe the women in the painting as "Tsigamese"—the Gypsies we know as the Gypsies, a group that originated in the Punjab region of India, began to migrate out of India around the 10th century AD, and by the 16th century had spread across Europe. In 1569, some documents referred to Giorgione's painting as "The Tsigant Woman and the Shepherd".
By the 20th century, some critics believed that the lightning bolt represented Zeus (Jupiter) in ancient Greco-Roman mythology, believing that the painting depicted a woman who was jealous of Zeus's wife Hera after she was pregnant with Zeus, the child of the heavenly leader who often suffered from the problem of style (later Dionysus, the god of wine).
Hera, who has been fighting with all kinds of small threes for a long time, has played a new trick this time. She approached Semele in the form of an old woman and told her: If your husband is really a god, you should let you see him as he really is.
Semele, who did not know whether he was alive or dead, told Zeus to appear as his true face, and Zeus was blinded by love and revealed his true face.
The result of the story is that Semele was burned to death by Zeus's lightning, and the child she left behind was less than a month, zeus rescued the baby, sewed him into his thigh, and did not take him out until full term, which is one of the legends of dionysus' life. (Another version of the story is that Zeus swallowed the heart of his child, another junior, to Beimoles, giving birth to the reincarnated Dionysus.) ）
If you compare the legend about Semele, the identity of the young man in the red coat in the front row of the scene cannot be reasonably explained, and in the early part of the last century, people scanned the painting and found that the young man was originally designed as a lady in advance, which made the story more difficult to match Hera's capture of Xiao San.
It has also been suggested that the figures in Giorgione's paintings are symbolic, such as their representation of the Virgin Mary and a saint in a religious painting, or that the painting was an illustration for a poet, except that he replaced the ancient clothes with the costumes of the Venetians of the time.
It has also been suggested that the painting represents the four basic elements of nature: fire (lightning), water, earth, and wind—reminiscent of the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus's view of the origin of the world. In my previous thirteenth article, "The Greeks Who Began to Think About Beauty," I introduced it.
Heraclitus believes that the origin of the world is precisely the above four material elements, the most important of which is the "eternal living fire", which seems to correspond to the lightning in the picture, on the basis of fire, part of the material is transformed into the ocean, half of the ocean is transformed into earth, the other half is transformed into wind, fire - water - earth - wind These four elements constitute this world, and the reason why this world is harmonious is that although these substances are opposed, struggle and change, they also collectively constitute a kind of "joint opposition". Thus achieving a harmonious beauty.
Perhaps, we should not be so stubborn about the picture, but we must find a standard answer, and from the image itself alone, Giorgione undoubtedly created a model of landscape painting.
Distress in the Garden, Bellini, 1459, tempera painting
He was better than his own teacher Giovanni. Bellini's 1459 tempera painting "Distress in the Garden" was more thorough, he not only innovated the landscape painting technique, but also let the landscape shoulder the poetic, symbolic, enlightened emotional expression and more connotations, which is no longer a landscape figure painting, religious painting, historical painting, but a landscape painting with characters.
Three Teenage Titian debuts
In the time of Giovanni-Giorgione, the painters of Venice were like a tree that was growing rapidly and flourishing, and five hundred years later, we can only see clearly the group of artists represented by this tree, starting from the tallest, strongest, most lush, and fullest branches, which in addition to the mysterious Giorgio, also have a famous disciple, Titian.
Titian Vecellio was born around 1488/90–1576 in a small mountain town northeast of Venice.
At this time, Raphael was also a child who followed his father to play in the court of Urbino. Because of Titian's high lifespan, when Michelangelo died in 1564, he still had a creative career of more than ten years, that is, the elder of the Venetian school, experienced Florence, the peak of the Renaissance, and also participated in and promoted the climax of the Northern Venetian Renaissance.
In his later years, Titian painted himself a self-painted pixel sketch
Two centuries earlier, the art centers of Italy were Florence and Rome, and after several generations of efforts, a complete set of mature and perfect systems have been explored for Western painting in terms of proportion, composition, perspective, anatomy, chiaroscuro and so on. The Northern Venetian School, represented by Titian, will make a more exciting attempt on this basis.
His teacher Bellini had mastered the art of oil painting, and the reason why Titian was later known as the father of Western oil painting was that he not only had a profound influence on his contemporaries Italian painters, but also had a great influence on Western painters in different regions at different times after that, and these painters could draw up a long list:
These include Tintoretto in Venice, Rubens in the Netherlands, Van Vincent in the Netherlands. Dioc, Poussin in France, Velázquez in Spain, Rembrandt in the Netherlands, and modern painters de La Croix, Manet, Willem de Koonin, and so on.
There are two theories about the age of Titian's birth, in 1488 or 1490, there were five children in the family, and he was the second oldest. He is said to have come to Venice at the age of 9, lived with his brother Francesco at his uncle's house, and began to learn mosaic painting with a master named Sebastiano Zuccato, where he received artistic enlightenment.
Soon after, he moved to the studio of the more famous Bellini family, probably in 1505. As a protégé of the Bellini family, he first studied with his eldest brother, Gentil Bellini, because he drew too quickly, and was often accused by his teachers of drawing too spontaneously and casually. When Jantir Bellini died in 1507, he began to study painting with Giovanni Bellini.
Compared to the aging, stern, stubborn teacher, the young Titian seems to prefer his dashing, handsome master brother Giorgione. To a large extent, in Titian's early years of study and creation, this master brother gave him a lot of inspiration. Soon after, he had his own independent work.
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