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 :. | Sleeping Venus | THe Tempest | Pastoral Concert (Fete champetre) | Portrait of a Young Woman | 1510 Museo del Prado, Madrid |
Related Artists:
Aurelio de Figueiredo
painted Girl at the piano in 1892
Max Buri
1868-1915,Swiss painter. While still at school he was given drawing lessons by Paul Volmar (1832-1906) in Berne. From 1883 he was a pupil of Fritz Schider (1846-1907) in Basle, where he became acquainted with the works of Hans Holbein the younger and Arnold B?cklin. In 1886 he went to the Akademie der Bildenden K?nste in Munich, transferring in 1887 to Simon Holl?sy painting school. After seeing the works of the French Impressionists exhibited in Munich, he moved to the Acad?mie Julian in Paris in 1889. He made several journeys to Algeria, Holland, Belgium and England, and in 1893 he returned to Munich to study under Albert von Keller. In 1898 he settled in Switzerland, living first at Lucerne, then from 1903 in Brienz, near Interlaken. About 1900, influenced by the paintings of Ferdinand Hodler, Buri moved on from his early genre pictures, which were in mawkish shades of pink in the style of Keller and H?llosy, to achieve an individual style that brought him great popularity. He established his reputation with Village Politicians (1904; Basle, Kstmus.). He painted mainly the landscape and people of the Bernese Oberland, often depicting single figures and groups in front of bare indoor walls in realistic everyday scenes. The expressiveness of the compositions is achieved by clear contours and powerful clearly differentiated surfaces in local colours. Buri works are essentially populist rather than intellectual and avoid Hodler strict parallelism and Symbolist content.
Johann Wilhelm Preyer
painted A Still Life with Peaches and Grapes on a Marble Ledge in 1803-1889