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 :. | The Judgment of Solomon | The Castelfranco Madonna, before recent cleaning | Madonna and Child with SS.ANTHONY AND rOCK | Ovadret | Young Man with Arrow |
Related Artists:
Robert Swain Gifford
(December 23, 1840 - January 13, 1905) was an American landscape painter. He was influenced by the Barbizon school. Much of his work focuses on the landscapes of New England, where he was born. He, along with Victorian contemporaries from the White Mountain and Hudson River Schools, helped immortalize the majestic cliffs of Grand Manan in the Bay of Fundy. His painting from the island, "Pettes Cove," is illustrative of his masterful marine work. In the 1870s, he undertook several journeys to Europe and the Middle East and painted some subjects from those regions. In 1899, he was an artist on the famous Harriman Alaska Expedition. Some of his works hang in the most prominent galleries in the USA, including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC. He was a member of the Society of American Artists.
Christian Seybold
1690/7-1768 German painter, active in Austria. He went to Vienna in his youth and, apparently self-taught (Hagedorn), became a portrait-painter. His earliest known work, surviving only in an engraving (1728) by Andreas Schmutzer (1700-40) and Josef Schmutzer, is a portrait of Graf Johann Adam Questenberg in the formal Baroque style. Subsequently, under the influence of Balthasar Denner, he turned to a more intimate style of representation,
Etienne Dinet
1861-1929