United States or Bulgaria ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The question of his birthplace and origin has been in great dispute. Without going into the evidence at length, we may accept with some degree of certainty the results at which recent German research has arrived. Dr. The tradition that the artist was a natural son of one of the great Barbarella family, and that in consequence he was called Barbarelli, is now shown to be false.
This cognomen is first found in 1648, in Ridolfi's book, to which, in 1697, the picturesque addition was made that his mother was a peasant girl of Vedelago. None of the earlier writers or contemporary documents ever allude to such an origin, or speak of "Barbarelli," but always of "Zorzon de Castelfrancho," "Zorzi da Castelfranco," and the like,
The composition has just the timidity, the lack of rhythm and variety, that to the last marks that of Barbarelli. The figures have his naïve truth, his warmth and splendour of life, but not his gilding touch of spirituality to lift the uninspiring subjects a little above the actual.
In them a simplicity, a concentration akin to that of Giovanni Bellini and Bartolommeo Montagna is combined with the suavity and flexibility of Barbarelli. The St.
Giorgio Barbarelli, known as 'Giorgione, in Italian, 'big, or, as I have heard it better translated, 'strapping George' was born at Castelfranco, in Treviso, about 1477, the same year in which Titian was born. Nothing is known of his youth before he came to Venice and studied in the school of Gian Bellini along with Titian.
It is by no means certain, all the same, that this question of influence imparted and submitted to can with advantage be argued with such absoluteness of statement as has been the rule up to the present time, both on the one side and the other. It should be remembered that we are dealing with three young painters of about the same age, working in the same art-centre, perhaps, even, for a time in the same studio issuing, at any rate, all three from the flank of Giovanni Bellini. In a situation like this, it is not only the preponderance of age two or three years at the most, one way or the other that is to be taken into account, but the preponderance of genius and the magic gift of influence. It is easy to understand how the complete renewal, brought about by Giorgione on the basis of Bellini's teaching and example, operated to revolutionise the art of his own generation. He threw open to art the gates of life in its mysterious complexity, in its fulness of sensuous yearning commingled with spiritual aspiration. Irresistible was the fascination exercised both by his art and his personality over his youthful contemporaries; more and more did the circle of his influence widen, until it might almost be said that the veteran Gian Bellino himself was brought within it. With Barbarelli, at any rate, there could be no question of light received back from painters of his own generation in exchange for that diffused around him; but with Titian and Palma the case was different. The germs of the Giorgionesque fell here in each case upon a fruitful soil, and in each case produced a vigorous plant of the same family, yet with all its Giorgionesque colour of a quite distinctive loveliness. Titian, we shall see, carried the style to its highest point of material development, and made of it in many ways a new thing. Palma, with all his love of beauty in colour and form, in nature as in man, had a less finely attuned artistic temperament than Giorgione, Titian, or Lotto. Morelli has called attention to that element of downright energy in his mountain nature which in a way counteracts the marked sensuousness of his art, save when he interprets the charms of the full-blown Venetian woman. The great Milanese critic attributes this to the Bergamasque origin of the artist, showing itself beneath Venetian training. Is it not possible that a little of this frank unquestioning sensuousness on the one hand, of this terre
Barbarelli never absolutely threw off the trammels of the Quattrocento, except in his portraits, but retained to the last not as a drawback, but rather as an added charm the naïveté, the hardly perceptible hesitation proper to art not absolutely full-fledged.
And if Bellini wanted to adopt him, treat him as his son indeed, kissing him on the cheek when he came back just from a day's visit to Mestre, whose business was it? Oho! Besides that, his name isn't Giorgione it is Giorgio Barbarelli. And didn't this Giorgio Barbarelli, and Tiziano from Cadore, and Espero Carbonne, and that Gustavo from Nuremberg, and the others paint most of Gian's pictures?
It mattered not to him that the picture was very old, that it had been painted by Giorgio Barbarelli centuries before his "Maria" could have lived; he simply declares: "Il est vraiment d une ressemblance admirable, ressemblant jusqu'au silence de la mort!"
Giorgio Barbarelli was born at Castel Franco, a small town not far from Venice, and it was to the great city of the sea that he was sent as soon as he was old enough, there to be trained under the famous Bellini. He was a handsome boy, tall and well-built, and with such a royal bearing that his companions at once gave him the name of Giorgione, or George the Great.
Word Of The Day