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Updated: June 20, 2025
Claude Phillips, in his Life of Titian, "is the soberly tinted yet sumptuous picture in its general arrangement, as in its general tone, and in this respect it is the fitting companion and the descendant of Giorgione's 'Antonio Broccardo' at Buda-Pesth, of his 'Knight of Malta' at the Uffizi.
He brought the canvas from the wall and placed it on the easel and stood back, examining it critically. His face lighted and he hummed softly, gazing at the rough outline.... Slowly, in the smudge of the vague face, gleaming eyes formed themselves Giorgione's eyes! They looked out at him, pathetic and fierce. With an exclamation of disgust he threw down the brush.
The face of my friend with the great Venetian name was like one of Giorgione's pictures, of that soft and mellow colorlessness that recalls the poet's line, "E smarrisce 'l bel volto in quel colore Che non è pallidezza, ma candore," or the Englishman's version of the same thought, "Her face, oh, call it fair, not pale!"
In Giorgione's own lifetime, the exact measure of the opposition is not easy to gauge, but it bore fruit a few years later in the machinations of the official Bellinesque party to keep Titian out of the Ducal Palace when he was seeking State recognition, Nevertheless, Giambellini, even at his age, found it advisable to modulate into the newer key, as may be seen in his "S. Giovanni Crisostomo enthroned," where not only is the conception lyrical and the treatment romantic, but the actual composition is on the lines of the essentially Giorgionesque equilateral triangle.
Palma Vecchio, Mareschalco, and Pennacchi all borrowed it for their own use, a proof that Giorgione's altar-piece acquired an early celebrity. Giovanelli Palace, Venice Exquisite feeling is equally conspicuous in the other two works universally ascribed to Giorgione.
Wind and rain and the salt sea air have entirely ruined these frescoes now, and there are but few of Giorgione's pictures left to us, but that perhaps makes them all the more precious in our eyes. Even his drawings are rare, and the one you see here is taken from a bigger sketch in the Uffizi Gallery of Florence.
Showing through the frankly human loveliness of Giorgione's women there is after all a higher spirituality, a deeper intimation of that true, that clear-burning passion, enveloping body and soul, which transcends all exterior grace and harmony, however exquisite it may be in refinement of voluptuousness.
Titian's chalk-studies, Fra Bartolommeo's, so singularly akin to Andrea del Sarto's, Giorgione's pen-and-ink sketch for a Lucretia, are seen at once by their richness and blurred outlines to be the work of colourists. Signorelli's transcripts from the nude, remarkably similar to those of Michelangelo, reveal a sculptor rather than a painter.
This in itself is not enough to disqualify Titian, but it is a factor in that cumulative proof by which I hope Giorgione's claim may be sustained. The marble parapet again is a feature in Giorgione's work, but not in Titian's.
Not that Titian necessarily appropriated Giorgione's work, and passed it off as his own, but we know that on the latter's death Titian completed several of his unfinished pictures, and in one instance, we are told, added a Cupid to Giorgione's "Venus."
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