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Updated: May 19, 2025
Modern criticism has recently distributed several "Giorgionesque" portraits in English collections among Licinio, Lotto, and even Polidoro! But this disintegrating process may be, and has been, carried too far. Two more small works may be mentioned which may tentatively be ascribed to Giorgione. George slaying the Dragon."
It is this renouveau of the Giorgionesque in the genius of the aged Titian that gives so exquisite a charm to the Venere del Pardo, so strange a pathos to that still later Nymph and Shepherd, which was a few years ago brought out of its obscurity and added to the treasures of the Imperial Gallery at Vienna. The sacred works of the early time are Giorgionesque, too, but with a difference.
There is nothing to remind the beholder, in conception or execution, of the exquisite Giorgionesque landscapes in the Three Ages and the Sacred and Profane Love, while the broader handling suggests rather the technical style, but in no way the beauty of the sublime prospect which opens out in the Bacchus and Ariadne.
So, too, is the spirit of the scene, so telling in its movement, gesture, and expression. Surely it is needless to translate all that is most characteristic of Giorgione in his most personal expression into a "Giorgionesque" mood of Titian. The former writers declare that it, "perhaps more than any other, approximates to the true style of Giorgione."
III. Assuming this date to be correct, no other Venetian artist but Giorgione was capable of producing so fine and admittedly "Giorgionesque" a portrait at so early a date. IV. Internal evidence points to Giorgione's authorship. It will be seen that the logic employed is identical with that by which I have tried to establish the identity of Signor Crespi's picture.
Lord Lansdowne's Giorgionesque picture of a young man crowned with vine, playing and singing to two girls in a garden, for example. The celebrated Concert of the Louvre Gallery, so charming for its landscape and so voluptuous in its dreamy sense of Arcadian luxury, is given by Crowe and Cavalcaselle to an imitator of Sebastian del Piombo. See History of Painting in North Italy, vol. ii. p. 147.
The Virgin is of a more refined and pensive type than in the Madonna with the Cherries of Vienna, or the Madonna with Saints, No. 439 in the Louvre, and the divine Bambino less robust in build and aspect. The magnificent St. Anthony is quite Giorgionesque in the serenity tinged with sadness of his contemplative mood.
The conception is wholly Giorgionesque, but the hardness of contour and the comparative lack of quality in the touch betrays another and an inferior hand. Nevertheless the portrait is of great interest, for could we but imagine it as fine in execution as in conception we should have an original Giorgione portrait before us. The features are curiously like those of the Barberigo gentleman.
His portraiture, however, especially his male portraiture, was and remained in its essence a splendid and full-blown development of the Giorgionesque ideal. It was grander, more accomplished, and for obvious reasons more satisfying, yet far less penetrating, less expressive of the inner fibre, whether of the painter or of his subject. But to return to the portrait of Berlin.
John the Baptist, in the Doria Gallery, formerly attributed to Pordenone, but by Morelli definitively placed among the Giorgionesque works of Titian, belongs to about the same time as the Sacred and Profane Love, and would therefore come in rather before than after the sojourn at Padua and Vicenza.
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