Edward Hutton: Venetian Renaissance

 

Below find Edward Hutton's thoughts on Giorgione and other great painters of the Venetian Renaissance. The painting he refers to as the soldier and the gypsy is usually called The Tempest but I believe its subject is the Rest of the Holy Family on the Flight into Egypt.

For the truth is that Giorgione, Titian, and Tintoretto are each an absolutely new impulse in painting. Fundamentally they owe nothing, accidentally even very little, to their predecessors; and if, as we have said, Titian and Tintoretto were able to find full expression because of the work of Giorgione, it is only in the way that Shakespeare and Milton may be said to owe something… to Spencer;… the work of Giorgione, Titian, and Tintoretto are absolutely new things in the world, the result of a new impulse and a new vision, individual and personal to the last degree, owing little to any school and making little of tradition. (149)

Giorgione: Tempest

For with Giorgione (1478-1510), the pupil of Giovanni Bellini…we have a new creation in Art; he is the first painter of the true “easel picture,” the picture which is neither painted for church nor to adorn a great public hall, but to hang on the wall of a room in a private house for the delight of the owner. For Giorgione the individual exists, and it is for him, for the most part, he works, and thus stands on the threshold of the modern world…. In these short thirty-two years, however, he found time to re-create Venetian painting, to return it to its origins, and to make the career of his great fellow-pupil, Titian, whom he may be said to have formed, possible. ... (160)

 It is almost the same with the Gipsy and the Soldier of Prince Giovanelli, only there, I think, anyone who has ever doubted that Giorgione was born at Castelfranco has his answer, for it is that little towered city beside the Musone that we see in the background, under that gathering storm sweeping down from the hills. (233)

 [Castelfranco] This little city…is the happy possessor of what will ever remain, I suppose, the work that is most certainly his very own—I mean the altarpiece of the Madonna enthroned with her little Son between S. Francis and S. Liberale. This glorious picture…is one of the very few Venetian pictures…which possess that serenity and peace, something in truth spellbound, that is necessary to and helps to make what I may call a religious picture. For something must be added to beauty, something must be added to art, to achieve that end which Perugino seems to have reached so easily, and which almost every Sienese painter knew by instinct how to attain. That quality is serenity, the something spellbound we find here. And Giorgione is the last Venetian master to possess that secret. Is it not the same in music? God forbid that I should claim that Palestrina is a greater master than Mozart, any more than I should claim that Giorgione is greater than Titian. It remains, however, that just as Giorgione, the Sienese and Perugino, to name no others, attained to this effect, while Titian, Tintoretto, Michelangelo, and a host of very great masters  could not, so Palestrina, Byrd, and di Lasso could achieve it, yet Mozart, Beethoven, and the rest never once in all their work--something has gone out of the world of which we are ignorant, only we miss it more and more in looking back on the beauty that was in the hearts of our fathers. (233-234)

### 

*Edward Hutton, Venice and Venetia,  London, third edition, 1929, first published 1911.