11 Facts About Giorgione

Giorgione was an Italian painter of the Venetian school during the High Renaissance, who died in his thirties.

Giorgione is known for the elusive poetic quality of his work, though only about six surviving paintings are firmly attributed to him.

Giorgione was very closely associated with Titian; although Vasari says that Titian was Giorgione's disciple, Ridolfi says that they both were pupils of Giovanni Bellini and lived together in his home.

Giorgione was usually thought to have died and been buried on the island of Poveglia in the Venetian lagoon, but an archival document published for the first time in 2011 places his death on the island of Lazzareto Nuovo; both were used as places of quarantine in times of plague.

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 feet in either dimension.

None of Giorgione's paintings are signed and only one bears a reliable date: his portrait of Laura, one of the first to be painted in the "modern manner", distinguished by dignity, clarity, and sophisticated characterization.

Many can be read as types designed to express a mood or atmosphere, and certainly many of the examples of the portrait tradition Giorgione initiated appear to have had this purpose, and not to have been sold to the sitter.

Many art historians argue that there is not: "The best evidence, perhaps, that Giorgione's pictures were not particularly esoteric in their meaning is provided by the fact that while his stylistic innovations were widely adopted, the distinguishing feature of virtually all Venetian non-religious painting in the first half of the 16th century is the lack of learned or literary content".

The vast bulk of documentation for paintings in this period relates to large commissions for Church or government; the small domestic panels that make up the bulk of Giorgione's oeuvre are always far less likely to be recorded.

Ironically, the Allendale Nativity caused the rupture in the 1930s between Lord Duveen, who sold it to Samuel Kress as a Giorgione, and his expert Bernard Berenson, who insisted it was an early Titian.

Berenson had played a significant part in reducing the Giorgione catalogue, recognising fewer than twenty paintings.