WHO was the first modern artist.9 How about Giorgione
(46)A far-fetched notion, perhaps, but this Renaissance Venetian
revolutionized painting--and his work, focusing on subjects such as bodies,
landscapes and female beauty, was titled "modern" by the leading art commentator
of the day, Vasari. Giorgione was not alone, as illustrated
by the excellent catalogue accompanying the exhibition "Bellini, Giorgione,
Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting" now showing at the National
Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (47)What made him, and the generation of
artists he inspired, so special was his ability to absorb the new currents of
culture then flowing through Venice. A catalyst was Leonardo da Vinci, who
briefly visited Venice in 1500. In Leonardo’s drawings, Giorgione, as well as
the younger artist, Titian, and their master, Giovanni Bellini, glimpsed a new
conception of the human form, based on observation and expressed in smoky
contours and subtle shades of light and dark. Over the
subsequent 30 years, one of the most exciting periods in the history of art
unfolded. In readable, engaging essays, David Brown and Sylvia Ferino-Pagden,
the exhibition’s curators, together with a team of top scholars, tell its story.
We learn how this triumvirate of Venetian painters devoured not only Leonardo’s
ideas, but also those of Albrecht Darer, the German artist whose realistic
rendering of nature was known in Venice through prints, even before his sojourn
there in 1506-7. (48)Darer’s work taught Venetian artists that landscape
could be an independent element of a painting, rather than just a symbolic
backdrop for religious subjects. The result was a new style
full of natural movement, sensuality and poetic atmosphere. (49) Venetian
painting had long been characterized by its jewel-like color--obtained by
grinding colored glass and minerals--but now it was applied in a way that gave
art the kiss of life. Giorgione blazed the trail. A top
student of Bellini, he later forged his own style, inspired by the current vogue
for pastoral love poetry based on recently discovered ancient texts, then the
bestsellers of Venice’s flourishing printing industry. (50) He excelled at
what was known among the educated elite as the model a competition between
painting and poetry in which painters sought to prove that they could rival
poets in conveying beauty by appealing to the eyes, as well as to the mind.
This was revolutionary because it implied that painting originated in the
imagination of the artist, rather than being a simple recording of the great and
the good, history and religion. It proved painters were creators and not just
craftsmen.