Birth of Urbino Venus

  by Akira Kato

June 29, 2002

Giorgione left an indelible imprint in the world of painting with his work of “Pastoral Concert”, which affected the minds of even modern painters—let alone those of his contemporaries such as Titian.

Born in Castelfranco and christened as Giorgio Barbarelli, Giorgione studied under the Venetian painter Giovanni Bellini, and later invigorated the Venetian school of painting. There remain no signed and dated works of his. Most scholars accept a small core of works as his, including the Castelfranco Altarpiece (1504, Castelfranco Veneto), Three Philosophers (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), and Tempest (Accademia, Venice). Other works are attributed to him on the basis of indirect evidence, although many of these attributions are still debated.

Most of Giorgione’s paintings consist of a figure or group of figures integrated in a broad surrounding landscape. Unlike earlier pictures in this mode, these works exhibit a new and highly lyrical use of light: The lighting is soft and hazy and is used to create mood rather than to define sharply the objects in the scene. He deliberately refused to make preparatory drawings, preferring instead to compose directly on the canvas; he felt that this led to a more atmospheric rendering and to more striking color effects.

Giorgione’s innovations in subject matter were especially important in two areas: the landscape and the female nude. Prior to Giorgione, landscape scenes were taken from biblical, classical, or allegorical stories, but the Tempest appears to have no such source and stands on its own as a purely imaginative work. It gave birth to a revolution against the storytelling element in landscape painting and paved the way for later masters such as the French painter Claude Lorrain and the Dutch artist Rembrandt.

The Sleeping Venus (1510?, Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, Germany), attributed to Giorgione, pictures a reclining nude and is one of the first modern works of art in which the female figure is the principal and only subject of the picture. It inaugurated the nude in a landscape setting as one of the great themes of European art and led directly to the work of artists such as the Venetian painter Titian and the Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens.

The above Venus of Urbino was painted in 1518 by Titian.

L I N K S

Giorgione seems to have impressed Manet greatly. He also painted the Luncheon on the Grass (Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe) with an ever-lasting impression of Giorgione’s Pastoral Concert (Concert Champêtre). For more information, please visit Origin of “Luncheon”.

Who painted the first reclining nude?
For an answer, please go to this page: The First Reclining Nude