Giorgio Giorgione

Pastoral Concert

Giorgio Giorgione (1477-1510) was a Vene­tian painter, born at Castelfranco. Apprenticed to Giovanni Bellini, and about the age of 22 was already receiving commissions for portraits, which included one of the Doge Agostino Barberigo. He was later employed to paint an altarpiece for the Cathedral of Castelfranco and frescoes for the façade of a number of Venetian buildings. When he died of plague about the age of 32 he was one of the most famous painters of his time, and widely admired for bis powers as a musician, his love of life, and his personal charm.
The works upon which his fame most securely rests are the Concert, in the Louvre, probably one of his last paintings, and the Dresden Sleeping Venus, which was the original on which Titian's renowned Uffizi Venus and many others were based. Giorgione learned the fundamen­tals of his art from his great master, but he was probably the first of the Venetians to lib­erate painting from all traces of primitive formalism, and to make new discoveries in realistic modeling and drawing, in composition, and particularly in richness of coloring, which were eagerly seized upon by Titian and other Venetian painters of the full flower of the Renaissance.