The Complete Paintings of Giorgione

The solid, undeniable facts concerning Giorgione could be contained without congestion on a postcard, and his surviving output is confined to a mere handful of pictures, most of them fairly small. Why, then, all the fuss? What accounts for the fame and the legend? Some of it, undoubtedly, springs from the very rarity of his pictures, and a great deal from the highly romantic image - the early death, and the fact that it was due to the plague said to have been caught from a lady friend. Something, again, is due to the romantic quahty inherent in the paintings themselves - the fact that in some cases they depict mysterious and enigmatic subjects which have hitherto defied elucidation. But all this fails to add up to a total explanation, and the residue must surely be made up from the quality of the pictures themselves. Giorgione happened to live and work at a magic moment in Italian and Venetian art, when new ideas about Nature and God and Antiquity, and man's relation to them, were being discussed just when several generations of technical advance had given painters the full power of illustrating them. The result, among others, was the Tempest, the quintessential Giorgione.