The Rough Guide to Venice and the Veneto

High Renaissance painting
While these narrative cycles were being produced Giovanni Bellini was beginning
to experiment with oil paint, which was soon to displace tempera (pigment in egg
yolk) as the preferred medium. Whereas tempera had to be applied in layers, the
long drying time of oil allowed colours to be mixed and softened, while its thick
consistency enabled artists to simulate the texture of the objects depicted. Close
examination of later paintings by Bellini shows he used his fingers to merge colours
and soften light, and two of his young assistants at the time – Giorgione and
Titian – were to explore even further the potential of the new material, developing
a specifically Venetian High Renaissance style.
Giorgione (1475–1510) seems custom-built for myth; little is known about him
other than that he was tall and handsome and he died young (possibly of plague).
The handful of enigmatic works he created were innovative in their imaginative
self-sufficiency – for instance, the Venetian collector Michiel, writing in 1530, was
unable to say precisely what the subject was of The Tempest (Accademia), perhaps
Giorgione’s most famous image. His only altarpiece, still in the cathedral at Castelfranco
(his home town), isolates the Madonna and the two saints from each other
by manipulating perspective and by placing the Madonna against a landscape while
the attendant saints stand against a man-made background. Despite the serenity
of the individual figures, the painting instils in the viewer a disquieting sense of
elusiveness.
Given his long life and huge output, Titian (c.1485–1576) is very badly represented
in his home town: a Presentation in the Temple, a Pietà left unfinished at his
death, and a couple of minor works in the Accademia; a handful in the Salute; the
Assumption and Pésaro Altarpiece in the Frari, and that’s more or less it. (Napoleon
made off with a good crop of Titians, including a Venus which he hung in his tent;
the Louvre now has a fine collection.)
Titian, like Giorgione, used the qualities of oils to evoke a diffuse light and
soften contours – in contrast with the contemporaneous art of Rome, the city of
Michelangelo, where the emphasis was on the solidity and sculptural aspects of the
objects depicted. Artists in Florence were answerable to an imperious ruling family,
in Rome they had to comply with the wishes of successive popes, but Titian’s
success was so great that he could virtually pick and choose from a host of clients
from all over the continent, and the diversity of works he produced – portraits,
allegories, devotional paintings, mythologies – remains unsurpassed in Western
art. His technical range is as impressive as the range of subject matter; the earliest
works are highly polished and precisely drawn, but in the later pieces he tested the
possibilities of oil paint to their limit, using his bare hands to scrape the canvas and
add great gobbets of paint (see the Accademia Pietà).
Giorgionesque is an adjective used to describe a number of early sixteenthcentury
Venetian painters, in reference to the enrichment of colour popular at the
time and to the increasingly oblique and suggestive approach to content. Sebastiano
del Piombo, who studied under Giovanni Bellini with Titian and Giorgione,
before moving to Rome in 1611, is one of the artists to whom the term is
applied; his altarpiece of San Giovanni Crisostomo in the eponymous church is
his best work still in Venice. Another is Palma il Vecchio (1480–1528); although
he was often frivolous in a way that Giorgione and Titian rarely were – ponds
of frothy nymphs and the like – his strongest work in Venice is a redoubtable St
Barbara in Santa Maria Formosa. The most interesting painter of this period and
type is Lorenzo Lotto (c.1480–1556), represented in the Accademia by the almost
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Venetian painting and sculpture
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