Giorgione is among the most intriguing yet enigmatic figures of the Italian Renaissance. Bernard Aikema argues that the painter’s increasingly legendary persona was forged in the seventeenth century, emerging not from verifiable historical evidence or facts, but from the art theory and cultural narratives of later Venetian commentators and critics, with Carlo Ridolfi leading the way.
Commonly hailed as a unique, almost solitary genius and acknowledgedas a forerunner to Titian’s triumphs, Giorgione is acclaimed for his poetic atmosphere, colouristic approach and his ability to convey mood and sensation – attributes that changed the course of Venetian painting. This laudatory reading originates largely with Vasari and has continued to be reinforced ever since.
In this provocative revisiting of Giorgione’s short life, oeuvre and myth, Aikema, after questioning the historical basis for this celebrated genius, shifts his focus in the second part of the book toward delineating a cluster of visually coherent paintings produced in Venice and the Veneto region in the early sixteenth century, which he terms ‘the Giorgione Group’. The idea is underpinned by placing these works within a specific artistic culture and social milieu, where the artwork, the viewer and, by extension, the art market engaged in a dynamic give-and-take to negotiate meaning and significance.
In tracing source material and historiographical assumptions back to their origins, dispelling the myth of Giorgione through a discursive sequence, the author fuses scholarly rigor with an engaging narrative voice in a way uncommon in academic art history writing. Like a tenacious police investigator who clings to the thread of his evidence, Aikema guides the reader through sources and arguments as clues unfold, as if he were finally cracking a ‘cold case’ once and for all.
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