Giorgione. Myth and enigma

The myth of Giorgione as a painter interested in poetry, music and philosophy as well as in alchemy and astrology still overshadows our knowledge of his life and art. Though celebrated as the father of modern Venetian painting in the 16th century, the teacher of Titian and other artists, his oeuvre still remains very small and we know only very little about his life.

In his revolutionary brushwork Giorgione skillfully combines Leonardo´s sfumato with the colours and the thin layers of paint favoured by the Old Netherlandish masters to add a new dimension to colour through light. It is impossible to construct a generally accepted catalogue of his work, and the mysterious subjects of his paintings have engendered numerous mutually incompatible interpretations. As we still do not have any secure textual sources for works such as La Tempesta, these interpretations are more a reflection of the individual breadth of knowledge of the interpreter or of changing art-historical fashions than Giorgione´s own ideas.

The chance to contrast and compare these two paintings from Venice with the Kunsthistorisches Museum´s unique holdings of masterpieces by Giorgione is made possible by this long awaited comprehensive show of the master´s most famous autograph works. Apart from the two paintings mentioned above - the Three Philosophers and Laura - the Kunsthistorisches Museum holds four other paintings with long provenances attributed to Giorgione: Boy with an Arrow, the so-called Girolamo Marcello, Boy with a Helmet, and Adoration of the Shepherds.

In addition, the show boasts important loans from other museums, for example the Madonna Benson from the National Gallery in Washington, the Portrait of a Youth (Giustiniani Portrait) from the Picture Gallery of the Staatliche Museen in Berlin, the Male Portrait from the San Diego Museum of Art, as well as the Portrait of a Youth from the Szépmüveszeti Múzeum in Budapest.

Large X-ray photographs and infra-red-reflectographies of some of Girogione´s works document interesting alterations and provide valuable insights into the artist`s process of creation.

A selection of seminal works by artists active in Venice or north of the Alps (Bellini, Titian, Catana, Dürer and Cranach from the Kunsthistorisches Museum) will help to place Giorgione´s paintings in the context of contemporary art and to document his influence on later painters.

The picture The Archducal Gallery in Brussels by David Teniers the Younger and early inventories of the imperial collection of paintings document both the provenance of the paintings and the important and glorious patronage of the Habsburg collectors in general and of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm in particular.

The exhibition is therefore not only of outstanding art-historical importance; it also offers visitors the chance to study - with the help of the paintings by Giorgione - the extremely well-documented and fascinating history of the collections now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum.