Today, in our Masterpiece section we discuss Giorgione's "Three Ages of Man", the third in our series of famous but mysterious painting of the Renaissance. Earlier we had discussed Giorgione's "Tempest", the most popular painting in the famed Accademia in Venice; as well as Titian's "Sacred and Profane Love", the most popular work of art in Rome's magnificent Borghese Gallery. Click on the image to enlarge.
Giorgione is the most mysterious and perhaps the greatest of all
Venetian Renaissance painters. The mystery stems partly from the fact that he
died at about the early age of 33 and left behind little biographical
information. We only have a handful of contemporary references as well as the
brief and often unreliable biography in Vasari’s Lives of the Eminent Painters,
written decades after Giorgione’s death in 1510.
Moreover, as was the custom, Giorgione never signed any of his paintings
and scholars have disagreed for centuries over questions of attribution.
Finally, for those few paintings definitely given to Giorgione’s hand,
controversy has raged over their subject or meaning.
A good example is the so-called Three Ages of Man, currently in
the Pitti Palace in Florence. The name of the painting is pure guesswork
stemming only from the obvious disparity in ages of the three men. One appears
to be about 60, another in his early thirties, and the last a young man in his
teens.
Scholars today object to the popular title. Some think the painting represents a music lesson and that the man on the viewer’s right is pointing to
musical notes on the paper held by the young man. Others claim that it
represents the education of the young emperor/philosopher Marcus Aurelius. Others just throw up their hands and
claim that it contains, like other Giorgione works, multiple levels of meaning.
However, the most spectacular element of this extraordinary
painting has so far received little notice. Venetian painters were known for
their coloration. Just look at the garments of the three men. Nothing in a
Renaissance painting is there by accident or whim. The colors in this painting
provide a major clue to its real subject.
As far as I know no one has suggested that the painting has a
sacred subject, but yet, it appears that Giorgione has depicted a scene from
the nineteenth chapter of the Gospel of St. Matthew. It is the story of
the encounter of Jesus with the young man of great wealth.
In Matthew’s account the young man asked Jesus what he could do to
attain eternal life. Jesus told
him to keep the Commandments, and specifically named the most important. The
man replied that he had done so but still felt that something was wanting. Jesus
then uttered the famous words, “If thou wilt be perfect, go, sell what thou hast, and give to
the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” The
gospel relates that the young man went away sad for he had many possessions.
How has
Giorgione depicted this story and who is the third man? The man in the middle is obviously young and the golden lapels of
his garment as well as his fashionable hat indicate that he is well to do. He
is holding a piece of paper or parchment that contains some indecipherable
writing that under magnification hardly looks like Renaissance musical
notation.
On the right any Christian, Venetian or otherwise, would
immediately recognize the visage of Jesus. There is no halo or nimbus but
Giorgione never employed that device. The pointed finger is certainly
characteristic of Jesus. Here he points not at a sheet of music but at the
Commandments, which the gospel account has just enumerated.
Jesus wears a green garment or vestment, certainly an unusual
color for him. In fact, it looks like the robe or chasuble worn by a priest
during Mass. At the hand of Jesus we can also see the white sleeve of the
“alb,” a long white robe always worn under the chasuble. Green is the color
used by the Catholic Church during Ordinary time, that part of the Church year
not identified with any of the great feasts.
The third man is St. Peter. He is the only other person identified
in Matthew’s account of this incident.
He stands on the left, head turned toward the viewer. Giorgione uses
Peter as an interlocutor, a well-known Renaissance artistic device designed to
draw the viewer into the painting and encourage emotional participation. The old man’s face is the traditional
iconographical rendering of Peter with his baldhead and short stubby beard. As
Anna Jameson noted many years ago, Peter is often portrayed as ”a robust old
man, with a broad forehead, and rather coarse features.”
The color of Peter’s robe is also liturgically significant. Peter
is rarely shown wearing red, but Giorgione has chosen to show him wearing the
color reserved for the feast days of the martyrs. In the gospel account
immediately after the young man went away sad, Peter, speaking for the other
disciples as well as for the viewer of Giorgione’s painting, had asked, “Behold we have
left all and followed thee: what then shall we have?”
In the first
decade of the 16th century Venice was at the apex of its glory. It
would suffer a great defeat at the end of the decade during the War of the
League of Cambrai but until that time it was arguably the wealthiest and most
powerful of all the European nations. It was certainly the only one that dared
confront the mighty Ottoman Empire.
Nevertheless,
some young Venetian patricians were wondering whether the whole life of
politics, commercial rivalry, and warfare was worthwhile. One of them, Tommaso
Giustiniani, a scion of one of the greatest families, did actually sell all his
possessions, including his art collection, in order to live as a hermit in a
Camaldolensian monastery. At one point he wrote to a few friends, who were also
considering a similar move, about the futility of their daily lives. He argued
that Venetian life was agitated, completely outward, and continually dominated
by ambition. It was the reason for all their worry. “If, then, a Stoic
philosopher appeared to free their minds from all these disturbances, his
efforts would be in vain, so completely does agitation dominate and enfetter
their whole lives. How can anyone not feel disgust for such an empty
existence?”
Peter and the
other disciples were shocked when Jesus said that it would be harder for a rich
man to enter the kingdom of heaven, than for a camel to pass through the eye of
a needle. “Who then can be saved,” they asked? The response of Jesus was full
of hope: “With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”
Green, the liturgical color used throughout the Church year, is also the color
of hope.
“The Rich Young Man,” the name we can
now give to the painting in the Pitti Palace, would certainly appear to have an
historical context in Giorgione’s time. Five hundred years after the death of
this short-lived genius perhaps we can begin to understand that Giorgione was a
unique and original painter of sacred subjects.
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