Titian: Sacred and Profane Love

 On a chance visit to Rome's Borghese Gallery in 2010, my wife and I entered a large upstairs room and were struck by Titian's famous painting, the so-called "Sacred and Profane Love." I turned to her and said, "It's Mary Magdalen." On our return home, this initial intuition led to the research that provided confirmation. I originally published my findings on Three Pipe Problem, a very popular art history blog created by Hasan Niyazi. After his untimely death, I published it on Giorgione et al... I have put the full version on academia.edu. where I call the painting "The Conversion of Mary Magdalen." Below I post a shorter version, the first in a series of posts on Titian that I will present this year. 

                 

 

Perhaps the most spectacular work of art in the magnificent collection of Rome’s Borghese Gallery is Titian’s “Sacred and Profane Love,” one of the great masterpieces of the Venetian Renaissance. Early in the last century a collector offered more for this one painting than the appraised value of the entire Museum. Measuring over 9.5 by 3.5 feet this beautiful painting seems to dominate almost an entire wall in one of the largest rooms. 

Despite its fame there has never been agreement on the subject of Titian’s painting. The title “Sacred and Profane Love” was only attached to it long after Titian’s death in an attempt to describe the two beautiful fair-haired women in the foreground. One is fully clothed in a sumptuous gown, and the other is semi-nude except for garments that billow around her but only cover her privates.

Commentators have always noted the resemblance between the two women. Some call them sisters, even twins. Most scholars have accepted the view, expressed by famed Art historian Erwin Panofsky almost 75 years ago, that the women are versions of a Neoplatonic Venus, one earthly and the other celestial. 

More recently, another famed art historian argued that Titian represented one woman in two guises. The woman was an idealized version of a bride, chaste and sexual at the same time. Indeed, the painting appears to commemorate the marriage in 1514 of a young widow, Laura Bagarotto, to a Venetian official, Niccolo Aurelio, whose coat of arms can be seen on the mysterious fountain.

I agree that Titian did depict one woman in two separate guises, but the only person who could be portrayed at the same time as a well dressed, even sumptuously dressed, woman, and as a semi-nude figure is Mary Magdalen, whose perceived life was the epitome of sexuality and chastity. 

The popularity that Mary Magdalen enjoyed during the Renaissance was different than the resurgence she is having in our own time. Today, authors like to depict her as the literal wife and sexual partner of Jesus. Feminist scholars don’t usually go so far but they elevate her to the rank of Apostle, even to the rank of first among the Apostles.

However, during the Renaissance the sinful and fallen women of the gospels were all considered to be Mary Magdalen. Indeed, it was the imputed sinfulness of her life that brought her nearer to her devotees. She was the sinner with the heart of gold who had finally seen the light. In Venice a long established tradition of venerating the penitent Magdalen went hand in hand with the largest concentration of prostitutes in Europe. 

Artists often depicted the Magdalen as a richly attired and seductive courtesan contemplating the folly of her life and considering the opportunity that had been opened up to her by the words of Jesus to sin no more. She could, however, also be portrayed as a semi-nude penitent sinner fasting and mortifying herself, according to legend, in a desert. Donatello’s penitent Magdalen; gaunt, haggard, and covered almost entirely by long hair that reaches to her ankles is the most famous fifteenth century version.

Apparently Venetian patrons preferred a beautiful to a gaunt Magdalen. Usually she would be depicted in the vestiges of her finery but at the same time tearful, sorrowful, and disheveled with breasts fully or partially exposed.

Titian became the most prolific and famous painter of Mary Magdalens. His half-length depictions of a beautiful, full-figured semi-nude show her long red hair around her body but parted to reveal bared breasts. She looks upward with the jar of ointment-- used to anoint Jesus-- beside her.

 

Titian: Mary Magdalen

However, in the “Sacred and Profane Love” Titian separated the Magdalen into both guises. The clothed woman is the courtesan contemplating the error of her ways. Contemporary preachers often complained that Venetian women in their finery could hardly be distinguished from courtesans. Some scholars believe that the folds of her gown and her spread legs are sensual and erotic but I can’t see it. To me she seems to stare off into the distance rapt in contemplation of a life changing decision. It almost appears that she is about to fall to her knees.

We notice the woman’s beautiful red hair so characteristic of Titian’s later Magdalens. The red color of her sleeve is also a Magdalen attribute as is the sprig of wild rose she holds in her hand. Her left hand rests on a container that could hold her jewels and perfumes. Both hands are gloved. Mary Magdalen was the patroness of all those engaged in producing female luxury items like perfumes and gloves. 

On the right the semi-nude woman is the newly converted, penitent Magdalen rejecting her jewels and finery. Legend had it that she spent the last 30 years of her life fasting and mortifying herself in a desert outside of Marseilles. The converted sinner in the “Sacred and Profane Love” has the same flowing red hair as well as the red garment of the courtesan. In her left hand she holds aloft the jar of oil that is the single most recognizable symbol of Mary Magdalen.

Titian joked of his Magdalens that he liked to portray them at the beginning of their fasting rather than as thin, wasted figures. Joking aside, in the “Sacred and Profane Love” Titian could actually be portraying the moment of conversion.  

Both the Magdalens sit on a sarcophagus-like fountain that further serves to connect them. The wild rose bush in front is also a traditional symbol of Mary Magdalen. The fountain is a puzzle in itself and the relief has also eluded identification. 

There are three scenes on the relief and we can now see that they depict great sinners. On the far right two nudes stand on each side of a tree. The figure on the left is Eve portrayed in her usual full frontal nudity. Adam is on the other side of the tree. Moving toward the center we see an act of murderous violence that represents the story of Cain and Abel, the first incident of sin after the Fall.

On the other side of the relief a man leads a horse whose rider appears to be falling off. The falling rider can only be St. Paul, one of the few sinners capable of being mentioned in the same breath as Mary Magdalen. In his letter to Timothy, Paul called himself the greatest of sinners.

If there was any woman in Venice who thought of turning to Mary Magdalen as an intercessor, it might have been the wife of the man who commissioned the painting. The arms of Niccolo Aurelio, a Venetian official, can be seen on the fountain. In 1514 he married Laura Bagarotto, a widow from Padua, whose father, as well as her husband, had been accused of treason in 1509 by the Venetian government for collaboration with the enemy during the War of the League of Cambrai. The husband most likely died in the war and the father was publicly hanged in the Piazza di San Marco, an execution that his wife and daughter were forced to witness. 

Laura’s goods, including her substantial dowry, were confiscated. Subsequently, she campaigned for the restoration of the family’s good name as well as for the restoration of the dowry. Her marriage to Niccolo Aurelio in 1514 must have been an important step in her rehabilitation since her dowry was only restored the day before the marriage. One would like to think that Niccolo was honoring his new wife, or seeking to aid in her rehabilitation with this painting. 

Given the ups and downs of her own life, Laura Bagarotto might have looked to the Magdalen as a patron. On that fateful day in 1509 she lost both her father and her patrimony. If she had not been a woman, she might have lost her own life. Eventually, she would provide the aging Niccolo with a beloved daughter and then a male heir. Who can doubt that she had prayed to the Magdalen, the patron saint of all women hoping for a family? 

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Giorgione: Adoration of the Shepherds

 This post originally appeared on this site on December 15, 2015. I do not challenge the traditional label of Giorgione's famous painting, but I do believe that there is much more going on in this painting than a simple Nativity scene.

Giorgione: Adoration of the Shepherds (Allendale Adoration)
National Gallery, Washington
96.8cm x 110.5 cm, 35.7" x 43.5"

Scholars have expended more time dealing with the controversy that has surrounded the attribution to Giorgione of the so-called “Allendale Adoration of the Shepherds” than they have in trying to understand what is actually going on in the painting. Here I would like to deal with the subject and meaning of this famous Nativity scene that is now in Washington’s National Gallery.

The subject of the painting seems so obvious. It is a depiction of the adoration of the shepherds who have left their flocks to seek out the newborn Savior after hearing the angels’ announcement.

Now when the angels had gone from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “let us go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened which the Lord has made known to us..” So they hurried away and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby lying in a manger. 

Luke’s account of the angelic appearance to the shepherds is the traditional gospel at the midnight Mass on Christmas. The actual arrival of the shepherds at the stable in Bethlehem is the passage used for the gospel reading for the Christmas Mass at dawn.

The relatively small size of the painting indicates that it was done not as an altarpiece but for private devotion. Although the subject is clear, there is a deeper meaning.* Why is the infant Jesus lying on the rocky ground and not in a manger or feeding trough? Why is he naked? Where are the swaddling clothes? 

Actually the newborn infant is lying on a white cloth that just happens to be on the ends of Mary’s elaborate blue robe that the artist has taken great pains to spread over the rocky ground. Giorgione is here using a theme employed earlier by Giovanni Bellini and later by Titian in their famous Frari altarpieces. The naked Christ is the Eucharist that lies on the stone altar at every Mass. The altar is covered with a white cloth that in Rona Goffen’s words “recalls the winding cloth, ritualized as the corporale, the cloth spread on the altar to receive the Host of the Mass.” In Franciscan spirituality Mary is regarded as the altar. 

Clearly, the viewer-worshipper is meant to identify the Madonna with the altar and the Child with the Eucharist. Bellini's visual assertion of this symbolic equivalence is explained by a common Marian epithet. The Madonna is the "Altar of Heaven." the Ara Coeli, that contains the eucharistic body of Christ” Ave verum Corpus, natum de Maria Virgine.**

The “Adoration of the Shepherds” represents the first Mass. This was not an unusual concept. Many years ago I attended a talk on the famous Portinari altarpiece that now hangs in the Uffizi. The speaker was Fr. Maurice McNamee, a Jesuit scholar, who argued that Hugo van der Goes had also illustrated a Mass in that Netherlandish altarpiece around the year 1475. His argument centered on the spectacular garments of the kneeling angels that he identified as altar servers wearing vestments of the time. He called them “vested angels,” and they are the subject of his 1998 study, “Vested Angels, Eucharistic Allusions in Early Netherlandish Painting.”

Hugo van der Goes: Portinari Altarpiece

His Eucharistic interpretation explained the naked infant on the hard, rocky ground. The infant Christ is the same as the sacrificial Christ on the Cross and on the altar at every Mass. In a study of Mary in Botticelli’s art Alessandra Galizzi Kroegel referred to this connection.

it needs to be pointed out first of all that the Renaissance era saw the spread of practices of individual devotion to be carried out primarily in the home…From the theological perspective attention should then be drawn to the emergence of a new trend that…tended to identify the mystery of the Incarnation with the Redemption itself, focusing on the Passion with much less fervour than in the past: whence the growing popularity of  ‘incarnational’ iconographies celebrating the word made flesh, such as pictures of the Infant Jesus in his mother’s arms…while the demand for images with Christ on the Cross, very common in the fourteenth century was drastically reduced.***

It would appear that Giorgione has used the same motif although his angels have become little putti who hover around the scene. The shepherds represent participants in the Mass who kneel in adoration. 

There are many other iconographical details in this painting that could be discussed. Joseph’s gold robe indicates royal descent from the House of David. The ox and ass in the cave are symbols of the old order that has been renewed with the coming of Christ. So too would be the tree trunk next to the flourishing laurel bush in the left foreground. The laurel is a traditional symbol of joy, triumph, and resurrection.

Giorgione has moved the main characters off to the right away from their traditional place in the center. Rather than diminishing their importance this narrative device serves to make all the action flow from left to right and culminate in the Holy Family.  Giovanni Bellini had done the same thing in his “St. Francis in the Desert,” and later Titian would use this device in his Pesaro altarpiece in the Frari.

Finally, art historian Mario Lucco has suggested that the long hair of the one indicates a Venetian patrician in shepherd’s clothing.* That may be so but I like to think Giorgione indicated that the Savior, whether present on the ground before the shepherds as a newborn King, or on the altar at Mass, is accessible to all. This King is not protected by armed guards. There is no need to bribe or otherwise court influence with bureaucrats acting as intermediaries. Anyone, even the simplest and the humblest, can approach this King directly and in his or her own fashion. 

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*Two recent catalogs have offered interpretations. See Mario Lucco’s entry in Brown, David Alan, and Ferino-Pagden, Sylvia, Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting, Washington, 2006. Also see the very strange interpretation of Wolfgang Eller in Giorgione Catalog Raisonne, Petersberg, 2007.

**Rona Goffen, Piety and Patronage in Renaissance Venice, Yale, 1986. P. 53.

***Alessandra Galizzi Kroegel, “The Figure of Mary in Botticelli’s Art.” Botticelli: from Lorenzo the Magnificent to Savonarola, 2003. (ex. cat), p. 56.

Grimani Breviary

 

In my interpretation of Giorgione's Tempest as "The Rest on the Flight into Egypt" I argued that Giorgione depicted the Madonna as nude because of her Immaculate Conception. In researching I was surprised and emboldened when I discovered that the last two images in the famous "Grimani Breviary" juxtaposed the Immaculate Conception with a version of the Rest on the Flight into Egypt. There they are. On the left the artist has placed the "Woman, Clothed with the Sun" from the Book of Revelation in the sky, and symbols of the "Woman, without stain or blemish" from the Song of Songs on the ground below. In the next image the Madonna sits with her child in a landscape always used in depictions of the Rest. Joseph and the Ass can be seen in the background.

The Grimani Breviary is famous for its depictions by Northern Renaissance miniaturists of ordinary life. Nevertheless, the last two images depart from that scheme and depict Mary. The owner of the Breviary was Cardinal Domenico Grimani, not only an important figure in the life of Venice and the Church but also one of the major art collectors of the early sixteenth century. Was there a connection between the owner of the Breviary and Giorgione? The editor of the beautiful facsimile edition of the Breviary  published by Levenger Press raised the possibility. 

"Outside Flanders this manuscript could not have found a more suitable home than Venice. The natural world is depicted in the Grimani Breviary with a care paralleled only in Venetian painting, which at this time was turning to an ever deeper study of nature, and this Flemish masterpiece must have aroused the curiosity of the Venetian painters, whose formation and sensitivity were quite different from those of their Tuscan counterparts. Certain of it meticulous landscapes must have aroused the interest of masters such as Giorgione and the young Titian…" ["The Grimani Breviary": Levenger Press, DelRay Beach, Florida, 2007, p. 38.]

In the catalog of the 2010 Giorgione exhibition in the artist's hometown of Castelfranco Veneto, Enrico dal Pozzolo also speculated about the connection between Grimani and Giorgione. After summarizing Cardinal Grimani's collection, Pozzolo wrote:

"here we have a number of elements that would lead us to wonder whether behind this manifest connection between Cardinal Grimani’s interests and some of the themes developed by the artist there were an actual, if unrecorded, patron-artist relationship—which might have been at the root of the mix of cultures that defined the young artist."[Enrico Maria dal Pozzolo: "Giorgione", Milan, 2009. pp. 210-212]

In an earlier post I have written about the connection between the work of Luca Signorelli in the S. Brisio chapel in Orvieto's cathedral and Giorgione's Tempest. On a visit to Orvieto I discovered that Signorelli's broken columns in his depiction of the end of the world bore a close resemblance to the ones Giorgione depicted in the Tempest.

In a study of the S. Brisio chapel Creighton Gilbert argued that Grimani played a key advisory role in its iconography.

"Grimani too visited Orvieto in 1493 and 1495 with Farnese, Borgia, and the rest. More of interest is that in 1505 he built himself a vacation house below the city walls, at the abbey of Santa Trinita.”
[Gilbert, Creighton E.: "How Fra Angelico and Signorelli Saw the End of the World", Penn State, 2003. p. 81.]

Below find notes from the introduction to the Levenger Press beautiful facsimile edition of the Grimani Breviary.

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p. 10. The Breviary is for Franciscan use and consists of some 832 parchment folios.

p. 10. Some hold that work on the manuscript started some time after 1480 and continued until about 1520; as far as we can see, however, it was completed in about a decade.

p. 13. The naturalism in the Grimani Breviary clearly derives from the Ghent and Bruges masters of the latter half of the fifteenth century.

p. 23. …the last miniature in the manuscript, the symbols of the Virgin.

p. 27. …while in the penultimate miniature in the manuscript the Madonna and Child are akin to the graceful figures of David’s Von Pannwitz Virgin and the landscape recalls the later manner of the first illuminator.

p. 29. Later the broad dating of 1481 to 1520 was narrowed down to the decade 1510 to 1520, and the predominant presence of three major illuminators was clarified.

p. 35. …the Breviary is the product and the expression of a stage in the history of Flemish miniature-painting, a lofty synthesis between the school of Ghent…and the school of Bruges.

In the opening pages of this introduction we emphasized how exceptional was the fact that the Grimani Breviary had been purchased in Italy by an Italian, even though the purchaser was a member of an illustrious family and himself high up in the Church….So Flemish paintings found their way into Italy to embellish the castles and palaces of the various ruling families…In addition, rare works came to decorate bourgeois homes—especially in Piedmont, Liguria, and Venice.

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Levenger Press, fascimile edition published in 2007, Delray Beach, Florida. 

Signorelli, Giorgione and Cardinal Grimani

 The broken columns and ruins in Giorgione's Tempest must be discussed in any plausible interpretation. In my interpretation I showed that they were commonplace in depictions of the "Rest on the Flight into Egypt." After delivering my paper at a conference in Venice in 2010, my wife and I stopped over in Orvieto before proceeding on to Rome. We wanted to revisit the famous cathedral of the beautiful hill-top city. In particular, we wanted to see the St. Brisio chapel with its frescoes by Fra Angelico and Luca Signorelli. 

Imagine my surprise when I noticed the columns depicted in the above image. Scholars have pointed out the connection between the work of Luca Signorelli in the S. Brisio chapel in Orvieto and the work of Michelangelo and Raphael. Perhaps, there is also a connection between Signorelli and Giorgione. Begun in the middle of the fifteenth century by Fra Angelico, the frescoes of the famous chapel were completed by Signorelli between 1499 and 1504. The “outer bay” of the chapel contains Signorelli’s version of the end of the world. 

Among the many iconographical details in this section are three prominent broken columns that bear a striking resemblance to the broken columns in the Tempest. Here is Creighton Gilbert’s description of this section:

 “One may take these to be the tribulations that Luke had described just before in the same chapter, where people are told to flee and are led away as captives, while no stone is left on another. These are precisely the motifs Signorelli shows us, with people running from a ruined colonnade, a nearby building showing cracks, and soldiers tying people up.” p.139. 

The ruined colonnade is actually three truncated white columns standing erect surrounded by rubble. In his book on the Tempest Salvatore Settis provided a number of broken column images but none were as similar to Giorgione’s or as close in time as the ones in the S. Brisio chapel. Signorelli’s use of the broken columns could not be clearer. It indicates the destruction of the World.

In "How Fra Angelico and Signorelli Saw the End of the World" Creighton E. Gilbert tried to identify the sources for Signorelli’s whole iconographic scheme in the S. Brisio chapel. He argued that two prominent churchmen, both associated with Orvieto, might have played pivotal roles. One was the young Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, the future Pope Paul III, and the other was a famous Venetian cardinal.

 "In this scenario a second powerful name should be mentioned, that of Cardinal Grimani, whose connection both with connoisseurship and with the Borgia group in control of Orvieto have been observed. It would be logical to see him seconding a proposal by Farnese." p. 115. 

Domenico Grimani was the son of the famous Doge as well as the Patriarch of Aquileia. He was also an avid art collector who is perhaps most well known for the magnificent illustrated Grimani Breviary. Gilbert points out that Grimani had strong ties to Orvieto.

 "Grimani too visited Orvieto in 1493 and 1495 with Farnese, Borgia, and the rest. More of interest is that in 1505 he built himself a vacation house below the city walls, at the abbey of Santa Trinita." p. 81.

 Signorelli’s work was completed in 1504 and the Tempest painted in 1509. It is not difficult to imagine Grimani describing Signorelli’s justly famous frescoes to eager Venetian hearers. Certainly, Giorgione’s use of the broken columns to symbolize the Fall of the Egyptian idols on the Flight into Egypt is strong evidence for the Grimani connection. On the other hand, the idea could have been conveyed to Signorelli by Grimani. 

Another sign of the connection between Signorelli and Giorgione is in the use of nudity. The following quotes from Gilbert’s work point out the novelty of Signorelli’s approach to nudity, 

“These saved are innovative in their nudity, surely unlike what Angelico had projected. All previous Judgments in this tradition contrasted the clothed saved with the naked damned,…This innovation, as such, seems not to have interested writers. Perhaps they found it only what one would expect in 1500, in the emerging High Renaissance, especially from a painter praised as an anatomist. Yet a closer look is surely warranted. At this period the saved appeared nude, outside a High Renaissance context, in the great sequence of Judgment paintings in northern Europe. …This was a time when the theme did not flourish in Italian painting. The nudity was logical in that the souls were regularly seen emerging naked from their tombs… Mainstream theology always affirmed that they would then be perfect bodies…." p. 80. "The nude saved do appear in Italy before Signorelli in various less noticeable contexts, presumably under northern influence…. The saved appear nude more conventionally in a large Venetian woodcut around 1500, possibly later than Signorelli…" p. 81. 

In the S. Brisio chapel Signorelli also depicted a nude Judith. This famous Jewish heroine was commonly regarded as a precursor of the Virgin Mary. Gilbert noted this unique portrayal as well as a northern equivalent.

 "Also about 1508, he [Niccolo Rosex da Modena] engraved a nude Judith, inscribed with her name. She is the only one in Italy of this period other than Signorelli’s monochrome found in this same outer bay of the chapel." p. 147. 

About five years after Signorelli completed his work in the S. Brisio chapel, Giorgione painted a nude woman nursing her child in the Tempest. Is it really that unimaginable to consider that she might be the Madonna?

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Gilbert, Creighton E.: How Fra Angelico and Signorelli Saw the End of the World, Penn State, 2003.

Note: This post is a slightly revised version on the one published here 15 years ago.

Fra Bartolomeo and Giorgione

 The following post was originally published in the early days of Giorgione et al... on 4/30/2011. I re-post it here in somewhat more readable form, and add a link to paintings by Paris Bordone and Lorenzo Lotto depicting younger, vigorous St. Josephs.

Baccio della Porta, a noted Florentine artist, had been so moved by the death of Savonarola that he gave up his painting career and entered the Dominican order himself. He was given the name Fra Bartolomeo. In 1504 his superiors convinced him to take up his brushes again and become a kind of official Dominican artist in residence. A little while later the young Raphael began his sojourn in Florence and the two unlikely personalities became friends and associates. It is generally believed that Raphael helped Fra Bartolomeo in developing his craft, but if we look at the latter’s 1499 version of the "Rest on the Flight into Egypt" now in the Borghese Gallery, we can see that Raphael could just as well have learned from the friar. 

Fra Bartolomeo: Rest on the Flight into Egypt
1499, Borghese Gallery

In 1508 Fra Bartolomeo was sent to Venice to do some work for the Dominican house on the isle of Murano. It would have been hard for him not to have become acquainted with the work of Giorgione, another young genius. Besides his great reputation, Giorgione had just completed his spectacular frescoes on the façade of the newly rebuilt Fondaco dei Tedeschi. At the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Venice in 2010, Alessio Assonitis presented a paper entitled “Fra Bartolomeo and San Pietro Martire at Murano.” He noted the following:

 "As a friar-painter…Fra Bartolomeo was exempt from conventional pastoral duties.… His travels to the other two major centers of Italian painting were nothing but artistic sabbaticals which consented the friar to keep up-to-date with recent artistic developments.... Indeed, following his brief sojourn in Venice, Fra Bartolomeo was able to integrate elements of Bellini and Giorgione’s pictorial lexicon soberly and harmoniously….he also showed no reservations about borrowing compositional elements from Venetian artists like Carpaccio, Bellini, Giorgione and Titian." 

If we look again at Fra Bartolomeo’s version of the “Rest” in the Borghese Gallery and compare it with another version done after the visit to Venice we will see a striking change. 

The Borghese painting was done around 1499 and while it is often called an “Adoration” or a “Holy Family,” it is really a depiction of the “Rest on the Flight into Egypt.” There are the three figures in a landscape so characteristic of “Rest” images, as well as the monumental ruins representative of the fall of the Egyptian idols as the Infant Christ entered Egypt. Artists sometimes just used rocks and rubble to depict the destruction of the idols, but Fra Bartolomeo liked to emphasize the ruins. I would like to draw attention, however, to the figure of Joseph whose prominent position in the foreground represents his increased importance in Renaissance devotion. He is no longer a small figure off to the side or in the background. He is still portrayed as a very old man with a gray beard. 

Ten years later, after the trip to Venice, Fra Bartolomeo did another version of the Rest that is now at the Getty in Los Angeles. This painting depicts the encounter of the Holy Family with the young John the Baptist on the return from Egypt. Now there are four figures in the landscape but Fra Bartolomeo still features the ruins. However, Joseph now appears to be much younger. The beard is gone and he is middle-aged. He is certainly physically capable of protecting his Family. 

In my paper on Giorgione’s Tempest I interpreted that famous painting as “The Rest on the Flight into Egypt.”  I argued that the young man in the painting is St. Joseph. In the paper I also discussed an earlier Giorgione painting which has been mistakenly called “The Discovery of Paris.” This lost Giorgione only exists in seventeenth century copies but it is taken almost literally from an apocryphal account of the encounter of the Holy Family with robbers on the Flight into Egypt. In that early work Giorgione depicted Joseph as a very old graybeard. In the Tempest, done at the end of his short career, Giorgione chose to portray Joseph as a youthful, virile Venetian patrician.

What was going on in Venice at the beginning of the sixteenth century? Had artists finally caught up with the demands of religious reformers like Jean Gerson? In a study of Gerson, Brian Patrick McGuire noted that in the early fifteenth century the famed Chancellor of the University of Paris had called for a different artistic approach to Joseph. 

"The chancellor imagined Joseph as a young man, full of energy and potency, able to take care of his wife and son by hard work, and not the broken-down, tired figure of popular imagination…." "Gerson wanted a man who was virile and chaste, loving and affectionate, happy and fulfilled in his vocation….Such themes are expressed in greatest detail in Gerson’s Considerations on Saint Joseph, written between August and late September 1413. The text takes up more than thirty pages in the Glorieux edition and provides the basis for his later poem, the Josephina." Brian Patrick McGuire, “Jean Gerson and the Last Medieval Reformation,” Penn State, 2005. Pp. 236-7.

Girolamo Savonarola, another reformer interested in naturalistic depictions of sacred art, might have also played a role in this new approach to Joseph. In the paper mentioned above Alessio Assonitis referred to the work of scholars on Savonarolan influence in Venice.

 "Tafuri and Scapecchi have pointed out how certain religious circles in Venice had favorably accepted the Frate’s reformational program; Leathers Kuntz went so far to claim that Savonarola’s sermons had reinvigorated the reformational zeal of the Venetian nobility and popolani….Precisely due to the Serenissima’s relative tolerance, many of Savonarola’s works were published in Venice. Quite frequent were communications between Savonarolans and Venetian presses…." 

Whatever the reason, both Giorgione and Fra Bartolomeo changed their approach to St. Joseph in the first decade of the sixteenthth century. In the next decade Paris Bordone and Lorenzo Lotto would also paint a young, virile Joseph in depictions of the Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine. 

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