Giorgione: Three Ages of Man

Old age and diminished eyesight have practically brought my art history career to an end. As a result, in 2023 I have decided to reproduce my various interpretive discoveries once again on giorgione et al... as a kind of archive. In the last month I have republished condensed versions of my interpretations of Giorgione's Tempest, as well as Titian's Sacred and Profane Love. Below find a third interpretive discovery that originally appeared here on October 11, 2011. The full paper can be found on academia.edu. 

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 Giorgione’s Three Ages of Man is another one of his paintings that has so far eluded identification. The name of the painting that now hangs in the Pitti Palace 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.

Giorgione: Three Ages of Man
Pitti Palace, Florence
Oil on wood, 62 cm  x 77.5 cm

Scholars today object to the popular title. Some think it 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 in this mysterious 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 real clue to its 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. (See below for full text)

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 most Venetians would have immediately recognized 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.” **

Durer: St. Peter detail

Giovanni Bellini and Albrecht Durer, both Giorgione contemporaries, depicted Peter’s head in this fashion. About a hundred years later Caravaggio still used it in striking fashion in the "Martyrdom of St. Peter" in S. Maria del Popolo in Rome, and in the "Denial of Peter" now in New York’s Metropolitan Museum.

Caravaggio: Denial of Peter

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 sixteenth 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 Encounter of Jesus with 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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Full text of Matthew 19:16-27.

And behold, a certain man came to him and said, “Good Master, what good work shall I do to have eternal life?” He said to him, “Why dost thou ask me about what is good? One there is who is good, and he is God. But if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.” He said to him, “Which?” And Jesus said,

Thou shalt not kill,
Thou shalt not commit adultery,
Thou shalt not steal,
Thou shalt not bear false witness,
Honor thy father and mother, and,
Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”

The young man said to him, “All these I have kept; what is yet wanting to me?” Jesus said to him, “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.” But when the young man heard the saying, he went away sad, for he had great possessions.

But Jesus said to his disciples, “Amen I say to you, with difficulty will a rich man enter the kingdom of heaven. And further I say to you, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.” The disciples hearing this, were exceedingly astonished, and said, “who then can be saved?” And looking upon them, Jesus said to them, “With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”

Then Peter addressed him, saying, “Behold we have left all and followed thee: what then shall we have?”

* Note: This article first appeared in Giorgione et al... on Oct. 8, 2011. It followed upon my interpretations of Giorgione's Tempest, and Titian's Sacred and Profane Love as sacred subjects. The full papers can be found on my website, MyGiorgione.

** Anna Jameson, "Sacred and Legendary Art," Boston, 1896, Vol. 1, p. 191.

*** Dom Jean LeClercq, Camaldolese Extraordinary, The Life, Doctrine, and Rule of Blessed Paul Giustiniani, Bloomingdale, Ohio, 2003, pp. 61-62.

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... and on MyGiorgione. Recently, I have put the full version on academia.edu. Below is a shorter version.

                 

 

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: The Tempest

Since its inception in 2010 Giorgione et al... has received over 565000 page views. Followers of the site may have realized that for the past few years, I have been reproducing older posts. Old age has taken its toll. I will continue the practice in the current year. New readers may enjoy these posts and hopefully be encouraged to build on the ideas presented. Below is the text of my first essay on The Tempest that originally appeared in the Masterpiece section of the Wall Street Journal in May, 2006. The text of the fully developed paper can now be found on academia.edu under the title Giorgione's Tempest, the Rest on the Flight into Egypt.

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No great work of art has mystified art historians and critics more than Giorgione’s Tempest, one of a handful of paintings definitively attributed to the Venetian Renaissance master. After his untimely death in 1510 of the plague at about the age of 30, most of his paintings were either lost or completed by others, especially his colleague, Titian. Although little is known of his life, Giorgione was apparently apprenticed to the great Giovanni Bellini at the outset of his career, and certainly was a major influence on Titian.

While the Tempest is universally admired as a pioneering work of landscape art because of its dramatic use of color and shadow, art historians have not been able to agree on the subject matter of this masterpiece of the High Renaissance. More than the painting itself, it was the mystery about its subject matter that first attracted me.

This relatively small painting (82 x 73cm.) currently hangs in the Accademia in Venice. Over a hundred years ago my favorite travel author, Edward Hutton, described it as “a delicious landscape of green and shady valley, of stream and ruin and towering country town.” The town is visible in the background and above it, clouds and a flash of lightning indicate that a storm is raging. In the middle distance, separated from the town by a bridge, are overgrown ruins and two broken columns. In a glade in the foreground, a nude woman nursing an infant sits on the right, while on the left, a young man dressed in contemporary Venetian clothing holds a long staff.

Although never named by Giorgione himself, the painting is usually called “La Tempesta” because of the storm. Sometimes it is called “The Soldier and the Gypsy,” even though critics have pointed out that the man is not a soldier and the nude woman is not a gypsy.

One tends to accept works of art at face value, particularly when they are as famous as this one. But one question struck me: Why is the woman nude? Other than a white cloth draped around her shoulder, there is no sign of any clothing. After all, it isn’t necessary for a woman to completely undress to nurse a baby. I believe that if the nursing woman were clothed, the subject would be immediately recognizable for what it is:  “The Rest of the Holy Family on the Flight into Egypt.”

The “Flight” is a common subject in the history of art. It illustrates a passage from the Gospel of St. Matthew in which Jesus, Mary and Joseph, escaping from the deadly designs of King Herod, find an idyllic rest stop upon arrival in Egypt. Giorgione’s painting has all the elements common to a “Flight” image: Mary holding or nursing the baby Jesus; Joseph standing off to the side or in the background; a town in the distance; and ruins.

Why ruins? Emile Male, the great French art historian, pointed out that it was common for medieval artists to draw on the legend of the “Fall of Idols” when painting the “Flight.” According to the legend, when the infant Jesus entered Egypt, all the idols crumbled. Artists commonly used broken columns to represent this episode.

Giorgione was a master of artistic narrative. In this painting the Holy Family has left Judea and its dangers, symbolized by the storm, behind. They have crossed the bridge and stream representing the border between Judea and Egypt. They have entered Egypt and the idols, symbolized by the broken columns, lie broken behind them. We notice that the tempest is raging in the distance. The glade in which they rest is serene. Now they rest in safety.

It is only the depiction of the man and the woman that has deterred experts from recognizing this painting as the "Rest on the Flight into Egypt." Joseph is usually portrayed as an old man by Medieval artists. Nevertheless, in the fifteenth century he began to be depicted as young and virile.  In Raphael’s depiction of the marriage of Joseph and Mary, the Sposalizio, Joseph appears to be about the same age as Giorgione’s man. Italians especially found it unseemly to show Mary being married to an old man.

But why the nude Madonna? The explanation lies in the Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, a doctrine of which every Venetian would have been aware. Simply put it was the belief that Mary, from the first moment of her existence, had been created free from the stain of original sin which every other descendant of Adam and Eve had inherited.

The concept of Mary’s Immaculate Conception had been vigorously debated by theologians during the previous 250 years. The great advocates of the doctrine were the Franciscans; whose center in Venice, the “Frari” became a virtual shrine to the Immaculate Conception. Special impetus to the belief had been given by Pope Sixtus IV, himself a Franciscan, in 1476 when he added the feast of the Conception to the liturgy of the entire Western Church.

Theologians called Mary the new or second Eve. Artists had difficulty in expressing this increasingly popular doctrine. By Giorgione’s time they had not yet settled on the now familiar image of the “Woman Clothed with the Sun” from the Book of Revelation. Giorgione had the unprecedented audacity to portray a nude Madonna as Eve would have appeared in the Garden of Eden before the Fall.

Nothing is in Giorgione’s painting by accident. The white cloth on which the Madonna sits is a symbol of the winding sheet or burial cloth of Christ. Franciscans regarded Mary as the altar on which the Eucharist rested. The altar was always covered with a white cloth.

Finally, in front of the Madonna a scraggly bush rises out of bare rock. Artists frequently used plants or flowers symbolically to identify characters. From the way it is growing, the plant could be a member of the nightshade family, a common plant found in Italy at the time. The most well known form of nightshade is the aptly named “belladonna.” This plant is associated with witchcraft and the Devil. Is that why the plant below the heel of the Woman has withered and died?

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Note:

The essay above is a copy, with some slight changes, of my original essay that appeared in the Masterpiece section of the Wall Street Journal on 5/13/2006. It was originally entitled, "A Renaissance Mystery Solved?" with the cautious editor adding the question mark. I reproduce it here at the start of 2020 because at age 80 I want to devote this year to posts dealing with what I consider to be major discoveries that followed upon my initial intuition that the Tempest was actually Giorgione's version of "The Rest on the Flight into Egypt." The full version of my paper can be found at my website, MyGiorgione, along with other interpretive discoveries.

I cannot say that my interpretation has taken the world by storm. I've sent it to most of the leading scholars in the field and only a handful have had the courtesy to even reply or acknowledge receipt. Academic publications have turned it down but I did get a chance to read it at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America held in Venice in 2010, the five hundredth anniversary of Giorgione's death. It was a huge conference but only about fifteen people turned up to hear a paper by an unknown independent scholar who had spent most of his career as a financial advisor. 

The experience in Venice led me to turn to the web as a means of publishing my work. I created MyGiorgione as an archive, and then began, with the great help of my late friend, Hasan Niyazi, to create Giorgione et al... which by last month has received over 565000 page views. The website contains subsequent discoveries like my interpretation of Giorgione's Three Ages of Man as The Encounter of Jesus with the Rich Young Man; Titian's Sacred and Profane Love as The Conversion of Mary Magdalen,  Titian's Pastoral Concert as his Homage to the Recently Deceased Giorgione, and Michelangelo's Doni Tondo as "Behold the Lamb of God."

Frank DeStefano