Review: Tom Nichols: Giorgione's Ambiguity

Ambiguity is defined as the quality of being open to more than one interpretation. In Giorgione’s Ambiguity, Tom Nichols argues that the mystery surrounding so many of the paintings of the Venetian master that has resulted in almost countless interpretations was by design, and not a failure of viewers, from Giorgione’s time to ours, to understand or find the texts that might unravel the mystery. *

Moreover, Nichols argues that Giorgione’s paintings were uniquely ambiguous, and that he had no predecessors or successors in this respect. Giorgione deliberately departed from traditional Venetian artistic themes and techniques, a practice followed by no one else, including the young Titian whose works Nichols regards as models of clarity despite the Pastoral Concert and the Sacred and Profane Love.

Nichols closely examines almost every work still attributed to Giorgione and sees ambiguity in practically every one of them, whether sacred subjects, portraits, landscapes or nudes. Nevertheless, Nichols often fails to see or even glosses over evidence that might lead him to modify his hypothesis.

In his extended discussion of the Tempest, for example, Nichols pays little attention to the nude woman nursing her infant. He regards her as secondary, ignoring the obvious fact that Giorgione shines a bright spotlight of sunlight on her, despite the storm in the background. He mentions a couple of explanations for why she is nude and nursing but rejects them without offering his own. He does not mention the large cloth draped over her shoulder that is obviously not an article of clothing. He does not mention or identify the plant in front of the woman or why the part beneath her heel has withered and died.

Like any good art historian, Nichols refers to other paintings, some many years before and after Giorgione’s time, but sometimes fails to notice relevant contemporary works. In his discussion of the Boy with an Arrow he finds no ambiguity. “Male physical beauty and its power to generate sexual desire is, after all, the obvious subtext of this painting.”(97) He insists that it cannot be St. Sebastian but does not notice Raphael’s remarkably similar depiction of the saint. It is true that Giorgione characteristically omits the halo but is that deliberate ambiguity, or rather confidence that he could depict the holiness within without the traditional device?

So, the essential question remains. Does Giorgione deliberately infuse ambiguity into his paintings, or is ambiguity a result of viewers failing to see and understand as Giorgione and his patrons might have done? Nichols himself provides a good example. Like many modern art historians, he tends to look for evidence of eroticism and sensuality in both the artist and his paintings. He notices the bare leg of Judith but what if there was a biblical source that would explain the bared thigh? In the Tempest, he sees sensuality in both the nude woman and the man, although he suggests that the man’s lust is unfulfilled, and that the broken columns in the mid-ground are phallic symbols of male impotence. But Luca Signorelli used two broken columns in his depiction of the end of the world in the Orvieto cathedral, and broken columns were commonplace in depictions of the rest on the flight into Egypt.

If we could see through the eyes of contemporary Venetians, perhaps much of the ambiguity would disappear. Significantly, Nichol’s bibliography does not include John Fleming’s 1982 study of the Frick St. Francis, a painting that Nichols believes is a rare example of ambiguity in the work of Giovanni Bellini. Fleming explained every detail in that painting and showed that it derived from a text by St. Bonaventura. Also, in a rare omission, Nichols does not discuss a seventeenth century copy of a lost Giorgione that is usually called the Discovery of Paris.

Giorgione’s Ambiguity is an easy-to-handle and well-bound volume whose text runs to 212 pages. It is very well-illustrated, and the illustrations are conveniently placed near the discussions. More importantly, it is well written with only a few lapses into art jargon. It comes with an extensive bibliography and notes and would serve most students as an up-to-date Giorgione catalog. ###

* Tom Nichols: Giorgione’s Ambiguity, 2020.

Review: Charles Hope, Giorgione or Titian.

In 2003 the Council of the Frick Collection published an extended lecture by Charles Hope entitled “Giorgione or Titian? History of a Controversy.” * Hope’s essay was the inaugural lecture in a projected series of annual talks to be given by eminent art historians. At the time Charles Hope was director of the Warburg Institute in London, and one of the world’s leading Titian scholars.

The lecture was published in pamphlet form with many illustrations and I believe it is still available in the Museum’s bookshop. It should be required reading for any student of Giorgione or Titian.

Titian: Man with a Red Cap
Frick museum, NY

Hope used the Frick’s own “Portrait of a Man with a Red Cap” as the starting point for a critique of practically all previous Giorgione scholarship and connoisseurship.  He concentrated mainly on the history of Giorgione attributions and argued that the great majority involve pure guesswork. He believed that only a handful of paintings, including the Tempest, the Three Philosophers, and the Laura, could definitely be attributed to Giorgione. 

After a very thorough review of the attribution controversies, he concluded,

we are faced here with a failure of connoisseurship, which, after more than a century of effort, has not produced a solution  that commands general assent, or indeed makes visual sense. All that we can say with complete certainty is that the overwhelming majority of the proposals that have been advanced must be wrong, because at most only one can be correct. (37)

How could so many distinguished scholars and critics have been wrong or have based their conclusions on such flimsy evidence? Here is Hope’s answer.

In one important respect the problem of Giorgione is paradigmatic of much modern discussion of Renaissance art. It is normally supposed, even if tacitly, that the history of art is a cumulative process, with each generation of scholars adding a little more knowledge to what had previously been discovered. Yet with Giorgione it is clear that nothing of this kind happened. Far from supposing themselves ignorant, scholars have always believed that they know a great deal about him and his Venetian contemporaries. Over the past couple of centuries some of the certainties inherited from earlier generations have had to be discarded, but there has been an almost universal reluctance to examine in a consistent way the basis on which our understanding of this artist and his circle was established. To do so would be to question the competence of most of those who have written on the subject, and this is something that no one, it seems, wants to do. As a result, the views of nineteenth century critics such as Crowe and Cavalcaselle, which were often based on the flimsiest evidence, have colored everything that has been written subsequently and the longer those views have gone unchallenged the greater the authority that they have acquired. (38)

Despite their well-known political inclinations, it would appear that most scholars are inherently conservative, especially when it comes to their own fields. They often will give lip service to “thinking outside the box,” but their devotion to traditional academic orthodoxies is pervasive. In my own experience I have found art history to be a very insular world.

I had never even heard of Giorgione at the time of the Hope lecture. It was two years later that by chance I noticed a black and white reproduction of the Tempest while preparing for a trip to Venice. I remember wondering why the nursing woman was nude, and also whether the couple had left the city in the background or were on their way to the city. An intuition led me to see the painting as a version of the Rest of the Holy Family on the Flight into Egypt.

After almost 35 years as a financial advisor, I was getting close to retirement and the painting fascinated me. Many years before, I had received my PhD in History, and had taught European history for seven years at a local Connecticut college. I dusted off the old academic shelves and began to do some research on Giorgione and the Tempest. Fortunately, the Accademia in Venice and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna had just sponsored a ground breaking Giorgione exhibition, and produced a magnificent catalog.

One of the first things I discovered was that not only did scholars fail to agree about Giorgione attributions, but also they could not agree on the subject matter of most of his paintings. It was just as Hope had claimed in his lecture. Each interpretation had been challenged by subsequent interpretations. The field was open to new interpretations that would not need to be based on the erroneous guesses of the past but on a fresh look at the paintings through eyes that had not been trained in the prevailing orthodoxy.

Since my interpretation of the Tempest as the “Rest on the Flight into Egypt,” I have been able to also identify the subjects of a number of other mysterious Renaissance paintings. These include Giorgione’s so-called “Three Ages of Man” (Pitti Palace) as “The Encounter of Jesus with the Rich Young Man”; Titian’s “Sacred and Profane Love” (Borghese Gallery) as “The Conversion of Mary Magdalen”; and Titian’s “Pastoral Concert” as his “Homage to the Recently Deceased Giorgione.” These papers can be found at academia.edu.

Coincidentally, in 2005 I discovered that I had glaucoma. The young surgeon who examined me said that without surgery to relieve the pressure, I would be blind in three years. Fortunately, he is a genius and the surgery was successful. My vision is not the best but I can still see.

I put this post up today in memory of  Hasan Niyazi, the creator of the popular art history blog, Three Pipe Problem. Unfortunately, Hasan passed away in October of 2013 but I will never forget our friendship and the debt I owe to him for guiding me through the intricacies of the blogosphere.  ###

Hasan Niyazi

*Charles Hope: Giorgione or Titian? History of a Controversy, The council of the Frick Collection Lecture Series, NY, 2003.