Giorgione and Titian: Pastoral Concert

The “Pastoral Concert” or “Concert Champetre” that now hangs in the Louvre is universally recognized as one of the world’s great masterpieces. Usually dated around 1510-1511 it is surrounded, like other famous products of the Venetian Renaissance, by an aura of mystery and enigma. Not only has scholarly opinion been divided about whether to attribute the painting to Giorgione or Titian, but also no one has been able to come up with a plausible explanation of the subject or meaning of the painting.

Titian: Pastoral Concert (Louvre)

In this post I present a synopsis of a “working hypothesis” that provides a new interpretation of the subject of the "Pastoral Concert" and also resolves the question of attribution. I argue that Titian used the famous Biblical story of Jonathan and David to provide a framework for a personal homage to Giorgione, his recently deceased mentor and friend. The full 3500 word interpretation can be found at MyGiorgione, a site devoted to my work on Giorgione, Titian, and the art of the Venetian Renaissance.

Before going any further it should be noted that my reading is speculative and unorthodox. As far as I know a painterly homage would be unique and unprecedented in the art of the Venetian Renaissance. Nevertheless, there is no settled opinion on the subject of the “Pastoral Concert”, and a Titian homage to Giorgione answers most of the questions that have surrounded the painting. 

This interpretation explains why Titian put so many Giorgionesque elements in the painting, but also identifies the four main figures in the painting as well as their relationship with one another. The man on the left wearing finery and holding the lute is Giorgione. Many of the features of Giorgione that Vasari mentions in his short biography can be seen in this young man. Moreover, three here-to-fore inexplicable details in the painting indicate that Giorgione is dead: his face is in shadow; the lute has no strings; and the nude on the left is pouring into a well.

This interpretation then identifies the young rustic on the right as Titian. He depicts himself as Giorgione’s social inferior but also as his successor. His closeness to the other man as well as his connection with the flock in the mid ground brings to mind the biblical story of David and Jonathan. Titian identifies himself with David, the soul-mate and successor of Jonathan.

Cima da Conegliano: David and Jonathan
National Gallery, London, c. 1506-10.

My interpretation agrees with those scholars who have observed that the two female nudes in the painting are muses who are invisible to the two men. Although muses are the source of inspiration, the men are oblivious of their presence. Indeed, I argue that the two nudes are the same muse. She is Euterpe, the muse of lyric poetry and music. The standing nude is pouring Giorgione’s spirit out, but on the right she is looking directly at Titian.

To express his homage to the deceased Giorgione, Titian incorporated many Giorgionesque elements into the painting. Practically everything that Vasari said about Giorgione can be found in this painting. The most telling evidence is the reference to the story of the paragone where Giorgione claimed supremacy for painting over sculpture since he could portray every aspect of a figure on a flat surface. In one glance the viewer sees the front, the back and the profile of the nude Euterpe.

Many have seen that the relationship between the two young men in the “Pastoral Concert” is the key to the painting. Some have even seen a strong trace of  “homo-eroticism.” In my opinion the bond between two young warriors, or two young artists is sufficient to explain the painting. Look at the painting and consider David’s lament on hearing the news of the death of Jonathan.

O Jonathan, in your death I am stricken
I am desolate for you, Jonathan my brother.
Very dear to me you were,
Your love to me more wonderful
than the love of a woman.*

* 2 Samuel  1:19-26

Pastoral Concert

I am working on a new interpretation of the Louvre’s “Pastoral Concert”, one of the most famous paintings of the Venetian Renaissance. Variously attributed to Giorgione or Titian, no one has so far been able to come up with a plausible explanation of its subject. Before publishing the interpretation on my website, I would like to post some bibliographical information here.

The December 1957 issue of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism featured an essay on the painting by Philipp Fehl entitled, “The Hidden Genre: a Study of the Concert Champetre in the Louvre.”[i] In his study Fehl limited himself to a discussion of the two female nudes in the painting.

My present proposition is simply this: the two women are not human. They are nymphs of the wood who, having been attracted by the music and the charm of the young men, have joined their concert. They are as invisible to the young men as they are, in the full beauty of the landscape which they bodily represent, visible to us. [157]

From this insight that was based primarily on an extensive analysis of literary sources, Fehl drew the following conclusion about the painting.

The picture, if we choose to look at it from this point of view, is now a true pastoral, in the spirit of the idylls of Theocritus. [157]

He did admit that a really convincing proof would require a poem or text which, unfortunately, he had not been able to find.

However, a year later famed Art historian Edgar Wind seemed to add his weight to Fehl’s description of the two nudes in Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance.[ii]

The same 'philosophy of clothes' can be studied in Giorgione's 'Fete Champetre' in the Louvre. The nymphs, distinguished from the musicians by the absence of clothes, are meant to be recognized as 'divine presences', superior spirits from whose fountain the mortal musicians are nourished…

Wind’s comment was only in a footnote and one would suspect that he came upon Fehl’s interpretation while his own book was in process of publication.

In any event, in 1959 Patricia Egan took Fehl’s analysis a step further in an essay, “Poesia and the Fete Champetre” that appeared in the Art Bulletin.[iii] Egan also concentrated on the two nude females, but she regarded them as muses rather than nymphs. They are sister beings who “constitute the first and strongest section of the picture.”

the left side comprises the water-pouring “muse,” the fine young lute-player, the white gabled building by the lake, and the farther landscape; the enclosed landscape on the right side contains the flute-playing ”muse,” the shepherd boy, the farmhouse, the grove, and the goatherd with his flock. [305]

Egan found a contemporary “Tarocchi” card with an image identified as “Poesia”. Although clothed, she carried the pitcher and pipe (aulos) seen in the “Pastoral Concert”.

Tarocchi card C-27

Entitled Poesia, the girl is seated beside a fountain on grass or leaves, using one hand to play a flute while with the other she empties a pitcher into a small body of water at her side….If we accept this degree of meaning to be implicit in the scene, we may add, tentatively, to the titles already bestowed on the picture, that of “Allegory of Poetry.” [304]

Egan admitted that the connections in the Tarocchi card have become somewhat weaker in the “Pastoral Concert.” “Poesia” has “twinned”, and each twin performs one of the actions depicted on the playing card.

Poesia as the personification of academic eloquence has twinned, and her actions, though simultaneous, no longer depend so closely on one another. [312]

Although Egan identified the nudes as muses and not as nymphs, she agreed with Fehl: the “muses’ belong to one world, the boys to another, the world of Poetry includes them all.” [312]

In 2006 Jaynie Anderson, in the catalog entry for the Bellini, Giorgione, Titian exhibition jointly sponsored by Washington’s National Gallery and Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, noted the contributions of Fehl and Egan, and claimed that their observations about the unworldly nature of the two nudes were now generally accepted by scholars.[iv] I fully agree and believe that in no way can these two females be considered as girl friends or prostitutes.

However, in my interpretation of the “Pastoral Concert” I go somewhat further and attempt to better identify the muses and give a fuller account of what they are doing. Moreover, I will identify their relationship with the two men. Finally, I will identify the two men. They are the two central figures in the painting and only if they are identified, can we begin to understand the subject.

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[i]Philipp Fehl: “The Hidden Genre: A Study of the Concert Champetre in the Louvre,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XVI, 2, 1957, pp. 154-168.

[ii] Edgar Wind: Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance, New Haven, 1958. P.123, n.1.

[iii] Patricia Egan: “Poesia and the Fete Champetre”, The Art Bulletin, Vol. 41 (Dec. 1959), pp. 303-313.

[iv] Brown, David Alan, and Ferino-Pagden, Sylvia, Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting, Washington, 2006. Catalog entry #31 by Jaynie Anderson.  

Titian Exhibition: Rome 2013

Entitled “Tiziano”, the Titian exhibition at Rome’s Scuderie del Quirinale is a spectacular display of a lifetime of work by the great Venetian Renaissance artist. My wife and I were able to see it last week after spending some time in London where the National Gallery has an outstanding collection of Titian and other Venetian masters. But the Scuderie show was something else.

In his notes the curator of the Tiziano exhibition wrote,

The aim of this exhibition is to authentically reconstruct his sixty year artistic journey, bringing together for the first time dozens of masterpieces, appropriately related to each phase of the artist’s life. Thus in successive passages we may grasp his careful evaluation of the tradition of Bellinian chromatic classicism and the revolution of tonalism learnt from Giorgione, right down to that dynamism of the painted surface which, together with extraordinary expressive force, opens up to the most advanced modernity.

Titian: Self-Portrait, Prado

The collection Filled ten rooms on two floors of the Scuderie and the curator decided to begin with a famous Titian self-portrait from the Prado juxtaposed with a very large Martyrdom of St. Lawrence, a painting revelatory of the old man in the self-portrait.

The ochre tonalities and the dark brown shadows punctuate a composition rendered dramatic by the fire of the braziers, by the rent sky. The expressive force is given by a colour no longer with half tones: this is how Titian interprets the hagiographic story where the Saint, tortured on the gridiron, proclaims, ‘my light has no darkness: everything is resplendent with light.’

Titian: St. Lawrence

This painting set the stage for the whole exhibition in another sense. The great majority of the paintings throughout were of sacred or religious subjects. Throughout his long lifetime Titian’s patrons were devoted to these subjects and looked to Titian to bring out their full meaning.

The first two rooms, for example, contained a Baptism of Christ (c. 1512); a Mystic Marriage of S. Catherine; the famous Christ being dragged by what the translator calls a “rogue”; Pope Alexander VI presenting a member of the Pesaro family to St. Peter; and three Madonnas and Child including an altarpiece from the Vatican Museum that had overwhelmed Goethe on his trip to Italy. Goethe wrote, “It shines before my eyes more than any other picture I have seen to date.” The only exception was a small so-called “Orpheus and Eurydice” that to my mind could easily be re-interpreted as a “sacred” subject.

Room 3 contained more of the same including three Crucifixions. One, attributed to Titian’s workshop, was especially interesting since it depicted Christ on the Cross along with the Good Thief. Usually Christ will either be alone or pictured between the two thieves. But in this case only the two were shown side by side. Nothing seemed to be holding the redeemed thief on his cross and he seemed to be about to fly off of it in response to the words of Christ: “this day thou shall be with me in Paradise.” A remarkable painting.

Rooms 4 and 5 contained an Annunciation, the Sacrifice of Isaac, and a Deposition done for Phillip of Spain around 1559. The latter was especially interesting to me because Titian used an antique relief on a sarcophagus in a way similar to the one in the Borghese Gallery’s “Sacred and Profane Love.” The relief contained images of the sacrifice of Isaac and Cain and Abel, both symbolic of the sacrifice of Christ. 

In Rooms 6 and 7 we began to experience the portraits for which Titian is so justly famous. Here we have Pope Paul III, a man with a glove, and the famous “Flora” whose image also graces the cover of the exhibition brochure as well as posters all over Rome. The brochure calls her a Venetian beauty but I still believe she is Mary Magdalene. She is only called Flora because of the flowers in her hand but she has no other characteristics of the nymph.

Titian: Flora

Room 8 was devoted to State portraits included a couple of Doges, but in room 9 we finally got to see some of Titian’s paintings derived from ancient mythology. There was a Danae done around 1544 and now in Naples, as well as the famous painting from the Borghese Gallery of Venus blindfolding Cupid.

The curator used Room 10 to bring the exhibition to an end and to recall its beginning. The “Flaying of Marsyas recalled the “Martyrdom of St. Lawrence,” but the exhibition ended with another self-portrait. This one from Berlin was done around 1562. Here is the curator’s description.

In this Self-Portrait he concentrates all the warmth of the picture in the head of the old man…It is the pose of an unprecedented assertiveness where the table, pure point of light becomes an expressive instrument for highlighting the figure which is not turned towards the beholder but is gazing at a distant point with the intent look of someone deep in thought.

It was a fitting end to a magnificent exhibition. Not only were the paintings of the highest order but also they were beautifully hung and lit. Wall descriptions were easy to read and informative. My wife used the audio guide and thought it was excellent. “Tiziano” must have been years in the making but it was well worth the effort.

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Houghton Hall Exhibition

We plan to visit Houghton Hall in Norfolk, England to see an incredible art exhibition. I say incredible not only because of the quality of the art that will be on display in the ancestral home of famed eighteenth century English politician Robert Walpole, but also because of the circumstances of the exhibition itself.

Houghton Hall

Sir Robert Walpole, later 1^st Earl of Orford, was the most important politician in Great Britain from roughly 1714 to 1740. He played an indispensible role in cementing the rule of George I and the Hanoverian dynasty. He was also an avid art collector. After his death his heirs squandered his wealth and eventually his magnificent collection of Old Masters had to be sold to Empress Catherine the Great of Russia.

 The collection wound up in the Hermitage where it survived even the Russian revolution. Incredibly, the Hermitage has agreed this year to lend not just a painting or two to an English exhibition but the whole Walpole collection that will be displayed not in a museum but at Houghton Hall. It promises to be the highlight of the British art year.

After Houghton we will train back to London for a brief stay where in addition to a visit to the National Gallery we hope to visit Strawberry Hill, the home of Sir Robert’s youngest son, Horace Walpole, who in his own way was just as illustrious as his father. Strawberry Hill is a monument to Walpole’s eclectic interests and it represents in its architecture and furnishings almost the start of the Gothic revival in England. Walpole’s little novel, The Castle of Otranto, is regarded as the first Gothic novel.

Strawberry Hill after recent restoration

But Horace Walpole is also the greatest letter-writer in the English language. His correspondence to his numerous friends spans a period of almost 60 years and along with his memoirs and other writings provides a veritable chronicle of the eighteenth century. Over 50 years ago I had to read and study most of Walpole’s correspondence and memoirs in my doctoral research on the political career of Henry Seymour Conway, a British general and politician.

Horace Walpole

Conway was Horace Walpole’s cousin and closest friend. Their lives and careers were always intertwined from their schoolboy days at Eton. Conway is not as well known as Walpole but he played a very important role in British politics during the era of the American War. As Secretary of State during the short-lived Rockingham administration he moved the repeal of the odious Stamp Act in the House of Commons. Afterwards, he opposed the disastrous measures that led to the war with America and eventually brought an end to the war with his motion in the House of Commons in 1782 to cease all offensive military action.

Henry Seymour Conway
as Secretary of State
Lewis collection, Farmington, CT

The study of Conway’s life was valuable in itself but having to read his cousin’s marvelous letters and memoirs constituted a life-changing education in many ways.  I had to leave Walpole and Conway aside after I left academe 50 years ago but now it was difficult to pass up this opportunity to re-visit. As an added bonus we will get to see an eighteenth century art collection in its original setting. 

See the video below for a brief preview of the Houghton exhibition.

Giorgione: "Tempest", First Edition

Today, on the anniversary of its first appearance in the Wall St. Journal on May 13, 2006, I would like to reprint my original essay on Giorgione's "Tempest", one of the most famous and mysterious paintings in the history of Western art. It originally appeared in the Journal's "Masterpiece" column under the title, “A Renaissance Mystery Solved?” A longer and more comprehensive version can now be found at my website. 

Giorgione: The Tempest (1509-10)

"Giorgione "La Tempesta": A Renaissance Mystery Solved?"

No great work of art has mystified art historians and critics more than Giorgione’s “Tempesta,” 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. In June the National Gallery in Washington will be hosting a Bellini, Giorgione, Titian exhibition.

While the “Tempesta” 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 to it, and which prompted a trip to Venice last year.

This relatively small painting (82x73cm.) 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: a “Flight of the Holy Family 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 it, 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 ”Flight into Egypt.” Joseph is usually portrayed as an old man by Medieval artists. Nevertheless, in the 15th century he began to be depicted as a young, virile carpenter. 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 come up with 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?

The discovery that this most mysterious and enigmatic painting has a "sacred" subject has led to a number of other significant findings. Giorgione's "Three Ages of Man" in the Pitti Palace has been identified as "The Encounter of Jesus with the Rich Young Man", and Titian's "Sacred and Profane Love" has been identified as "The Conversion of Mary Magdalen." These two papers as well as a number of others can be found on my site, My Giorgione. Of course, I have also been discussing them and others on this blog for the past three years. 

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