CF STUDIES JOURNAL 09 - Flipbook - Page 103
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A gamechanger for Giorgione
Fig. 3 / Detail of fig. 1, showing
the inscription in iron gall ink.
before the nineteenth century for the National
Gallery’s Adoration of the Magi, the painting to which
the Sydney drawing is most closely related, we do not
know who owned this work either. We know little of
artists’ libraries in Renaissance Venice, with occasional
exceptions, such as the case of Giancristoforo Romano,
who when he died in May 1512, left to the notary who
drew up his will his copy of Pietro Bembo’s Gli Asolani,
his most precious possession.12 It has been suggested
that this may have been one of the rare copies signed
by Bembo himself.13 Art historians on the whole are
reluctant to believe that Renaissance artists were well
read, but there are continual surprises – as in the
case of Giulio Cesare Procaccini, who was thought to
be illiterate until recently it was discovered that as a
teenager he owned a signed copy of Lomazzo’s treatise
on painting.14 As Lino Pertile reveals in his book on
“Dante Popolare”, Dante is so rich a writer that even
A gamechanger for Giorgione
the totally unprepared reader can find something
extraordinary in the poem.15 Giovanni di Paolo,
Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo
were obsessed with how to represent Dante’s words,
as shown in their manuscripts and drawings. The
Commedia has always been a genuinely popular poem
that unleashed a catalogue of emotions among Dante’s
contemporaries and still does today among twentyfirst century translators and admirers. Suffice to
mention the remarkable translation of the Commedia
by the Australian Clive James, whose wife Professor
Prue Shaw is a famous Australian Dante scholar in
Cambridge and London; as an undergraduate she
was educated in the Sydney library with the Dante
collection. The phenomenon of producing Dante
translations is world-wide, as shown by the Californian
Marcus Sandars who has given us a contemporary
American translation.
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It is hardly surprising that Giorgione may have
responded to the text. The edition that he owned or
read had a Latin commentary by Cristoforo Landino,
surprising for a vernacular text. Giorgione’s image is
probably made in response to Bernard of Clairvaux’s
Invocation to the Blessed Virgin Mary. There are a
few attempts before Giorgione to respond to this part of
Dante’s text.16 Some writers have considered Giorgione
to have been illiterate, others that he was as learned
as a professor of classics at the University of Oxford.
We now know that Giorgione is likely to have read
and responded to the text of Dante’s Commedia, not the
easiest of books, although one with a popular following;
thus he can no longer be considered illiterate. The
majority view expressed in recent discussions was that
an artist would only have drawn in his own book.
A near contemporary example of a drawing by a
Renaissance artist in a manuscript may be found in the
library of Leonardo da Vinci, never a passive reader.
Carlo Vecce’s meticulous reconstruction of Leonardo’s
library, based on the various lists that Leonardo made
of books in his possession, identifies only one volume,
among two hundred that belonged to him, which he
annotated, a manuscript of Francesco di Giorgio’s
Trattato di architettura e machine now in the Biblioteca
Medicea Laurenziana, Florence.17 Pietro Marani dates
Leonardo’s annotations to circa 1504-1506, transcribes
twelve critical observations about Francesco di
Giorgio’s text, and comments on Leonardo’s drawing of
coastlines and ports (fig. 4).
Fig. 4 / Leonardo da Vinci’s
annotation and drawing
in the manuscript of the
Trattato di architettura
by Francesco di Giorgio
Martini, ca. 1504-1506,
Florence, Biblioteca
Medicea Laurenziana, Ms.
Ashburnham 361, fol. 25r.
Of all Giorgione’s contemporaries it is Albrecht Dürer
who annotated and drew more frequently in books
than any other artist. Dürer decorated the titlepages
of at least fourteen classical books for his friend and
patron, Willibald Pirckheimer, the best known of
which is the frontispiece to the Aldine edition of
Theocritus, from about 1504. The imagery closely
follows the classical text and is probably the result of
conversations between Dürer and Pirckheimer.18
