Well, it’s that time of year when we look for the seasonally sublime, and this year let’s visit a nativity scene by one Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco (1470s-1510) – better known simply as Giorgione. Giorgione was the Italian painter who founded the Venetian school of Italian Renaissance painting along with his younger contemporary Titian. He is one of the more mysterious characters in European art; little is known about him other than the brief biographical sketch in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. His work seems to elude critics too, and in fact there are only six surviving paintings that are firmly attributed to him.
Take his Adoration of the Shepherds, for instance. Art historian and Renaissance specialist Bernard Berenson was firmly of the belief that this was by Titian, though earlier had attributed it to Vincenzo Catena, and later hedged his bets somewhat by attributing it partly to Giorgione but finished off by Titian. Roger Fry, meanwhile, had it down as a Giovanni Cariani (“the landscape and the foliage in the foreground leaves little doubt”). These things matter when you’re selling a painting, of course, and this one has an interesting provenance. The painting had come up for sale, as a Giorgione, in 1847 at Christie’s in London and was purchased for £1544 by Thomas Wentworth Beaumont of one of my local stately homes, Bretton Hall in West Yorkshire.
The painting got passed down through several generations of Viscounts Allendale (hence the painting’s alternative name the Allendale Nativity) ultimately to Beaumont’s great grandson, Wentworth Beaumont, who then sold the painting to legendary art collector Lord Duveen in 1937. Duveen’s resident expert was none other than the aforementioned Bernard Berenson. Sadly, the men fell out over the attribution and their long-term partnership ruptured, all because Berenson insisted it was a Titian and Duveen thought it a Giorgione. Duveen sold it on – as a Giorgione (if he’d have seen Titian’s selling power today, perhaps he would have gone along with Berenson) — to department store magnate Samuel Henry Kress who displayed it in the window of his store on Fifth Avenue over the Christmas period 1938. It’s now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.
Giorgione – or Titian, or whoever (though certainly someone Venetian) – places his Nativity in front of a dark grotto rather than a stable, while on the left a bright Venetian landscape recedes into the distance. Joseph and Mary are opulently dressed, and the baby Jesus lies on a white cloth on the ground rather than in a manger – even in the sixteenth century artists sought to be different. You would be forgiven for missing the putti (winged heads) who hover ethereally above the entrance, or the angel surreptitiously floating amid the treetops top-left. Merry Christmas!
