The Tempest by Giorgione.
When was the first landscape painting made in Europe? And the first abstraction? Art historians love these questions about origins, for identifying the beginning of a tradition is essential for a proper narrative history. When was the first modernist painting? Many scholars argue that Courbet or Manet did it. More eccentrically, T. J. Clark has recently backdated that moment, arguing that Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat (1793) was the first modernist picture. Here I take that argument a step further. Arthur Danto wrote about how historians used what he called narrative sentences to explain historical events. To use the vocabulary of his historiography, ‘in 1509 the first modern painting was made’. Giorgione’s The Tempest (1509) is the first modernist painting. Needless to say, that discovery was not understood then in these, our modern terms. In 1509 no one could know that they were looking at a modernist painting.
What are the conditions of artistic modernism? Any answer to that question is bound to be highly controversial. In an earlier, brief essay “The Venetian Birth of Modernism” I argued that artistic modernism was born in Venice. Now I extend that analysis. What defines modernism, in contrast to art of the old regime, so I argued, are five conditions:
Art is displayed in a public space, not only in sites accessible only to the privileged elite.
There is free discussion (art criticism) evaluating that art.
Art presents secular subjects.
There is public sale of art
There is a market in contemporary art
The details of these five conditions, and their relationship, as discussed in my prior account, are very familiar. Under the old regime, aesthetic judgments were made in a top down fashion. Modernism, by contrast, involves the frank acknowledgment that everyone is capable of judging for themselves. In that way, modernism has been identified with liberal democracy, in the broad sense of that descriptive phrase. In modernism, aesthetic judgments are made, in principle, collectively by everyone. Hence the importance of Kantian aesthetics and the Enlightenment tradition. Needless to say, in practice we are a long way of achieving that ideal. And right now, I grant, it’s not obvious that it will ever be achieved. I will take up this important question elsewhere. Here, however, I focus on why The Tempest can legitimately be understood as the first modernist picture. I discuss just with that one picture, Giorgione’s most famous work. His other paintings, many of them sacred works or portraits, aren’t modernist paintings.
As I indicate in my prior account, these five conditions are met by Giorgione’s work only in tentative ways. His public fresco of 1508 is, as reported by Vasari, a subject of public discussion; some of his pictures show secular subjects, and are sold to private connoisseurs. There is thus a very rudimentary beginning to a modernist art market in Venice circa 1509. Still, at least we can see that in hindsight, from our vantage point the beginning of this very familiar art marketing system.
In his recent book on Giorgione Tom Nichols says that “the Tempest is perhaps the most often explained painting in the entire Western tradition of painting . . . .” And this, he rightly observes, makes it hard (at least for scholars) to view without recollecting the array of published interpretations. Indeed, Salvatore Settis’ Giorgione’s Tempest. Interpreting the Hidden Subject (1978) has an elaborate chart, two pages in microscopic type, listing some of the interpretations. But that does not present him from offering yet another interpretation. And a more recent account on-line, “Giorgione’s Tempest, the mystery no one has yet solved” by Federico Giannini, Ilaria Baratta offers some further accounts:
Among the most recent interpretations, it is worth mentioning, in order of time, those of Carlo Falciani (2009), Ugo Soragni (2010), Maria Daniela Lunghi (2015) and Sergio Alcamo (2019). Falciani has given a Virgilian reading connected to the events of the Vendramin household: the work should be interpreted as the birth of Silvius, son of Aeneas and Lavinia, and successor to his half-brother Ascanius as king of the Latins. The standing man would be Silvius himself caught contemplating his own birth as an adult, a situation that would evoke the passage in the Aeneid in which Anchises welcomes Aeneas during the latter’s passage into the afterlife by revealing to him the birth of his son. According to Soragni, who formulated his theory on the occasion of the exhibition Giorgione in Padua. The Enigma of the Chariot held at the Musei Civici agli Eremitani in Padua between 2010 and 2011, the Tempest would be “the paradoxically most explicit and least investigated testimony to Giorgione’s interest in Padua, in which allusions and references to a plurality of Paduan subjects are condensed, alongside the depiction of some of its most representative monuments: from the founding of the city by Antenor to the dramatic end of the Carrarese seigniory, from the flooding of the contado resulting from the works carried out by the Venetians to ensure the hydraulic stability of the lagoon, to the constant concern about the outbreak and spread of the plague, from the great undertaking of the reconstruction of the Carmini dome, completed a few years earlier, to the wooden bridges that took the place of the solid stone buildings inherited from the ancient world.” On that occasion, it was suggested that the chariot depicted near the city gate would allude to the Carraresi, the lords of Padua, and that in the outline of the city the profile of the Carmini church could be unmistakably distinguished: the woman would thus be an allegory of the city of Padua, caught nursing Venice (an allusion to the fact that the lagoon city is of much more recent foundation than the Euganean city), while the man would be a “stradioto,” a Venetian mercenary.
As this quotation indicates, the painting has become a treat for erudite scholars. This so extensive discussion may seem surprising, for it is a relatively small picture depicting only a man, a woman and a child. And in the landscape is only a broken column, a stroke of lightning, and in the distance some buildings. It is fascinating that a relatively simple work generates so much interpretative dispute. The rules of this interpretative game are simple: the ‘solution’ must consistently identify all of these figures and depicted things. Perhaps, then, Giorgione shows a scene from Scripture, but maybe he presents some image from pagan literature of the novel Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. The Strife of Love in a Dream (1499); or, possibly, he makes a commentary on contemporary political events— for the painting was done at the moment of an extreme political crisis, when the very continued existence of the Republic was in doubt. It’s clear why this activity continues. It would be unexciting, I think, to simply accept a prior solution to this puzzle. To enter into the interpretative debate, you need to pose an original solution. And that I am doing, in a modest way.
In my judgment, the most satisfying account appears to have been developed separately by two scholars, Johannes Wilde (1974) and S. J. Freedberg (1970), who apparently wrote independently of each other.
Allowing that no solution is at hand, Wilde offers an elaborate description of this “landscape with figures.” “The figures fit their surroundings as well as any other ‘motive’ rendered in the picture. . . . No line is really straight: no vertical is vertical, no horizontal is horizontal. . . Nevertheless, the illusion of reality conveyed to us is perfect. . . All these effects contribute to making the atmosphere strikingly apparent: it envelops all the objects and fills the space between them. . . It was Giorgione’s achievement to . . . envisage nature in a particular mood that corresponds to the feelings of its inhabitants. . . . (Venetian Art from Bellini to Titian)
And Freedberg says: “The Tempest is built from forms of landscape, and in the structure of the picture the human actors are quite incidental. They loom larger than their physical scale in the picture’s communication of it content, but in this too the landscape seems the real protagonist. . . . the landscape is thought of as a state of nature that, chiefly by its visible qualities of light and colors, evokes emotion”. (Painting in Italy. 1500-1600)
As Tom Nichols puts it (without reference to these accounts): the painting “engages and acknowledges the contest between the human senses in the midst of such rapidly changing natural phenomenothe way in which their usual ordering is suspended or overturned within the temporal flux of the present moment. . . . a self-conscious display of art’s ultimate supremacy over the powerful forces of nature. (Giorgione’s Ambiguity)
Here, I think it’s clear, we could be reading descriptions of a contemporary painting. Because it satisfies our five conditions, The Tempest thus has become a modernist artwork. Let us suppose, for the purposes of argument, that originally Giorgione had some intended source, which was the product of some friendly erudite humanist collector. If that documentation is discovered, then the solution to these interpretative puzzles will be in hand. Still since we have no documentation, all that we can do now, in the absence of any record is describe the work as Wilde, Freedberg and Nichols do— and the convergence of their concerns is I think striking. Whatever Giorgione’s intentions, The Tempest now is the first modernist painting.
Now let’s take that analysis further towards the present. The Venetian Republic, which died in 1797 when Napoleonic troops invaded, was an old regime state. Venice had a very well developed system ship building in the arsenal, which was a pro-to-modern manufacturing system. In a famous demonstration for the visiting King of France, in 1574 a gallery was completely assembled and launched in just one hour. If that modernist system of production might have been developed, then could not the art market also have modernized?
Imagine a counter-factual history in which the story of Venice in the eighteenth-century was different. (There is a massive literature devoted to such alternate histories.) Suppose that the armed forces of the Republic had modernized, and that the city had made serious efforts to create and sustain a market for contemporary art. After all, such an art world developed in Paris before 1789, when the French old regime ended. Since there was a market amongst foreign visitors for Canaletto’s pictures, and sophisticated writers, perhaps a market for contemporary work might have developed in Venice. Taking this counterfactual account a step further, if the government had been more forceful, perhaps rather than being conquered by Napoleon, Venice would have survived into the nineteenth-century. If that had happened, the history of modernism would have been entirely different. And then historians would identify Giorgione as the founding figure of modernism. So far as I can see, none of these hypothetical suggestions are obviously absurd. Obviously, a historian can only describe what actually happened. But it is instructive, still, to see how — starting with Giorgione — the story of modernism might have been very different.
Note:
See my “ Tiziano 1508. Agli esordi di una luminosa” ( carriera And my “The Venetian Birth of Modernism” and “Walter Pater’s Venice,” On the Arsenale see Frederic Chapin Lane, Venetian Ships and Shipbuilders of the Renaissance (1934) . On Danto’s historiography see his Analytical Philosophy of History (1965). For a forceful critique relevant to this counter-history see Francis Haskell, Patrons and Painters. Art and Society in Baroque Italy (1980).
