The Royal Academy’s Sackler Galleries are the perfect size: big enough to mount substantial exhibitions which break new ground, but at the same time compact enough not to overwhelm. This is confirmed yet again by a gem of a show which provides the most comprehensive UK viewing to date of Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco, aka Giorgione, one of the most enigmatic yet influential figures of the Venetian Renaissance. It also offers a unique cultural snapshot of La Serenissima on the cusp of its cultural heyday, but all in such a way that you are able to spend proper time appreciating each of the world-class pieces that have been brought together.  And what a lineup it is. We treated are to seven out of the mere ten or so works that most art historians now agree were actually painted by Giorgione, including the La Vecchia, his intense and compassionate study of a woman in old age, which is in the UK for the first time on loan from the Accademia Gallery in Venice. The exhibition also showcases the National Gallery’s exquisite and utterly mysterious Il Tramonto, in which two men crouch in the foreground amongst shadowy brown hills and rocks, but where the real action is in the vista leading out to a scrap of luminous blue horizon.  Then there is another clutch of works which slip in and out of attribution but are utterly gorgeous nonetheless. A soulfully romantic portrait of possibly one of the most beautiful young men in art history depicts perhaps the romantic poet Antonio Borcardo, but nobody quite knows. Add to this major paintings by Giorgione’s Venetian mentor Giovanni Bellini and his slightly younger rival Titian, along with a roster of less familiar contemporaries, and two works by influential Venetian visitor Albrecht Dürer, and the cumulative result is an astonishingly rich show.  Very little is known about the life of Giorgione before it was cut short by the plague in 1510 when he was just 32. The great Renaissance scholar Bernard Berenson described “Big George” as a “shadowy, fluctuating, half mythical figure”; and in his Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari declares that he was also famous as an accomplished lute player and by all accounts a famous ladies’ man who “took unceasing delight in the joys of love”.  Certainly he was a major art star. There’s abundant evidence that Giorgione’s engaging, psychologically complex portraits and his strange poetic landscapes were highly sought after by the new species of wealthy patrons that put Venice on the world map at the beginning of the 16th century not only as a cosmopolitan global trading power but also a vibrant, flourishing artistic centre.  But alongside its wealth and prosperity, Venice was also under constant threat of war and plague – maybe Giorgione’s appeal lay in the sense of fragility and the transience of life that’s evident in so much of his work. Often, no single reading of his paintings is possible and nothing seems static or certain. This is immediately evident in the first room at the RA, in which Giorgione’s earliest portrait of an unknown young man in a pink shirt – painted when the artist was still in his teens – rests his arm on a parapet and meets your gaze in a way that is both introspective and immediately engaging. Across the room Giovanni Bellini’s delicately painted portrait – possibly of the humanist writer Pietro Bembo – stares off out of the side of the painting and seems static and remote in comparison.  We may not know the identity of the sitter in Giorgione’s great Terris portrait (named after a former owner), but the man who stares directly at us, out of the gloom and over the centuries, has immeasurably more vivacity than the two meticulously executed, sharply focused but more static paintings by Dürer that flank him. It is also worth noting that his subtle five o’clock shadow and the gentle shading on his neck bears strong evidence of the influence of Leonardo da Vinci, whom Giorgione almost certainly encountered when the older Florentine artist visited Venice in the first years of the 16th century.  Art historians can have a field day in this show, pondering influences, authorship and attributions. But what shines through the myth and the mystery is the way in which the power Giorgione’s extraordinary paintings not only animated and revolutionized Venetian painting – and spawned a slew of followers – but also how they continue to cast their beguiling spell on us today.  In the Age of Giorgione is at the Royal Academy until June 5
Despite featuring just a handful of Giorgione’s own paintings, the Royal Academy’s rich exhibition demonstrates how influential the enigmatic Venetian artist was