This article attempts to decipher the content of Giorgione's The Tempest, painted in the first decade of the 16th century. The study suggests the presence of two thematic layers in it: external, at ...the mundane level of the plot; and deep-laid, based on the esoteric concepts of the era. Astrology and occult practices became widespread in Italy in the second half of the 15th century. Natural magic, which was thought to attract positive star influences, acquired a wide circle of followers. The third book of Marsilio Ficino's treatise "On Life" is devoted to its practical application. The description of one of the talismans therein corresponds closely to the iconography of the characters in The Tempest. Research carried out in this connection suggests that the painting was created as a talisman capable of endowing its owner with special gifts - a love of life, outstanding intellectual abilities, and spiritual generosity.
This article aims at presenting a painting by Cesare dell’Acqua (Piran 1821-Bruxelles 1905) as an interesting example of the nineteenth-century genre of history painting depicting scenes from the ...lives of Renaissance artists. The analysis of this work, that has never been examined by the critics, will concentrate on Giorgione’s fortuna in ninteenth-century Venice, especially as a subject of this genre of representation. The painting was exhibited at the Cercle Artistique et Litteraire di Bruxelles in 1861 with the title Giorgione stupisce Tiziano e Giovanni Bellini and is today held in a private collection in Trieste. Cesare dell’Acqua has depicted Giorgione in the act of painting under the gaze of a boy, Titian, and an old man, Giovanni Bellini. Dell’Acqua’s work thus presents the triad of Venetian Renaissance art highlighting Giorgione's pivotal role and reflecting an iconographic theme that is typical of Venetian and Giorgione's painting, the 'Three Ages of Man'. The contribution analyses the visual and literary sources of dell’Acqua’s composition and compares it with other coeval paintings of the same genre, with the aim of deepening the fortuna of Renaissance artists through this new evidence.
The friendship between Gabriele d’Annunzio and Angelo Conti is particularly intense in the years 1894-1900, in the context of Venice. Both of them reflect about Venetian painters and especially ...Giorgione, whose picture they interpret as an expression of Venetian magnificent life. I analyze the meaning of the form fuoco giorgionesco, also used by Walter Pater in his well-known essay The School of Giorgione. I examine in particular Conti’s references to this text, in order to verify their accuracy. I put forward the hypothesis that, when Conti wrote the monograph Giorgione, his knowledge of the English author was incomplete and came largely from articles published in magazines, from conversations with friends, and from the translation into Italian of only short extracts. I argue that it was unlikely that Conti (and d’Annunzio) had read Pater’s whole work in English, which at the time was little known in Italy.
A multifaceted picture of the dynamic concepts of time and temporality is demonstrated in medieval and Renaissance art, as adopted in speculative, ecclesiastical, socio-political, propagandist, ...moralistic, and poetic contexts. Questions regarding perception of time are investigated through innovative aspects of Renaissance iconography.
The paper is concerned with the problematic of one of the aspects of the perception of the male portrait of the Renaissance. The article is a separate chapter of the master’s thesis devoted to the ...male portrait of friends in Italian Renaissance painting. The contemporary (current) viewer can perceive old masters portraits rather ambiguously, including as images of homosexuals. However, for such statements is necessary to realize very confidently what exactly “homosexuality” means and whether such a concept existed in the past. In addition, it is necessary to have as much knowledge as possible about the most varied aspects of the period under study, while always be aware that our knowledge is very mediocre and limited. The author critically analyzes the studies, in which the problem of the representation of homosexuality in old art is touched upon, and tries to identify methodological warnings for further interpretations. In conclusion, the author proposes new open discourses for future research in this field, encourages researchers to take a fresh look at not only the portraits of the Renaissance, but also at their own interpretations.
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