This essay aims to resolve the long-standing debate over whether the female figure in Giorgione's Laura is a bride or a courtesan. On the basis of the inscription on the back of the portrait and ...archival and other documents, the conclusion reached is that the sitter was Laura Donà, born between 1485 and 1492 and married to Nicolò Contarini in 1506. Attention is also given to the theories that the subject of the painting is a courtesan, Petrarch's Laura, or an illustration of the paragone argument. Giorgione skilfully alludes to these other possibilities, thus enhancing the effect of the picture and contributing to the destabilization of the traditional portrait genre at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
As
Quine (1953) taught us, from (1) and (2) we cannot infer (3):
(1)
Giorgione was so-called because of his size
(2)
Giorgione was Barbarelli
(3)
Barbarelli was so-called because of his size.
Why?
In ...this paper I discuss and dismiss two possible answers. The first answer (section 1) rests on the view that in a sentence like (1)—a Giorgione-sentence—the name ‘Giorgione’ plays a dual role, i.e. it is both used and mentioned, and, since it is mentioned, it cannot be substituted salva veritate by the coreferential name ‘Barbarelli’. The second answer (section 2) dismisses the dual role of the name. It proposes the view that the name ‘Giorgione’ is picked out by the pronoun ‘so’ working like a demonstrative. In section 3 I present a plausible Perry-inspired account—i.e. I take on board Perry's distinction between an utterance's referential truth conditions and its reflexive truth conditions—which enables us to solve Frege-inspired puzzles concerning cognitive significance. Finally, in section 4, I discuss and defend the view that in a Giorgione-sentence ‘so’ works as an anaphoric pronoun coindexed with the name ‘Giorgione’. This anaphoric link and coindexation, though, appears at a reflexive level. This solution rests on the view that at the surface level the name is merely used while at the reflexive level, it is mentioned.
1
1
The picture I propose is neutral
vis-à-vis any particular theory of quotation. For my argument to work, it is sufficient that the NPs appear within quotation marks at the cognitive level.
I also show how the account proposed elegantly deals with so-called simple sentences of the form “Clark Kent, unlike Superman, can’t fly”, “Superman is stronger/more successful/…than Clark Kent”. In these sentences, codesignative NPs do not seem to be substitutable salva veritate. As in Giorgione-sentences, it is shown that their apparent non-substitutability is best dealt with at the reflexive level. The picture I’ll end up proposing endorses the welcome consequence that in Giorgione-sentences, unlike in simple sentences, codesignative names cannot be replaced salva veritate. Yet in simple sentences the intuitions concerning their alleged non-substitutivity are dealt with at the reflexive level. Thus, these intuitions force us neither to invoke special modes of presentation entering the proposition expressed nor to enrich our ontology and claim that coreferential names can refer to different entities in various contexts.
This thesis concerns a shift in the historiography of the Venetian painter Giorgione (c1477- 1510). In important ways, this change was caused by Joseph Archer Crowe (1825-1896) and Giovanni Battista ...Cavalcaselle (1819-1897) in their A History of Painting in North Italy (1871). This text met seminal reactions from Walter Pater (1839-1894) in his essay “The School of Giorgione” (1877) and from Giovanni Morelli (1816-1891) in his Die Werke italienischer Meister in den Galerien von München, Dresden und Berlin (1880). Following a method of close reading, the analysis will concentrate on the intertextual relationship between these three works. This thesis contends that Crowe and Cavalcaselle comprehensively problematised scholarship on the artist, creating a “new” Giorgione; that Pater responded dialectally to scientific connoisseurship with aesthetic criticism, intellectually justifying and morally absolving his interpretation; that Morelli responded by offering a noticeably different catalogue of paintings, and by making Giorgione function within his anti-authoritarian rhetoric as a validation for his method; however, in so doing, Morelli was conducting an ironic problematisation of connoisseurship in general. The thesis begins with an introduction to the “old” Giorgione, before discussing the concepts of aestheticism and connoisseurship. It is then divided into three studies and a conclusion. The first part considers how the artist was understood in the nineteenth century prior to Crowe and Cavalcaselle’s research, before discussing the nature of the two connoisseurs’ enquiry. The second part focuses on Pater and his relationship with Giorgione, placing his essay in the context of The Renaissance (1873); after this the study follows Pater as he defines his theory of aesthetic criticism and responds to what he understands as scientific history, before analysing his interpretation of Giorgione. The third and final part of this thesis will seek to understand Morelli’s ambiguous text and the function of the artist within it; examining his method, rhetoric, and polemic with Crowe and Cavalcaselle, it will conclude by arguing that irony was an active concept in Morelli’s thinking. By attending to a specific artist’s historiography at a particular time, this thesis indirectly reveals the way art history on Italian painting operated in this period, when the discipline was undergoing the processes of professionalisation and institutionalisation.
A number of Italian paintings from the first decades of the 16th century represent musical time in a similar way—an arched hand with fingers in the process of being raised and lowered with the beat. ...This action is described by contemporary music theorists and is now commonly referred to as ' tactus'. Looking at connections between musical paintings by Sebastiano Florigerio, Giorgione and a number of related artists, and contemporary discussions of musical time in music and medical treatises, I argue that the tactus was a symbol for aging, time and sexual decorum. These paintings use tactus as a foil for the passage of time, a necessary element for the emerging 'Iconography of Age' tradition. Tactus was seen as a musical pulse, and pulse was believed to change with the different stages of life and health. The symbol of the tactus is strongly connected with men in their virile middle age. These paintings reveal expectations for decorous engagement in social music-making that were different for men and women.
