Giorgione's La Tempesta, a Radical Masterwork
Giorgione's La Tempesta, a Radical Masterwork
“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.” William Shakespeare
Introduction
Why write about art? Isn't art explicit enough? And if it is, what is the nature of what it says? Argumentative? Declarative? Let us pretend for a second that we know what this nature is, what do we want to say when we write about art? To ground or discuss its saying? To test its meaning vis á vis the time of its creation? To evaluate different and successive interpretations through history? To ponder its influence power? To retrieve its value from spontaneous forgetfulness?
Traditionally, art writing has separated the work of art itself from its interpretation. In general terms, we may say that it has placed the work of art in the order of experience, and its interpretation in the order of judgment. Our first impression wants to decide whether the work of art is good or not. But, what happens when we already know that it is good, when history has canonized it? Why do we go back again and again to these works of art? What do we want to establish? Do we want to question its place in the canon?
This is the case of Giorgione’s La Tempesta, probably one of the most enigmatic works of art of all time. Elaborated in a time in which art was not explicitly abstract yet, La Tempesta presents itself exactly in the way contemporary abstract art does. It disposes of a number of material elements in an order still unknown. Why a naked woman feeds a child in the open with an upcoming tempest looming in the horizon?, how is she related to the almost faceless male character on the left? Why is she staring directly at us, setting up the question (as Michel Foucault would have said) about a blurring limit between the worlds of the observed and the observer? Even the title is not descriptive in a strict way since it talks about a tempest that has not yet reached these characters. Thus, the very fact that La Tempesta is still enigmatic five hundred years later is proof enough that it keeps intact its original novel character. How is that possible?
From Hans-Georg Gadamer (Warheit und Methode) we learn that a work of the past is directly related to us. Understanding, for him, is an ‘effect’ of history. In this sense, hermeneutical ‘consciousness’ is itself that mode of being that is conscious of its own historical ‘being effected’—it is ‘historically-effected consciousness’ (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein). From this standpoint we may say that interpreting a masterwork of the past is necessarily an expression of this hermeneutical consciousness, of this mode of being that knows how we are a meaningful effect of that particular work. But the question is how this work reaches us, what is its mode of being. The first step in answering this question is clarifying to what style the work of art belongs. We all know that Giorgione’s La Tempesta is one of the finest examples of the so-called High Renaissance. But, what is ‘High Renaissance’ as opposed, for example, to plain Renaissance? What distinguishes the High Renaissance from Renaissance? It is the fact that it constitutes a transition to Mannerism, and from this to Baroque. In other words, Giorgione could be placed in that ambiguous position that no longer believes in the rational humanism of the Renaissance. The conception of space, the use of light, and the structure of the elements prefigures the baroque aesthetic revolution insofar as it poses the question of what is it that conditions the possibility of our knowing something at all. However, in the world of art there are no conceptual thesis, works of art are not ‘arguments’, but rather wondering and a privileged way to question the limits of what is established. Thus, the High Renaissance is one illustrious step in the tortuous elaboration of the question about the true nature of subjectivity and, consequently, of the real as such. A question that may be traced back, simultaneously, in the field of the philosophical critique of Cartesian Dualism.
The Evolution of Modern Painting and its Meaning
Renaissance, as we all know, introduced a radical change in terms of worldview as well as in the conception of man and its place in the cosmos. The painters, for example, introduced perspective to provide their works with a realistic view of the surrounding world. But perspective, we must clarify, is a geometrical concept. In other words, what they really introduced was the outcome of the projection of a mathematical model of space. The contrast with Byzantine art was bold and, during the second half of the 15th Century, it was regarded as an accurate way of representing the world. What we saw in the world appeared “fairly” represented in those works of art. Nonetheless, by the end of the first decade of the 16th Century, there appeared some artists (Andrea del Sarto, Giorgione), who started to “criticize” this Platonic tendency to represent the world in a mathematical fashion. Human models inspired on Greek and Roman art started to blur, to fade away. These new artists were clearly in search of the object of the senses and not the transfigured objects of a mathematical regard. How did this change happen?
I do not pretend to trace the whole evolution line up to baroque painting. Rather, my intention points towards the specific, almost imperceptible changes introduced by some High Renaissance painters, one in Florence and the other in Venice.
Let us start by considering three elements that Renaissance share with High Renaissance, namely, perspective, physical and psychological features. High Renaissance certainly do not dismiss the use of these Renaissance accomplishments. Nonetheless, when closely observed, there starts to appear in it something strange, something disquieting. In Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, for instance, the enigmatic woman is framed by an even more enigmatic landscape. Where does this subtle change come from?
Art critics after Jacob Burckhardt claim that understanding the teleology of this evolution requires the observation of these features in Mannerist art, its last and almost decadent phase. According to them, in Mannerism perspective collapse, characters lose their physical balance, and the whole environment accuses a theatrical, staged air. The foremost examples of the High Renaissance, we know, are Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Yet, alongside these summits of the style there are two painters whose contribution cannot be ignored: Andrea del Sarto (1486-1530) and Giorgione (1473-1510).
Eclipsed by the big names, these painters greatly contributed to the evolution of High Renaissance into Mannerism. Del Sarto’s Cristo in Pietà, from Florence’s Galleria dell'Accademia, is one of these paintings which goes beyond High Renaissance and shows Mannerism before its official existence. The work perfectly fulfills its proper features. The perspective is completely collapsed, the environment is as unreal as to show a suffering Christ just about to levitate, his physical features are as blurred as to create a sensible image of a painful compassion. It is even possible to establish a direct line between this aesthetic conception and what we would know four hundred years later in the art of Paul Cézanne. Andrea del Sarto shows us a transfigured world from the perspective of Christ’s love, a world of unity, where there is no longer any distance between man and the world inhabited by Him. Del Sarto understood that the world of our experience is the world of the Spirit (in the Hegelian sense). As a man of his time and culture, he could see that Christ’s loving redemption had opened a spiritual dimension within this very world of matter, and that is what appears through his colors and almost non representational forms. In a less radical way, Del Sarto showed us this spiritual dimension in his Assunta Passerini, from Galleria Degli Uffizi, and in every image where he deconstructed the Platonic, geometrical world of Renaissance’s mathematical imagination.
The Tempest
Giorgione, born in Castelfranco, Veneto, Republic of Venice, was a contemporary of Michelangelo and Titian (fellow founder of the so called Venetian School) but at the same time was the one who died earlier, even before Leonardo, who was almost a generation older than them. A pupil of Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione inherited the basic inspiration for an imminent transformation of painting. I am thinking about Bellini’s deeply influential altarpiece at San Zaccaria, Venice, where it is clear how “natural” perspective has been substituted by a deliberately “fake” perspective of a scenography which camouflages itself with the architecture of the church, so as to give us the impression that the painted characters walk with us in the same space. The genius of Bellini gives us a stroke of realism insofar as those historical characters are suddenly brought to our very contemporaneity.
Giorgione was to recreate this realist effect with the altarpiece called the Castelfranco Madonna, an interesting variation of Bellini’s piece contrasting indoor and outdoor spaces. But beyond this exercise, Giorgione’s true contribution to the consolidation of High Renaissance’s style and the setting of future transformations was, no doubt, La Tempesta.
The most common interpretations of this work oscillate between the privileged emphasis on particular elements such as the characters, the natural symbols, the architectural pieces, etc., and interpretations which search for a unified explanation of all its constituent elements. In both cases, the painting is interpreted in isolation from the extremely dynamic trend to which it belongs in the history of art. As we have seen above, this is the precise moment in which Renaissance is being substituted by High Renaissance and some elements of future changes are starting to appear. Within this context, it is valid to ask ourselves about the meaning of this work of art, not from the perspective of the meaning of it’s content, but from the viewpoint of the structural disposition of those elements; in other words, not from the perspective of painting conceived as an illustration of literary, mythological or religions imagination; but from the viewpoint of the question about the ontological conditions of meaning in human experience. It is extremely tempting to discover the secret key to the hidden meaning of the work, which could be the author’s original intention, the commissioned topics by Gabriele Vendramin, its first owner, the cultural and historical contexts considered by critics in their readings, etc. However, both Vendramin and Giorgione were men of their times, and these were times of changes. Changes in world exploration, science discoveries, political structures, biblical hermeneutics, just to say the least. And these changes necessarily had a huge impact in aesthetic consciousness, that is, in the way we see ourselves observing the real. Andrea del Sarto and Giovanni Bellini somehow understood these demands and made an effort to show that human experience is neither an empty, abstract reflexive regard nor the plain exteriority of the sensible world, but the continuation between them, that is, the spiritual dimension. Their religious paintings were the perfect occasion to make visible the Spirit in the world. But Giorgione tries to express these questions from a more radical way, that is, the secular perspective. We could even say that this intention was recognized by Giorgione’s contemporaries insofar as the painting was called La Zingarella e il Soldato (“the Gypsy Woman and the Soldier”).
But, what is it that allows us to affirm that in this painting what is represented is not a group of characters in a particular mixed environment, but a way of seeing? We know that Giorgione opposed the Florentine way of conceiving in advance the design of paintings. In other words, for him this Florentine way of seeing was the clear example of the conception of painting as a rational preconception of the world. We have to remember that Florence was, some decades before, the site of Neo Platonism with figures such as Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. This disagreement with the Florentine school is what justifies that Giorgione’s process of painting was tortuous and slow, but also full of doubts and sudden setbacks. This is why a contemporary x-ray examination of La Tempesta has revealed an erased nude woman in the place where we now see the man. But the question is how could we define Giorgione’s conception of painting as opposed to that of the Florentine school? We could easily say that as opposed to a rational conception of art, Giorgione’s was intuitive. But this does not amount to much, it is just the exercise of a logical mechanism. What we would like is to reach a close description of what Giorgione did when he was painting.
To be purely intuitive, especially in Modern times, is close to impossible. Why? Because we have already incorporated rational mediation, a model between our eyes and our objects of experience. How, then, is it possible to reach these objects without this sort of mediation? We may answer that only in a critical way, to use the philosophical modern jargon. But, what does this mean to an artist who did not even live to know this philosophical debate over method? Well, we could say that if preconceived certainty is the method of reason, doubt is the method of intuition. But here we are not talking about the Cartesian doubt, that is, the doubt about what we see, but the aesthetic doubt, that is, the doubt about what we know. Doubting about what he saw, Descartes thought he had reached pure thinking. Doubting about what he knew, Giorgione attempted to reach pure seeing. And this is what we believe we experience in La Tempesta: pure seeing.
Yet the question remains: how did Giorgione do this? In both Descartes and Giorgione the reflexive activity amounts to a spiritual exercise. Descartes suspends the world, puts into question the very existence of the external world. Giorgione, on the other hand, suspends what we know about the world, puts into question, let’s say, the theoretical scaffolding of experience. Descartes concludes that thought alone exists. Giorgione concludes that there should be a pre rational way of seeing. Descartes argues that it is impossible to elaborate a scientific proof of the existence of the external world. Giorgione proceeds to decompose the rational, hierarchical composition of things: the idea of the world as a house becomes the depiction of two nomadic characters; the woman besides a protecting man becomes a man and a woman who do not even look at each other; a man dominated nature becomes a world in ruins; Venice neighboring Mantua; an ongoing tempest before breaking up; a woman questioning the spectator as a character defining look, etc. Obviously, these apparent contradictions are not the structure of meaning, but the structure of the question about the very possibility of meaning; and I say “apparent” contradictions, because they do not stand for the simple absence of meaning, but stand for the question about the possibility of meaning. Giorgione’s doubt method consists of upsetting the established structure of rational intelligibility. This is why La Tempesta is and will always be enigmatic. This is why it is worthless trying to build its meaning upon narratively pre-existing structures, be it biblical or mythological stories. Giorgione’s La Tempesta is a radical work of art, that is, a critical one, a masterwork that reaches far beyond decorative and illustrative art and opens up the question about what is real, about how it is possible to “touch” the skin of the world.
There is one last question: why is it called La Tempesta?, what might be said about its title name from the perspective of a radical way of conceiving the practice of art?, where is this tempest happening?, which are its possible victims?, where and what is this city upon which it devastatingly hits? These questions have a possible unified meaning only if we conceive this “tempest” as man’s eternal battle with himself, his never ending struggle for his soul, for leaving the Platonic cave and having a direct, not mediated encounter with what is real for, in, and from itself. Of course we all know that the human condition could be seen as a kind of tempest, a struggle, because although Giorgione tries to attain pure seeing, the object is never completely present to the artist, just as pure thinking is never totally devoid of world. La Tempesta is itself the internal struggling dynamic that gives birth to subjectivity, a still faceless, violent movement, where the genesis and destruction of meaning happens simultaneously. La Tempesta, as title, means that this genetic constitution of subjectivity brings with it wild and blind winds which put our world upside down, a force coming from transcendence that compels us to hear the call of the True, that brings down the arbitrary constructions of reason. Giorgione’s masterwork will always question our position in relation to the real. Its permanent whisper is the question of la zingarella’s straight regard: “am I present or absent?”
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