The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (190 page)

(1879–1952).
British painter. He grew up in France (his father, a doctor, practised there) and settled in London in 1910. He was already a friend of
Gilman
and
Gore
and through them he was drawn into
Sickert's
circle, becoming a founder member of the
Camden Town Group
in 1911 and the
London Group
in 1913. His Continental background made him a respected figure among his associates, who were united by an admiration for French painting. Ginner was primarily a townscape and landscape painter and he is known above all for his views of London (often drab areas, although he also depicted the hustle and bustle of places such as Leicester Square and Victoria Station). He painted with thick, regular brushstrokes and firm outlines, creating a heavily textured surface and a feeling of great solidity. Once he had established his distinctive style (by about 1911) it changed little and he became one of the main upholders of the Camden Town tradition after the First World War (ironically, unlike other members of the group, he never actually lived in Camden Town). He worked for the Canadian War Records Commission in the First World War and was an
Official War Artist
in the Second.

 
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(1634–1705).
Neapolitan painter, the most important Italian decorative artist of the second half of the 17th cent. He was nicknamed
‘Luca Fa Presto’
(Luke work quickly) because of his prodigious speed of execution and huge output. His early works were in the
tenebrist
manner of
Ribera
, but his style became much more colourful under the influence of such great decorative painters as
Veronese
, whose works he saw on his extensive travels. Indeed, he absorbed a host of influences and was said to be able to imitate other artists’ styles with ease. His work was varied also in subject-matter, although he was primarily a religious and mythological painter. He worked mainly in Naples, but also extensively in Florence and Venice, and his work had great influence in Italy. In 1692 he was called to Spain by Charles II and stayed there for 10 years, painting in Madrid, Toledo, and the
Escorial
. His last work when he returned to Naples was the ceiling of the Treasury Chapel of S. Martino. In his personal self-confidence and courtliness, and in the open, airy compositions and light luminous colours of his work, Giordano presages such great 18th-cent. Painters as
Tiepolo
.

 
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(
c.
1477–1510).
Venetian painter. Almost nothing is known of his life and only a handful of paintings can be confidently attributed to him, but he holds a momentous place in the history of art. He had achieved legendary status soon after his early death (probably from plague) and through succeeding centuries he has continued to excite the imagination in a way that few other painters can match. The extraordinary discrepancy between his enormous fame and the tiny scale of his
œuvre
is explained by the fact that he initiated a new conception of painting. He was one of the earliest artists to specialize in
cabinet
pictures for private collectors rather than works for public or ecclesiastical patrons, and he was the first painter who subordinated subject-matter to the evocation of mood—it is clear that his contemporaries sometimes did not know what was represented in his pictures.
Vasari
, who says that Giorgione earned his nickname—meaning ‘Big George’—‘because of his physical appearance and his moral and intellectual stature’, ranked him alongside
Leonardo
as one of the founders of ‘modern’ painting.
Giorgione was born in Castelfranco, about 30 km. north-west of Venice, and according to Vasari he trained with Giovanni
Bellini
(although it has also been suggested that
Carpaccio
may have been his teacher). He had two important public commissions in Venice: in 1507–8 he worked on a canvas (now lost without trace) for the audience chamber of the Doges' Palace; and in 1508 (assisted by
Titian
) he painted frescos on the exterior of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi (the German warehouse), now known only through engravings and ruinous fragments. Apart from this, the only contemporary documentation on any of his surviving paintings is an inscription on the back of a female portrait known as
Laura
(Kunsthistorisches Mus., Vienna), which says it was painted by ‘Master Zorzi da Castelfranco’ in 1506; it also records that Giorgione was a colleague of Vincenzo
Catena
, a partnership about which nothing else is known. The main document for reconstructing Giorgione's
œuvre
is the notebook of the Venetian collector and connoisseur Marcantonio Michiel, written between 1525 and 1543. Michiel, who is a scrupulous and reliable source, mentions a number of paintings by Giorgione , four or five of which can be plausibly identified with extant works:
The Tempest
(Accademia, Venice),
The Three Philosophers
(Kunsthistorisches Mus.),
Sleeping Venus
(Gemälde-galerie, Dresden),
Boy with an Arrow
(a copy?, Kunsthistorisches Mus.), and (an oblique and less explicit reference than the others)
Christ Carrying the Cross
(S. Rocco, Venice). He says
The Three Philosophers
was finished by
Sebastiano del Piombo
and the
Sleeping Venus
(the work that founded the tradition of the reclining female nude) was finished by Titian . The problem of attribution was, then, complicated from the start by the fact that some of Giorgione's paintings were completed after his death by other hands, and confusion soon arose; in the first edition of his
Lives
(1550) Vasari attributed the S. Rocco painting to Giorgione, but in the second edition (1568) he gave it in one place to Giorgione and in another to Titian, even though ‘many people believed it was by Giorgione’. Distinguishing between the work of Giorgione and the young Titian continues to be one of the knottiest problems in connoisseurship, the celebrated
Concert Champêtre
in the Louvre being the picture most hotly disputed between them.
Among the other paintings given to Giorgione are the
Castelfranco Madonna
, in the cathedral of his home town (first mentioned by
Ridolfi
in 1648 and accepted by almost all critics), and several male portraits, including a self-portrait in the Herzog-Anton-Ulrich Museum in Brunswick (perhaps a copy). Giorgione is said to have been handsome and amorous, and he initiated a type of dreamily romantic portrait that became immensely popular in Venice. The powerful influence that his work exerted in the generation after his death (even the venerable Bellini succumbed to it) is one of the main factors in making the construction of a catalogue of his work so difficult, for there are scores of paintings of the period, particularly pastoral landscapes, that can be described as Giorgionesque, and many are of high quality. The problems of
iconography
that Giorgione's paintings present are sometimes every bit as difficult as those of attribution. The most famous instance is
The Tempest
. Michiel saw it in 1530 and described it as a ‘little landscape with the tempest with the gipsy and soldier’, so he evidently did not know what subject, if any, was represented. X-rays have shown that Giorgione radically altered the figures in a way that suggests he was here indulging his imagination rather than illustrating a particular theme, although many ingenious attempts have been made to unravel a subject. This development of the ‘landscape of mood’ was, indeed, his great contribution to the history of art—an innovation of great originality and influence. Apart from the artists already mentioned,
Palma Vecchio
and Dosso
Dossi
were among the outstanding contemporaries who fell under the Giorgionesque spell, and among later artists
Watteau
was his most sensitive heir.

 
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