The thunderstorm (painting)
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| The storm |
|---|
| Giorgione , ca.1508 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 82 × 73 cm |
| Accademia (Venice) |
The thunderstorm ( Italian La tempesta ) is a painting by the Venetian painter Giorgione . It was created around 1508 and is located in the Accademia in Venice.
The picture of Giorgione is considered to be one of the unsolved riddles in European art history. It has been interpreted in different ways, but so far it has not received a valid interpretation that is satisfactory in all aspects. Perhaps Giorgione never intended to tell a self-contained, clear picture story. The puzzling nature of the picture is likely to be a cause of the unbroken fascination that it has exerted on the viewer over and over again for centuries.
history
In Giorgione's work it is one of the pictures called poetry , which were created for a courtly and educated circle of collectors, connoisseurs and art lovers. The aim of poetry was to offer the educated and learned art lover a difficult and encrypted subject to which he could apply all his imagination, his understanding of art and his erudition.
The picture was probably commissioned around 1508 by the Venetian nobleman and art collector Gabriele Vendramin. It is one of the few paintings by the painter for which a reliable source exists. In 1530, Marcantonio Michiel, in his book Notes of Opere del disegno, describes the picture that he saw in the Vendramins house as ... a small landscape with the storm, the gypsy and the soldier ... by the hand of Zorzo da Castelfranco . It is listed under a slightly different title in an inventory of the Vendramin Collection from 1569. Jacob Burckhardt saw it in the middle of the 19th century in Palazzo Manfrin and mentions it in his Cicerone .
description
The picture shows an Arcadian landscape with tall trees and a river that is crossed by a bridge. A thunderstorm has risen over a city in the background with towers and a dome. The city shows the lion of St. Mark as a coat of arms on a wall. A castle can be seen to the right of the lightning bolt, with a four-wheeled coat of arms above the gate. This can be assigned to the da Carrara family in Padua. The last signor of the da Carrara family was strangled in 1405 while in Venetian captivity. In the foreground is a young man in contemporary fashionable clothing (Landsknechthose) with a shepherd's crook in his hand, opposite him is a naked woman with a child on her breast. The two have no eye contact with each other, but the woman looks at the viewer. The rocky landscape is overgrown with a few sparse bushes, ruins and parts of a wall can be seen. The city, brightly lit by a flash of lightning, seems deserted. The only living being visible is a stork on a roof.
The landscape in Giorgione's painting is no longer just a background and of secondary importance. Rather, it has absolute priority over the two human figures posted on the edge and determines the atmosphere and the charisma of the picture. Deep shades of bright blue and green dominate, with which Giorgione creates an almost magical pictorial effect of calm, silence and harmony, which is not disturbed by the distant thunderstorm on the horizon.
Interpretations
The usual keys for interpreting a Renaissance image do not fit here, and this is shown by the multitude of different attempts at explanation. Michiel's first description already speaks of a “ gypsy ” and a “ nymph ” who, according to the conventions of Greek mythology, can not actually breastfeed a child. An interpretation is made even more difficult by the fact that Giorgione's picture was changed and painted over . In the final version, another naked woman was replaced by the man with the shepherd's staff.
Salvatore Settis lists a selection of interpretations in his book. Accordingly, the picture shows The Four Elements , a secular version of the rest on the flight into Egypt , a scene from Ovid , from Boccaccio , from Petrarch or from the dream of Polyphylos , The Legend of Saint Theodore , the finding of Moses , Adam and Eve , the birth of Bacchus , one of Zeus' love affairs , etc.
In more recent research, Antonio Boscardin, Wolfgang Eller and Udo Soragni independently connect the depicted city silhouette with early modern Padua . Robert Otten sees a relationship between the painting and a legend from the 15th century that tells of the beginning of the Paduan dynasty Da Carrara, which is not genealogically documented. The legend mentions the love affair between a young soldier and a princess of the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire . The lovers fled from the imperial court to the area around Padua and founded the Da Carrara tribe, who ruled Padua from 1318 to 1405.
Otten assigns the picture details to the founding of the Da Carrara family and the dynastic rule. The soldier has the typical iconographic features of a ruler, e.g. B. allusion to the Augustus of Prima Porta statue , the trouser and shoe garb of a mercenary , the position of the left hand and the right leg.
The woman wears typical attributes of a bride, e.g. B. Veil, bared right breast, a wrap over her shoulder, a laurel bush in front of her nakedness. The connection between Padua and the young couple is underpinned by the family coat of arms above the city gate.
Receptions
- literature
In his novel Die Rote Giorgiones, the writer Alfred Andersch quotes paintings under the title Storm in some places: The protagonist Fabio Crepaz - who works as a violinist in the Teatro La Fenice - has a photo of the painting in his room. And he also looks at the original at certain time intervals. In the presence of the child Serafina, Fabio remembers her Jewish father Tullio Toledano. The protagonist relates the motif of the painting to his uprooted situation and to the family relationships in the Venetian ghetto where he once lived, which was torn apart after the Holocaust . The painting is like a parable for loneliness, the main theme in Andersch's novel.
- Movie
The painting plays a central role in the movie "Tempesta" (Eng. "The Venice Code") : It is stolen from the Gallerie dell'Accademia .
literature
- Hans Belting : Exile in Arcadia. Giorgiones Tempestà in a more recent perspective . In: Reinhard Brandt (Ed.): Masterpieces of Painting. Reclam, Leipzig 2001, pp. 45-68, ISBN 3-379-20013-1 .
- Salvatore Settis : Giorgones "Thunderstorm". Client and hidden subject of a picture in the Renaissance. Wagenbach, Berlin 1982, ISBN 3-8031-3506-0 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Wolfgang Eller: Giorgione catalog raisonné, Imhof 2007
- ↑ universal_lexikon.deacademic.com/224253/da_Carrara
- ^ Antonio Boscardin: Padova nella Tempesta: nel capolavoro di Giorgione una veduta coerente di Padova al tempo della guerra di Cambria, Padova - ° sn, 2005
- ^ Wolfgang Eller: Giorgione catalog raisonné, Michael Imhof Verlag, Petersberg, 2007, ISBN 9783865681263
- ↑ Udo Soragni in "Giorgione a Padova - l'enigma del carro", Comune di Padova, Skira, Milan / Padua, 2010, (ed.) ISBN 9788857207711
- ^ Robert Otten: Observations on the painting "Das Gewitter" (1508) by Giorgione, 2015, GRIN Verlag, Munich, ISBN 9783668045828
- ^ Tempesta - Giorgione - new research - Otten. Retrieved October 21, 2017 .
- ↑ Paola Tellaroli: Misteri e storie insolite di Padova, Newton Compton Editori, Rome, 2015, ISBN 9788854182295
- ↑ Alfred Andersch: The Red. Book guild Gutenberg, Frankfurt am Main 1962, pp. 34–36 u. P. 337f.