The three philosophers
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| The three philosophers |
|---|
| Giorgione , c. 1508-1509 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 125.5 x 146.2 cm |
| Kunsthistorisches Museum , Vienna |
The Three Philosophers is an oil painting by the Italian Renaissance painter Giorgione ,completed around 1508 to 1509,commissioned by the Venetian nobleman Taddeo Contarini .
The current name of the work comes from a writing by Marcantonio Michiel , who saw it in a Venetian villa. The three figures have clear allegorical features: a bearded old man, an Arab and a seated young man in a natural landscape. In the background you can see a village in the middle of mountains, in the far back a blue object with an unknown meaning. The young man looks at a cave on the left edge of the picture and apparently measures it with a device.
The scholarly world interprets the work differently. According to widespread interpretation, the three men do not represent the wise men from the Orient in front of the grotto of Jesus' birth, but the three stages of human spiritual life: the Renaissance (the young man), Arabia (the man in a turban ) and the Middle Ages (the old man). Others see the three ages of humans instead of an allegory . Still others suspect astrological and alchemical allusions to Contarini's scholarly engagement.
According to new research, the young man on the left with the angle iron is Pythagoras and next to him are his two teachers Pherecydes and Thales of Miletus.
The social philosopher Agnes Heller , a student of Georg Lukács, describes the Venetian image as the "philosopher types representative of the Venetian development: the Thomists , the Averroists and the natural philosophers ". With this interpretation Heller bases its argument that in Venice unlike Florence of determinism in the Renaissance dominated.
- Details from the painting The Three Philosophers
Individual evidence
- ↑ Kunsthistorisches Museum: The Three Philosophers
- ↑ Agnes Heller, Der Mensch der Renaissance Hohenheim-Verlag, 1982
