Giorgione’s The Tempest has been called the first landscape in the history of Western painting.

The subject of this painting is unclear, but its artistic mastery is apparent.

The Tempest portrays a soldier and a breast-feeding woman on either side of a stream, amid a city's rubble and an incoming storm.

The multitude of symbols in The Tempest offer many interpretations, but none is wholly satisfying.

Theories that the painting is about duality (city and country, male and female) have been dismissed since radiography has shown that in the earlier stages of the painting the soldier to the left was a seated female nude.

Giorgione works in 1508 on a group portrait of the Council of Ten in Venice (now lost) and on frescoes on the facade of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi (now mostly destroyed).

Tiziano Vecellio, or Titian, works alongside him as an independent painter.

Born in about 1488 in Pieve di Cadore in the Dolomite region of Italy, Titian had come as a young man to study painting in Venice, but little is known of his early training and practice there.

He had studied under the famous painters Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, but Giorgione’s tutelage gives the first great impetus to his style. (The young painter so completely absorbs Giorgione's use of color and brush technique and the sublime, poetic vision of his landscape and figure paintings that debate continues over the attribution of works considered either collaborations between the elder Giorgione and the young Titian or works wholly by one or the other.)