Giorgione, who had probably received some training in Venice in the 1490s with Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, is the probable painter of the “Castelfranco Madonna,” executed around 1503 for La Pala of the Cathedral in his home town of Castelfranco, Veneto.

The altarpiece was commissioned by the condottiero Tuzio Costanzo in memory of his son Matteo, who died of a fever while serving the Republic of Venice in Serenissima, 1503/4 or 1500.

Also commissioned was a family chapel, La Pala, containing the tombs of Matteo and Tuzio, built into the walls on either side of the painting.

The picture, a typical sacra conversazione, shows the Madonna enthroned with the Child with St. Francis and, on the left, St. Nicasius.

The latter, an armored figure, has also been identified as the fighting saint St. George or St. Liberalis, patron of Castelfranco.

Tuzio is a member of the Knights of Rhodes, whose ensign is borne by St. Nicasius (a martyred saint who had also belonged to the Hospitaller order.

Some scholars have speculated that St. Nicasius himself is actually a portrait of Matteo).

The traditional scheme of composition is lightened by the novel use of such elements as the throne and the landscape, which takes up a good portion of the background.

Noteworthy is also the absence of any reference to ecclesiastical elements of architecture.

The technique of painting is an example of what Vasari will call pittura sanza disegno (painting without drawing).

This is a new approach to painting which revolutionizes the Venetian school and is famously used in The Tempest.

Titian, a pupil of Giorgione, is later to become one of the most important exponents of this style.

The little that is known of Giorgione's life is given in Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects.

The painter came from the small town of Castelfranco Veneto, forty kilometers inland from Venice.

His name sometimes appears as Zorzo.

The variant Giorgione (or Zorzon) may be translated "Big George".

How early in boyhood he went to Venice we do not know, but stylistic evidence supports the statement of Carlo Ridolfi that he served his apprenticeship there under Giovanni Bellini; there he settled and made his fame.

Contemporary documents record that his gifts were recognized early.

In 1500, when he was only twenty-three (that is, if Vasari is correct about his age when he died), he was chosen to paint portraits of the late Doge Agostino Barbarigo and the condottiere Consalvo Ferrante.

He is in 1503 hcommissioned to paint an altarpiece in memory of another condottiere, Matteo Costanzo, in the cathedral of his native town, Castelfranco.

Giorgione paints the Madonna and Child Between St. Francis and St. Nicasius, also known as Castelfranco Madonna, an altarpiece in sacra conversazione form—Madonna enthroned, with saints on either side forming an equilateral triangle.

This gives the landscape background an importance that marks an innovation in Venetian art, and will be quickly followed by his master Giovanni Bellini and others.

It is housed in the Cathedral of Castelfranco Veneto, Giorgione's native city, in Veneto, northern Italy.

The altarpiece had been commissioned by the condottiero Tuzio Costanzo in memory of his son Matteo, who died of a fever in 1499 while serving the Republic of Venice.

Also commissioned as a family chapel, containing the tombs of Matteo and Tuzio, built into the walls on either side of the painting.

Judith, a painting by the Italian painter Giorgione, executed around 1504, is one of the few authentic works by Giorgione owned by the Russian Hermitage Museum.

The painting, originally attributed to Raphael, came to the Hermitage in 1772 from Paris.

Like many other paintings, it refers to the Judith and Holofernes motif.

Giorgione and the young Titian revolutionize the genre of the portrait.

It is exceedingly difficult and sometimes simply impossible to differentiate Titian's early works from those of Giorgione.

None of Giorgione's paintings are signed and only one bears a reliable date: his portrait of Laura (June 1, 1506), one of the first to be painted in the "modern manner", distinguished by dignity, clarity, and sophisticated characterization.

Italian scholar and engineer Fra Giovanni Giocondo, who has worked throughout Italy and in France for Charles VIII and Louis XII, mostly as an advisor, works on the defenses of Venice in about 1506.

Girgione’s Portrait of a Young Man (now in Berlin) is even more striking.

Few of the portraits attributed to Giorgione appear as straightforward records of the appearance of a commissioning individual, though it is perfectly possible that many are.

Many can be read as types designed to express a mood or atmosphere, and certainly many of the examples of the portrait tradition Giorgione has initiated appear to have had this purpose, and not to have been sold to the sitter.

The subjects of his non-religious figure paintings are equally hard to discern.

Perhaps the first question to ask is whether there was intended to be a specific meaning to these paintings that ingenious research can hope to recover.

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.)

Lorenzo Lotto, one of the first great Venetian artists of the High Renaissance to see the art of central Italy and Rome, works with a number of artists in the Vatican Palace’s Stanze della Segnatura—the apartments of Pope Julius II—under the supervision of Raphael.

Like Leonardo’s earlier Milanese frescoes for the “Last Supper,” Raphael's frescoes in the Stanza are visually and contextually ultimate Florentine-Roman statements, whereas the oil paintings of Giorgione and Titian are most representative of Venetian concerns.

Vittore Carpaccio’s Presentation of Christ in the Temple, along with his undated Two Courtesans, exemplify the painter’s lively use of light, his design, and his sharp, often witty, powers of observation.

Giorgione evidently executes commissions for numerous private patrons.

The deep shadows and resonances in his so-called “Fete Champetre,” painted in about 1510, mark the development of the full potential of oil color as an expressive tool.

He creates a self-portrait in 1510.

(It is held at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, from which it was stolen on November 5, 1983, and recovered in Operation Budapest.)

Giorgione dies of the plague in September or October 1510.

The Sleeping Venus, also known as the Dresden Venus, is a painting by Giorgione, with, it is now generally accepted, the landscape and sky, by Titian, completed after Giorgione's death in 1510, as Vasari first noted.

It is today in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden.

One of the last works by Giorgione, the painting portrays a nude woman whose profile seems to follow that of the hills in the background.

Giorgione had put a great deal of effort into painting the background details and shadows.

The choice of a nude woman marks a revolution in art, and is considered by some authorities one of the starting points of modern art.

The painting is unfinished at the time of his death.

The landscape and sky are later finished by Titian, who will later paint the similar Venus of Urbino.

Underlying erotic implications are made by Venus's raised arm and the placement of her left hand on her groin.

The sheets are painted in silver, being a cold color rather than the more commonly used warm tones for linens, and they are rigid looking in comparison to those depicted in similar paintings by Titian or Velázquez.

The landscape mimics the curves of the woman's body and this, in turn, relates the human body back to being a natural, organic object.

The pose of the figure has been connected with a figure in one of the woodcut illustrations to Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of 1499, but a nude of this size, as a single subject, is unprecedented in Western painting, and to a large extent determines the treatment of the type for centuries to come, excluding, for example, the more explicit treatment in the contemporary engravings of Giovanni Battista Palumba.

Although prints had contained many more nude female figures, the two famous paintings of Botticelli, the Birth of Venus and the Primavera, are the closest precedents in painting.

The contemplative attitude toward nature and beauty of the figure is typical of Giorgione.

The composition of this painting will influence later painters such as, Ingres and Rubens.

A direct link connects the Venus of Giorgione to that of Titian, and his Venus will lead directly to the Olympia of Manet.

This early portrait by Titian was long wrongly believed to be of Ariosto; it is more likely a self-portrait, and the composition will be borrowed by Rembrandt for his own self-portraits.