GIORGIONE's FETE CHAMPETRE

GIORGIONE's FETE CHAMPETRE (1500-1510)

After looking at Giorgione's painting called THE TEMPEST in the previous blog entry, it is a natural progression to look at his painting called the FETE CHAMPETRE, dated between 1500-10, now in the Louvre in Paris.
 

The Fete Champetre is hung on the wall behind the MONA LISA in the Louvre, but most people touring the museum miss it because they stop,
understandably, at Leonardo's great work. It is appropriate to associate Giorgione's painting with the Mona Lisa, however, because both paintings were created sometime between 1500 and 1510, and it is possible that Giorgione met Leonardo when Leonardo visited Venice during those years. The Fete Champetre shows the influence of Leonardo's "sfumato" (smoky) style of painting, where the contours of figures and objects are soft and blend into the landscape.

 




Mona Lisa is a portrait  while Giorgione's painting contains four main figures, the two dressed men and two naked women, as well as the shepherd in the background with his sheep, none of them portraits. However, the way the skin of the figures in both paintings is made to blend into clothing and surroundings without any sharp edges is similar in both. The shadows at the sides of Mona Lisa's cheeks are similar to the shadows at the sides of the back of the flute player in Giorgione's painting;
the painters are softening the edges in both cases.
 

The Giorgione painting is given a French title in a later century, Fete Champetre, which roughly translates, "Picnic in the Countryside." That title does not tell us what Giorgione believed the subject
of the painting to be. The Louvre label attributes the painting to Titian, but I disagree with that attribution and will show why a little later. 

          Let us first look at the painting and gather clues from it. Though it is a rectangular painting and larger than the Mona Lisa, the figures are not life-size. Two men dressed in fashionable clothes, one in a hat, sit on the ground and seem to be conversing with one another. The man on the left wears striped tights, the man on the right has bare feet.

 

  

The man with the hat holds a lute and appears to have stopped playing it since his right hand is away from the strings while the fingers of his left hand press on the strings of the instrument. He turns towards the man to his left, who bends his head as if to whisper something to his companion. Behind the men's heads we can see a couple of houses that indicate a village a fair distance away. In the foreground are two semi-naked women; the one on the left stands and is about to pour liquid from a see-through pitcher into a stone well. The water has not reached the mouth of the pitcher but appears
about to be poured out.

The light reflects off the glass of the pitcher making the shape of the pitcher round; we also see through the glass to the beige stone of the sarcophagus beyond it. This woman's head and body verticals are reinforced by the vertical lines of the tree behind and the side of the well in the front. The clothing of the woman on the left is white and appears to wrap around her hips and legs while revealing her upper torso. Her breasts are hidden by her left arm holding the pitcher of water. The light reflected on the glass is reflecting on her round stomach, and the comparison of ewer to her naked round area is intended by the artist for us to view this woman as a container, too.
            The woman on the right appears to have been playing the flute that she holds in front of her in her right hand; we see her from the back as she sits on the ground partly on her removed white clothing. Since we do not see her face, we are not sure where she looks. The flute is a phallic-shaped
instrument so the implication of her playing it is not overtly sexual but is subtly there.
 

In a Renaissance drawing now in the British Museum, a drawing which could also be by Giorgione,
a similar flautist female sits in a landscape in the same position, holding a flute, but in the drawing she appears to look off into the distance at the houses of a village. The drawing also differs from the finished painting in that the one dressed male musician is actually bowing a viola da gamba while behind him lie three sleepy sheep.

 

On the far right  in our painting and a certain distance away from the group in the background is a shepherd playing a bagpipe (you can see the flute part of the bagpipe sticking out over his left shoulder) and walking towards the group; he is surrounded by a flock of sheep and behind them we can make out the shepherd's mule. Shepherds playing bagpipes used to come down from the hills in
Italy at Christmas to play in the city streets (as late as 1994) and their bagpipes were similar to this simple one.

The whole of the scene is painted in muted, soft tones and while there are shadows (see sheep and shepherd's legs) that indicate a light source coming from the left, the light glances quietly off sections of the figures and objects and the contours are not sharply drawn.

The gathering of two dressed men and two naked women is unusual for subjects painted in
the 15th and 16th centuries. A story seems to be unfolding. The two men appear to talk with each
other without looking at the ladies. The shepherd seems intent on approaching the group in the distance. One woman seems to have been playing a duet with the lutenist, the other is up
supplying the party with water or pouring water out. A mysterious air hovers around the group. Is this another personal experience being rendered by Giorgione on canvas? Two men have taken their lovers to the countryside to make music (symbolic of love-making) and they now have to discuss what to do with the approach of the shepherd. 

       Some critics call the painting The Pastoral Concert, which seems very appropriate. The lute and the flute represent a soft kind of music, perfect for the accompaniment of intimate relations, perfect for producing civilized, sweet sounds of love. The bagpipe, on the other hand, represents a loud harsh sound, meant for communicating in large fields, the opposite of courtly entertainment, the rough, brash sound of the countryside and animal life, and in this context, an interrupting sound.

One might be tempted to see this painting as part of a series for depictions of the five senses:
sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. Sight is portrayed in the display of landscape and sky along with
the four foreground characters, as well as in the light reflected off the pitcher of water. Smell is implied in the flock of sheep and natural bodies on the earth. Taste is figured in the water about to pour out of the glass pitcher. Touch is certainly shown in the fingering of the flute, the holding of the pitcher, the playing of the bagpipe, and the hands of the man on the lute and its strings, the touching of the naked bodies of the women implied in those gestures.
         But SOUND is the most prominent of the senses on display here. If we read the central line that moves across the canvas horizontally, it follows the sounds the viewer is meant to hear. 

Starting at the left, we hear the pouring of the water into the well, then the implied music of the lute just finished. We hear the low sounds of the men talking to each other. Next to the right we imagine the flute sound that has just ended, and then, at the far right, the bagpipe sound drowning all the other sounds all out. The first four sounds implied, left to right, are subtle, the last on the right demanding and even unpleasant. Are the men deciding they must all leave, their music-making and love-making having been interrupted? Has the man without instrument been singing and has stopped? His vocal sound would be another sound added to the theme, if so.            

A painting about sound produced in a lyrical way. Sometimes these paintings of subjects unknown,
where the action takes place in the natural landscape, are known as POESIE, painted POEMS.
And the soft contours of fabric, hair, faces, fleshly bodies, and vase are perfect renderings of
poetic performance, especially since poetry is meant to be read aloud in sound.

A poetic love song set in the countryside.

Many critics have wanted to see the women as invisible Muses who accompany the
men in their musical fantasy, the women as ideas that inspire the players, ideas not in the realm of reality inhabited by the men. The problem with that kind of reading is that it wants to stop looking at the naked women, either out of fear of confronting the arousal they engender in their nakedness, or
out of worry that nudity evokes unwanted desire and distracts the viewer from the real meaning. But Giorgione wants us to see the women and admire their beauty, wants us to compare the dressed figures of the men with the undressed women beside them. For him the seductive beauty of the women is how he expects to attract people to his paintings. The beauty of the men in their display of drapery and leg tights is accompanied by the beauty of the women in the display of their bodies. The playing of instruments to make music is a metaphor for the making of love, the most seductive subject.
          Which brings us to the question of authorship for this painting. Titian, who is born around 1488, is a pupil of Giorgione in Venice, and is certainly painting during this period. However, his
early paintings, such as the Sacred and Profane Love in the Borghese Gallery, of 1514,

and his Venus of Urbino of 1534, 

both of which contain naked women, are not at all in the same mysterious vein of the Giorgione paintings and do not use the same Leonardo "sfumato" style of smoky contours.
In order to understand the difference between Giorgione and Titian, we only have to look in the
same room of the Louvre where the Fete Champetre is hanging to see a painting by Titian of 1515
called "Woman at her Mirror."

The size of Titian's figures is always larger than those of Giorgione's. This woman at the two mirrors takes up most of the picture plane and is much larger than the naked women in the Fete Champetre. We can distinctly make out the contour line of the mirror woman's right forearm and elbow; there is no softening of the edges as there is in the woman pouring the pitcher in the other painting.

 
Titian's woman is perfuming her hair and looking at her reflection in the mirrors held by the man. The subject is straightforward; while she is distracted by gazing at herself, the man is gazing at her breasts over her shoulder. We sense no particular story
or narrative, and if there is one, there is no mystery about it; the two people are interacting but we understand the motives of each.
        In Giorgione's paintings the mystery of life's interactions is subtly represented by figures that
are not large and not clearly defined in their contours. The mystery of what is happening in the
scene is made visible by the unclear edges as they slide into other edges. What do the men say?
Why have they stopped playing music? What will happen next? Why are out in the country? How far
away is the shepherd? What is the relation of the women with each other and with the men?

If we compare Giorgione's Sleeping Venus of 1510 (Dresden) to Titian's Venus of Urbino of 1534 (Uffizi), we can see the same distinctions apply:
 

In Giorgione's painting the woman is lying with her eyes closed so the viewer may peruse her body
and follow the lines of her curves in the same way that we follow the lines of the landscape behind
her, and all the lines are muted. There is a mystery about her that remains unanswered by her closed eyes.
In Titian's painting,

the woman looks out at the viewer and either invites the viewer in or prevents the viewer from entering her bedroom, where two servants are either putting her clothes away or taking them out for
wearing; the reality of the soiled bedclothes, the dog, her rings, her left hand preparing for or finishing up love-making, all of these specific details make for intrigue but not mystery. The Sleeping Venus of Giorgione evokes all women on the earth and makes us wonder how women fit into the natural landscape of procreation in all of time, while Titian's sharper leg contours on the Urbino mistress focus our attention on her specific moment, whether waiting for her lover or finishing up after an encounter.
          The specific and sharp-edged are not present in the Fete Champetre in the Louvre. The figures are not even 2/3 lifesize and do not take up most of the space of the painting as the Titian's females do. The soft tone of the musical encounter in the countryside and its melded edges means the Louvre Fete Champetre cannot be a painting by Titian. It presents a mysterious love encounter interrupted, a theme we have already seen painted by Giorgione in The Tempest.The interruption makes the viewer
remember the sound that has stopped, just as the painter captures the moment where the sound is
still hanging in the air, a harmony about to be broken. The glass pitcher poised in mid-air envelops

the water and keeps it held for a single harmonious instant. The pitcher symbolizes the act of painting for Giorgione who creates one moment caught between the present and eternity to make us all feel held within the beauty that he envisions.

 

GIORGIONE's THE TEMPEST

GIORGIONE's THE TEMPEST 

Marcantonio Michiel's inventory of 1530 for the art collection of Gabriele Vendramin is the first mention of this painting of Giorgione's now in the Accademia in Venice: "El paesetto in telacunla tempesta, cunla cinganaet soldato, fude mano de Zorzi da Castelfranco"(A small landscape on canvas with a tempest, with the gypsy and soldier, was by the hand of Giorgio from Castelfranco - my trans.) (Zorzi is the Venetian version of Giorgio, cingana probably the Venetian version of zingara.)

Since Giorgione died in 1510 of the plague, according to Vasari, this painting had to have been painted sometime before 1510, probably around 1505-6. The mystery of the painting's subject has excited more art historical writing than almost any other painting in the Italian Renaissance, and with good reasons. 

 

It is a beautiful painting. It is an erotic painting. And the subject is not typical for painters of the

15th or 16th centuries. We have no documents for the patronage apart from the inventory, so we don't know if it was commissioned, only that in 1530 Vendramin had bought it, and that Michiel thought it was painted by Giorgione with the subject a soldier and a gypsy in a landscape. Not much

to go on twenty years after the painter's death.

           The best approach to any painting, however, but especially to one where the subject is atypical, is to look closely at all the elements included in it. 

Here two adults and a child are painted into a scene that is partly natural, with stream and trees and 

meadow, partly constructed by humans, with a village, bridge over the river in the middle distance, and suggestions of ruins of buildings closer to the people. The two adults are one man standing on the left, holding a staff, and one woman, naked, who is seated, nursing a baby on a white cloth on the ground. The two adult figures are separated by the river that winds between them and keeps them apart.

 There are ducks in the river and a white crane atop one of the village buildings.

In the background sky, a streak of white lightning forms a sharp diagonal slicing through the dark grey clouds, suggestive of a storm, hence the title of the painting now.

        

The man looks over at the woman while standing in place and holding the staff in his right hand, his left arm almost akimbo. He wears a codpiece, perhaps, but is painted to look clearly aroused as he

gazes at the naked woman. A tie string from his red short mantle hangs down untied on his right side, and his right white sleeve is loose.

The woman looks out at the viewer with hair in 
disarray, white cloak thrown over her shoulder, her naked body only slightly covered by the bush in
front of her. Her breast is exposed as she offers it
to the child who nurses with eyes closed.

Is her clothing only the white cloth on the ground or is her clothing somewhere else out of sight?
Why is she not looking back at the man but rather at the viewer? Her exposed body is sprawled
on the ground and the cloth under her is rumpled as if she has taken her place in haste to answer the need of the child.
     The two figures are not in the village, they are outside it, in the countryside, in natura, which
reminds us that the Italian word for the vagina of animals is "la natura." (Italian contadini will say that they reached into "la natura" to help pull out a calf that is being born.) Nature is more than just landscape in Italy; it is creation and procreation, the place of sexual activity.
      The scene is one of an intimate event in the lives of these two people. One can imagine that they
had been making love in the countryside, away from the prying eyes of people, but they had brought
the baby, and during their love-making, the baby had cried, and the woman had a choice to make:
to take care of the needs of the child before the needs of the lover or husband; she knows she can
nurse the child back to sleep and resume love-making with the man, so she chooses to nurse the child
first. The man has partially dressed again but is still aroused, and he stands quietly and looks to her for a sign that he may return to her side. He stands away from them so as not to distract the child,
whom they both hope will go back to sleep. She doesn't look at the man because the baby is still at breast. She knows she must wait to give the man a signal to come back. While she waits, she looks at the viewer as if to ask approval for her choice.

 

We as viewers are given access to the sex life of this couple, a rare privilege, and yet we feel, as we look at them, as if we look at all couples as they negotiate the sometimes crossed paths of loving each other and loving their child. The natural quality of their interaction and the mystery of it are both present in their disparate glances and in the landscape painted behind them.

        Their sexual connection and implied intercourse are symbolized in the bridge that spans the river

behind them and connects the land the man stands on with the village behind the woman. 

The interrupted love-making, coitus interruptus, is referred to in the columns that stop short behind the man

and in the arches that seem to start a span but are cut off abruptly in the structure behind the columns.

The building elements that are unfinished are signs of the unfinished nature of their love-making.

The impending or retreating storm adds to the anxiety of the moment, the question about whether they will be able to finish what they came for.

        The excitement of their sexual encounter is mirrored in the lightning strike in a sky which

envelops them, yet the storm implies a natural interruption in the proceedings. 

The mystery of the universal attraction and separation of the sexes is portrayed here, and if we were not aware of these two people representing male and female, Giorgione shapes them in the form most familiar to Italians, the articles il and la, the definite articles that come before masculine and feminine nouns in Italian, even Italian of the 16th-century. The man's staff presents the i of il, the man's standing figure the l.  

The woman's head and body present the l of la, the curved leg and white cloth the a. 

      An example of these articles in a Venetian printed book of 1545 comes from Parabosco's

appropriate Lettere Amorose:     (the feminine articles are circled in green, the masculine in yellow)

        Do I think Giorgione purposely paints Italian definite articles here? Is the subject about

grammar? No, it is more that because of the sexual division in the Italian language into male and

female nouns, everything learned by Italians from birth is regarded as either masculine or feminine

(there is no neuter), so that the grammatical forms well up from the cultural landscape for the painter

because he has grown up with that language. The sexes in the painting are separated by a gap, a river, but that river is bridgeable, or in the foreground, jumpable, and so the separation in this case is temporary. All creation is sexual in Italy, reflected in its verbal language and in the visual language painted into the couple here. Giorgione is painting the mysterious understanding and misunderstanding between the sexes and the shapes of the people in that mystery take on the forms of the masculine and feminine he has come to know since childhood.

        An intimate love moment between two people is a powerful image and unusual as subjects

normally painted in 16th century Italy. But if we gather some of the paintings that most art historians

think were painted by Giorgione, we find that Giorgione paints or draws subjects often that are unusual or personal, intimacies outside the usual religious or mythological topics painted by other painters of his era. The titles are given to the paintings afterwards by others. The dates are all between 1505 and 1510.

Fete Champetre, Louvre

 Venus, Dresden

 Drawing of viola da gamba player and flautist in the British Museum

 Laura, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna

Since the drawing and paintings are all unsigned and unnamed, we rely on style and approximate
date, but in every case, the subjects are intimacies.
Two exceptions to his intimacy oeuvre:
The Castelfranco Altarpiece, commissioned for his hometown church, a more usual 16th-century
altarpiece:

and a self-portrait, originally as David with the head of Goliath, in the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum in Braunschweig: 

(The painting has been cut down and is the reverse of this etched image of 1650, with eyes looking out at the viewer).

The TEMPEST is more like the first four examples than these last two. Giorgione's choice for subject, love interrupted in an intimate natural setting, may be personal and perhaps autobiographical.

Some critics have said that the soldier, who is not a soldier at all but a Venetian with striped hose, looks unlike Giorgione's self-portrait:

But is it that much unlike? Long nose, dark hair covering brow and cheeks, set mouth.

When the subject is about male arousal and female breast-feeding, it is understandable if art historians find it easier to attach mythological and biblical stories to the event depicted, since the

subject evokes powerful feelings and makes the viewer want to keep looking at it. The gloss for this intimate subject over the years has covered over the real scene out of a need to avoid confronting it directly and a need to keep looking at it. Various critical identifications have included Adam and Eve, Iasion and Ceres, Padua and Venezia, Mars and Venus.

       And what about the crane, you ask?  Why is it in the picture? Cranes have a natural migratory

path across Northern Italy in autumn, when they sense the coming of the winter cold. The crane

at the top of the building in the background is another indication of interruption; it is not a flock of

cranes, but the first scout in the migratory pattern of change from summer, depicted in the painting

in the trees in full leaf, to the colder season which follows. 

Art historians have often wanted to see erudite literary passages implied in Renaissance paintings about naked women. Though it is true that intellectual advisers undoubtedly contributed content to

some of the paintings created in the 15th and 16th centuries in Italy, it is also true that painters during

that period painted about life, the lives of their patrons and their own individual lives, something

some art critics have preferred to see not happening for painters until the 19th century. 

        If believing that this is a painting about Giorgione's own love-making is not acceptable, perhaps

believing that the painter was sensitive enough to imagine his own parents and their activities when

he was a child could be settled on. The curators in the Accademia may refer to this possibility in placing the painting side by side with another personal painting by the artist, the painting called "Col Tempo."

 

Is this not the same woman's face turned 3/4 to the left to look out at the viewer? Is she not the same woman in both paintings who has aged in the older portrait and who points to herself to say the aging has taken place "WITH TIME," COL TEMPO, the inscription written on the scroll she holds in her right hand? Does that mean that the woman in the Tempest is a portrait of Giorgione's mother? Or an imagined portrait of the young lover in the Tempest that Giorgione wishes to remind of the swiftness of life's passing? It would certainly suggest that she is not a woman from mythology or from the Bible; the implication is that she is a real woman who is subject to the vicissitudes of time, to aging. The sweet atmosphere in the Tempest, the heavily charged sexual atmosphere, then, could be a painting of a memory of time long past that has led to the reality depicted in Col Tempo, or the painting of an event that the artist wishes to preserve from the natural ravages of time. The personal and intimate nature of both paintings gives us a glimpse into the appreciation Giorgione had for the brief exhilarating moments in life that we all remember in old age. The electricity in the scene

in the countryside is emphasized in the lightning strike but is palpable in the space between the

two lovers.

If we are naturally drawn to look at it, it is because we recognize in it our own sexual origins

and the beauty and pleasure of love-making and breast-feeding both.