Giorgione (Castelfranco Veneto in the province of Treviso, 1477 - Venice 1510) was a major painter from the Veneto region who, in the space of just ten years at the beginning of the 1500s, set down the foundations for all Venetian art in that century.

Drawing on the work of Vittore Carpaccio and Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione revolutionised painting, in style and content.
His earliest works – an Adorazione dei pastori (1504-05, National Gallery of Art, Washington), the Pala di Castelfranco (1505) and his portrait of Laura (1506, Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna) – already show how he abandoned the traditional spatial arrangement in the previous century to create a new relationship between the figures and nature, while colour becomes an important part of the overall composition. In 1508 he painted the frescoes on the façade of the fondaco dei Tedeschi on the Canal Grande in Venice, a fragment of which, the Giovane ignuda (1508), is now kept in the Gallerie dell’Accademia.

In 1505-1510 he painted a few important works: I tre filosofi (1504-05), Venere dormiente (1507), La Tempesta (1507-08, Gallerie dell’Accademia) and Concerto campestre (1510). There are about twenty works attributed or attributable to Giorgione, including his Cristo portacroce (San Rocco a Venezia), Tramonto (in a private collection in London) and Ritratto virile (Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego in California).

1500 - - rev. 0.1.7