Why do they want to destroy Giorgione as a painter?
The most interesting play on in London at the moment is The Old Masters at the Comedy Theatre. Simon Gray has written
a drama about the conflict between commerce and idealism in the sale of paintings. Lord Duveen, in an astrakhancoloured coat, tries to persuade Bernard Berenson to revise his view that 'The Adoration of the Shepherds' is only a Titian and upgrade it to a Giorgione, since the millionaire Mellon, to whom he plans to sell it, has several Titians already and no Giorgione. Berenson refuses. That is the plot.
It is quite true that the 30-year-old partnership between Duveen and Berenson broke up over this painting. It is described in chapter four of S.N. Behrman's life of Duveen (not entirely to be trusted, however, since the author made some of it up). But I'm not sure that the presentation of Duveen as a monster of greed is just. He was, rather, prodigiously generous. He gave vast sums of cash to the Tate, the BM, the NG and the National Portrait Gallery to build more exhibition space; refurbished the Wallace Collection, paid for Rex Whistler's wonderful murals at Tate Britain, endowed academic chairs and founded organisations to encourage young British artists. Paintings he gave to our national collections included Correggio's marvellous 'Christ Taking Leave of His Mother', Hogarth's 'The Graham Children', the notorious 'Madame Gautreau' by Sargent — about which Deborah Davis has just published a rather vulgar book, Strapless — and Augustus John's masterpiece 'Madame Suggia', the cello player.
Equally, Berenson was not quite the apostle of integrity that Gray presents. The actor Edward Fox plays him as a forceful, noisy retired cavalry major, but my recollection is of a quiet, feline, soft-spoken Prospero figure, with a plentiful white beard, wearing a white straw hat, a magician. But that encounter, in his beautiful garden at I Tatti, his villa outside Florence, was over half a century ago, and I may have conflated my recollection with a famous photo of 'BB', often reproduced. What I do remember is asking the sage what aspect of art I should begin by studying. He said the early Sienese masters. I took his advice, and in fact the first article of mine to reach print was on precisely that topic. BB's works, especially his omnibus volume The Italian Painters of the Renaissance, are still well worth reading (though catty art historians now say they are out of date) because they reflect the extraordinary intuition which made him understand a painting just by looking at it for hours on end. But he tad to make his way in life just like the rest of us' (as Ernie Bevin once said of Stalin) and there were many instances when his attributions fitted in conveniently with the exigencies of the market He came to be ashamed of his work as an 'expert adviser', which made him affluent and financed his own collection in the villa (all left to Harvard), and in his memoirs, Sketch for a Self-Portrait, Duveen is never mentioned.
What I hold against BB, along with other authorities, is their minimalist approach to the oeuvre of Giorgione. In the 19th century, about 60 works were attributed to hint and as recently as 1908 the 'expansionist' critic Carl Justi produced a large canon. Since then nearly all of them have been whittled away, and now only five or six are left: 'La Tempesta' in the Venetian Accademia (Byron's favourite painting), 'Laura', 'The Boy with an Arrow' and 'The Three Philosophers', all in the Vienna Kunsthistorisches, the 'Portrait of a Man' in San Diego, California, and the big, weird altarpiece in Caste!franc°, the painter's home town. The hugely lovable 'Fete Champetre' in the Louvre is attributed to Sebastian° del Piombo or Titian, who also gets the credit for the best nude ever painted, the delightful 'Sleeping Venus' in Dresden. Both of them, it seems to me, are much too good — in inventiveness, sympathy (and empathy), charm and poetic spirit — for dogged Titian, even when he was young. Why do the academics boost this successful careerist — the Annigoni of the mid-16th century — so highly? The other day in the Fitzwilliam, Cambridge, I looked at the big Titian there and thought how inferior it was to the Palma Vecchio of Venus and Cupid across the room. But these 16th-century Venetians do seem to breed a tone of unreasonable anger among art-lovers. Thus, Sir Joshua Reynolds dismissed Titian as a 'mere decorator'.
Equally the attempt to erase Giorgione's works seems to me madness. The current issue of the Burlington Magazine, which has a fascinating article on the disposal of the Cook Collection, once the delight of Richmond, puts in an appendix two letters from the early 1920s from BB and Roger Fry. One of the Cook family, brought up among masterpieces and with the sense of quality that such a youthful training inculcates, had dared to publish a book giving an expansionist view of the Giorgione canon. Both letters were sent to him in tones of stern reproach. BB's, as one might expect, is gentle and gentlemanly. Fry's, as one might also expect, is extreme and Bloomsbuly-nasty, opening with the admission that he is the author of the 'savage' review of the book in the Athenaeum. Neither letter, to a man who had merely, with much sweat and trouble, published his views on a great painter, can be described as balanced or the product of a normal mind. Why is it that lives spent in the professional assessment and study of works of art — the buffeting and arguments of value and attribution, the behind-the-scenes rows of galleries and museums — tend to become so twisted and atrabilious? And why are so many art experts destructive, delighting to destroy our faith in so many paintings as, for instance, works of Rembrandt, many of which have been decanonised by horrid Dutchmen? If the minimalists continue to have their way, Giorgione will virtually cease to exist in a generation or two, since a painter without paintings is a ghost.
It is true that Giorgione died young or youngish, at about 30 to 32. And he must have been a rather slow producer since even at the time Isabella d'Este, anxious to get hold of one of his works, was told by her agent in Venice that the painter had recently (1510) died of the plague and that none of his paintings was available for sale. His studio, then, far from being cluttered with unsold works, was empty. All the same, in say 12 years as a painter, he must have produced at least some 50 pieces, and granted the fact that loss and destruction take away a huge chunk of the works of any early 16th-century master, one would expect a score or so to survive. I hope the current exhibition of Giorgione, assembled in Vienna and travelling to Venice, where I plan to see it, will redress the balance. And why is it not coming to London? Minimalists at work again?
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