Tempesta Bledsoe

I’ve always been a fan of this painting, ever since I went to Italy in 2001. Not that I saw it in person, but I learned about it in my art history class. Giorgione isn’t the biggest star of the Renaissance, even out of the Venetians, but he definitely needs props as training Titian. Aside from that, he does some great thing with color at times, those Venetian reds and greens that compliment each other so well. But what I love most about him and the other Venetian such as Titian and Tintoretto are the compositions. They make so much sense to me, and ever since my experience in Italy I have emulated/imitated/appropriated their compositional techniques/tricks many times in my own work. Typically I’ve never been a huge fan of Giorgione, with the exception of this painting.

What I love most about the Tempest is the mystery of it. Every painting in the Renaissance is about something; either based on some myth or biblical story, or is some sort of political or allegorical image. Nobody knows what exactly is going on in this one though. Historians have been in debate about what the meaning/significance of it is. Imagine that; hundreds of years after your death and scholars are arguing about what one of your paintings is about. The theories cover pretty much everything: an illustration of a myth, legend or biblical story, an allegorical image, a historical or political statement, an expression of the philosophical theories taught at the time. Then there’s the easy way out: simply there is no subject or there’s a hidden or personal meaning.

What I also thought was a riot was how when I was reading about the painting, of the 4 pages in the book, 3 and a half were tracking the history of the painting. It was like reading about a person, where it’s been, what it has seen, a way of personifying the painting. At one point there was a law passed that it couldn’t leave the country, it was so important to them. It even had it’s own private security guards, like the painting was some sort of celebrity. The best quote was from some Italian of importance whose name I didn’t bother to write down, after the painting returned from a show in London:

“First I would have the painting cleaned. In London it looked as though it had not washed it’s face.”