Another instalment in our series of puzzles; you’ll find the solution below the detail from the painting.
La Tempesta (The Tempest) is a puzzle in and of itself – one of the most mysterious and controversial works of Western painting. Thus far, the ingenuity of art experts has not led to an unambiguous determination of what this is a painting of. As early as 1530, after seeing the painting exhibited in the Palazzo Vendramin in Venice, the Italian literatus and art collector Marcantonio Michiel, in his work Notizia d’opere di disegno, gave the work a banal name: Landscape with a storm, a gypsy woman and a young soldier. It’s not ruled out that the true meaning of the work was known only to the most deeply initiated viewers, or only to the patron.
The painting emerged from under the brush of the Italian Renaissance master Giorgione, between 1506 and 1508. It was created on a commission from the Venetian aristocrat Gabriel Vendramin and still today remains in Venice in the collection of the Gallerie dell’Accademia.
Against the background of a disturbing landscape, under a stormy sky ripped apart by a flash of lightning, surrounded by greenery and the closeness of ancient ruins and a town, Giorgione placed two figures: on the right of the canvas, an almost naked, breastfeeding woman, leaning delicately over a child in a protective gesture; on the left, a fashionably-dressed young man leaning on a shepherd’s staff. The youth directs his gaze at the woman, smiling at her, but she looks at the viewer, not at him. The man’s colourful clothing attests to his membership in the Compagnie della Calza, a brotherhood of young Venetian aristocrats. Just behind the figures rises a wall with two broken columns. It’s not clear what they are meant to symbolize, but if the work is a Biblical illustration, they could signify the supports for the Church. When we remember a quote from the book of Job, “He shakes the earth from its place and makes its pillars tremble” (Job 9:6), their brokenness could be a portrayal of the collapse of the values brought by Christianity.
It remains a fact that generations of scholars have spilled rivers of ink attempting to understand what the painting’s ‘real’ message is – what ties together the figures immortalized in this beautiful scenery? Are the city walls real or imagined? Why did the artist decide to unleash a storm over the whole presentation? Does the work refer to a Biblical or mythological story, or is it merely the artist’s imagination?
Of course, each successive interpreter has their own idea for how to solve the puzzle of the painting; each one attempts to disprove the ideas of their predecessor, which may be demonstrated by a short list of various hypothesis and meanings that have been attributed to Giorgione’s picture.
Until the mid-19th century, the most widespread interpretation of the painting was the perhaps slightly naive assumption that the work was simply a portrait of the artist with his family, and the painting itself was briefly known as The Giorgione Family. Some also said the work could contain a mythological motif. It could be an illustration of a selection from the Thebaid, an epic poem that tells the story of Hypsipyle, taking care of the infant Opheltes, who was killed by a serpent because of her negligence, or possibly a reference to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where Deucalion and Pyrrha were described: the ancestors of the human race, saved from a flood sent by Zeus. Many researchers perceived in the image the Biblical story of the expulsion from paradise: the woman could be Eve, with little Cain in her arms; in the background, divine wrath shown as a stormy sky and the ruins of the city symbolizing the lost Eden.
Others have seen in the painting a reference to the erotically-charged Hypnerotomachia of Colonna, whose hero Poliphilius wanders in a dream through the land of love to find his lost lover Polia. Still others saw the picture as an allegory of power (the soldier) and love (the woman) in the shadow of implacable fortune (the lightning penetrating the jumble of clouds). The puzzle has been complicated even further by a recent X-ray of the painting, which revealed that beneath the figure of the youth lies the painted silhouette of a nude woman.
Hypotheses on the meaning of the work will no doubt continue to multiply, because it seems that Giorgione didn’t leave us the key to solving the mystery. Fortunately, the mood and the beauty of the painting, and their effect on the viewer, don’t require any interpretation.
Translated from the Polish by Nathaniel Espino
