Giorgione

Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco was born in the 1470s and worked during the High Renaissance. With Titian, his younger contemporary, he founded the Venetian school of Italian Renaissance painting, a tradition built on colour and atmosphere rather than the linear precision favoured in Florence. His paintings carry an elusive poetic quality that has kept scholars arguing over meaning and authorship for centuries. He died on 17 September 1510, still in his thirties. Only about six surviving paintings are firmly attributed to him, and the uncertainty surrounding both the identity and interpreta…