Renaissance Art History as a Global Discipline

Scribbling in books is usually discouraged. Why even look at the thoughts readers scribbled in the past? Yet such scribblings, dignified by the term marginalia, have recently contributed to our knowledge of major Renaissance artists, whether Leonardo da Vinci or Giorgione, whether in the university libraries of Heidelberg or Sydney.

At Heidelberg in 2005 the University librarian, Dr Armin Schlechter, noticed in an early edition of Cicero’s letters an annotation by Amerigo Vespucci (secretary to Machiavelli) who had witnessed Leonardo painting the portrait of Lisa del Giocondo (the Mona Lisa) in October 1503. The discovery was made as part of routine cataloguing and was previously unnoticed even though Heidelberg has had a distinguished art history department from the nineteenth century.

Giorgione: a discovery closer to home

Jump to 2017 and the University of Sydney, where librarian, Kim Wilson, became captivated by a drawing and inscription on the last page of an incunable, a 1497 edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy. The inscription was no longer than three lines, and the drawing, in red chalk, appeared to show the Virgin Mary and a child.

The book that bore these curiosities was displayed at an event for philanthropists, when treasures from the Fisher Library were on show, including two other earlier editions of Dante’s Divine Comedy, both of which were considered rarer and more significant. Nerida Newbigin FAHA, then professor of Italian was consulted, and a preliminary reading of the text revealed that it was about ‘Zorzon’, Venetian for Giorgione.

Selected pages from an incunable of Dante’s Divine Comedy, 1497, in the University of Sydney library collection. On the last page is an inscription about Giorgione, and a sketch attributed to him. Supplied by author.

Digging deeper

I received an email from Kim and recognised that the chalk drawing in the incunable was very close in style to the underdrawing of Giorgione’s Adoration of the Magi in the National Gallery in London. I contacted the National Gallery to acquire a new infrared scan of the underdrawing, which was sent within the week.

The cover of Giorgione, Dante and the Sydney incunable shows an example of an undersketch from ‘The Adoration of the Kings’ beside the discovered chalk sketch. Source: Melbourne University Press.

In my monograph on Giorgione, the painter of Poetic Brevity, published in 1997, I made a special study of the underdrawings of Venetian paintings to find a different set of criteria to establish attributions. To make an attribution of this importance by comparing an underdrawing with a work on paper is unprecedented.

When working as a curator for the National Gallery in Washington on a Venetian exhibition in 2006, I had travelled to examine Venetian paintings, major works by Giorgione and his contemporaries, in museum laboratories – e.g. the Uffizi, the Louvre, National Gallery London. Such close acquaintance with major works of art in many museums is unusual — but having that experience, when I saw the image of the Sydney drawing, I recognised the similarities between the sketch in the incunable and the underdrawings I’d seen elsewhere.

Consultation with colleagues in Australia and abroad resulted in the first article about the discovery, ‘Giorgione in Sydney’, published in the peer reviewed Burlington Magazine March 2019, in collaboration with Kim Wilson, Nerida Newbigin, and Julie Sommerfeldt. It included a translation of the inscription written alongside the sketch, in another’s hand.

The inscription read:

On the day of 17th September, Giorgione of Castelfranco, a very excellent artist, died of the plague in Venice at the age of 36 and he rests in peace.

More questions than answers

The article was discussed in 36 newspapers throughout the world. How did such a book end up in Sydney, and who had written the inscription which gave Giorgione’s birth and death dates for the first time? There was a flurry of questions, which we have attempted to answer in the book, Giorgione, Dante and the Sydney Incunable, published by Melbourne University Press.

To answer these questions, we needed more information about the book itself. Professor Emeritus Salvatore Settis of the Scuola Normale in Pisa suggested to the Prefect of the Vatican Library, Monsignor Cesare Pasini, to have the conservation department of the Vatican Library (Biblioteca Palatina) examine the book.

This research was generously funded by the University of Sydney and resulted in a seminar in October 2022 in the Vatican. The first essay in our book is written by the librarian of the Vatican, Andreina Rita and her colleague Sara Simone. Their contribution was about the fifteenth century publisher Pietro Quarenghi, from Bergamo, who specialised in economical editions of the classics, that an artist could afford.

The Vatican library had three copies of the same Dante edition. Page by page, watermark by watermark the copies were compared. The last page in all copies had the watermark of the cardinal’s hat. The red chalk drawing was examined by fluorescence, but no further marks were discovered, even on the face of the Virgin. The positioning and repositioning of the Christ child on the Virgin’s body was characteristic of Giorgione’s line drawing, responding to the Invocation to the Virgin by Bernard of Clairvaux that Dante quotes on the preceding page.

Solving a 500-year mystery

All the evidence suggested that this was Giorgione’s own copy of Dante, which is why he drew in it. When he died on the Lazzaretto, the plague island, notice of his death would have been sent to his loved ones in Venice, on a slip of paper. The details of the inscription are very precise and can be explained as copying a death notice of this kind. The handwriting does not correspond to any artist with whom Giorgione worked, not with Titian, nor Sebastiano del Pombo, nor Catena. The script is more likely by an artist friend, or studio assistant, or someone who knew Giorgione well. Palaeographers believe that the correction to the word plague is in a slightly different hand. The analysis with the synchrotron revealed that the composition of the ink on the correction was slightly different, thus confirming the palaeographers. There were two witnesses to Giorgione’s death.

A few months before sleuthing began with the Sydney discovery, I was asked by an Italian publisher if I would write a fictional biography of Giorgione. My mind ran riot with the possibility of inventing teenage escapades that he might have had with Albrecht Dürer in the Veneto, an encounter with Leonardo when he visited Venice briefly, a visit from Isabella d’Este to his studio. But once the inscription had been read the wannabe novelist gave way to the nerd historian, the scribbles on the last page of Dante’s Commedia defined a more remarkable life than could be imagined.

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