View of Castel San Zeno, Montagnana, with a Seated Figure in the Foreground

Author: Rosie Razzall

As the only drawing generally accepted to be by the hand of the elusive Venetian painter Giorgione,^[1] this sheet has achieved a legendary status in art historical scholarship, even though much of what we know about it remains unresolved. A hooded figure is seated on a rock in a hilly landscape with a castle and a winding river. The precise meaning of this scene is still unclear, and while the attribution has received broad approval,^[2] several scholars have nevertheless admitted that it is based on little more than stylistic assumptions and a provenance dating back to the seventeenth century.^[3] Our ability to interpret the sheet today is not helped by its poor state of preservation. Hoping to remove grime from the paper, the drawing was washed with hot water by Padre Sebastiano Resta (1635-1714), who first recorded the sheet in his collection alongside another drawing then attributed to Giorgione.^[4]   

The art historian Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) made an early assessment of the scarcity of Giorgione’s draughtsmanship, writing that he ‘drew nothing beforehand, since he firmly believed that painting alone with the colours themselves, without studying anything on paper, was the true and best method’.^[5] As if to sum up the ambiguity that surrounds any evaluation of the Rotterdam drawing, it has been used as evidence both for and against Vasari’s claim. For some, the quality of the drawing – as far as it can be read through the damage it has sustained – must prove that Giorgione was a proficient and more regular draughtsman than the evidence suggests, and the anecdote merely demonstrates Vasari’s profound prejudice against Venetian art.^[6] For others, Vasari’s statement does seem to be borne out by the fact that there are so few surviving drawings by Giorgione’s hand.^[7]

The Rotterdam drawing has often been compared to Giorgione’s landscape painting La Tempesta (The Tempest), now in Venice.^[8] The meandering landscape setting and the arrangement of fortified buildings in the background are comparable in both drawing and painting, and the pose of the seated, breastfeeding woman in the lower right corner of the painting can be loosely related to the hooded male figure in the drawing.^[9] However, scholars have more recently questioned a strong relationship between the drawing and La Tempesta, preferring to compare it to other paintings from Giorgione’s oeuvre.^[10] The hooded figure, for example, has been compared to the seated St Roch in La Tramonto (The Sunset), in London.^[11] However, without any other secure drawings with which to make a comparison, it remains the case that the attribution is effectively based on what we might imagine a Giorgione drawing to look like from the evidence of his landscape paintings: a layered, undulating landscape with fortified buildings in the background and a somewhat disconnected figure in the foreground.^[12]

Padre Resta’s assumption that the drawing represents Giorgione’s home town of Castel Franco was maintained until 1978, when research by the Centro Studi Castelli di Montagnana definitively established that the castle depicted in the background is instead Castel San Zeno at Montagnana, near Este, seen from an elevated road on the town’s northeastern outskirts.^[13] Giorgione’s drawing must therefore have been drawn on the spot, or at least was based on an observational study that he made during a visit to the town.^[14] The castle may not have held particular narrative significance, however, and it may simply have served as a convenient landscape motif, such as in the examples of identifiable cities rather than imagined buildings in paintings by Giovanni Bellini (c. 1430-1516), Vittore Carpaccio (c.1465-1525/1526) and Cima da Conegliano (1459/1460-1517/1518).^[15] Some scholars have attempted to read political significance into the topography depicted here,^[16] suggesting that at this time Montagnana was an important strategic site in the defence of Paduan territory from invasion, but this proposal has not received general approval.^[17]

The identity of the cloaked figure sitting with crossed legs and leaning on a staff on a mound in the foreground has also attracted much speculation. Resta’s belief that this was a self-portrait of the artist can now be discarded,^[18] and though there are no sheep the figure may be a shepherd, or a wanderer weak from hunger or physically disabled, leaning on his stick.^[19] Aikema has suggested he may be holding a book and is in the act of reading or making a drawing; perhaps he is a pilgrim with the holy city of Jerusalem behind him.^[20] A fuller explanation for the seated figure may rely on the identification of another enigmatic object on the sheet, a bird-like creature in the sky, with a curved neck and holding a round object in its beak. This object has been interpreted as a loaf of bread, suggesting that the seated figure may be Elijah fed by ravens in the desert, or as a tortoise, making him Aeschylus about to meet his tragic end.^[21] Another suggestion is that this is Ganymede about to be carried off by Jupiter in the form of an eagle.^[22] None of these interpretations has yet proven fully convincing.

Beyond the sheet’s puzzling iconography, art historians have situated this enigmatic drawing in the broader context of sixteenth-century art in Venice and beyond. According to Vasari, Giorgione took an interest in the subtle gradations of the sfumato manner of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519),^[23] who spent time in Venice after leaving Milan in 1500. A particularly useful comparison is a small drawing by Leonardo in red chalk of a clump of trees in Windsor,^[24] where a dense passage of marks to represent the foliage and branches can be compared with the row of trees on the riverbank below Castel San Zeno. The prints and drawings of Giorgione’s followers, especially Giulio Campagnola (c. 1482- after 1515), are also often cited. An etching^[25] of St Jerome, for example, shows the saint seated on a hillock, with buildings and trees in the background, and passages of the sheet left almost completely blank. Other scholars have linked Giorgione’s landscape mode with northern sources, especially Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528),^[26] who was in Venice for the second time in 1506-07, and the painter Joachim Patinir (1483-1524).^[27] Though the sheet remains unique in sixteenth-century Venetian art, Giorgione must have absorbed and responded to the work of these contemporaries.