This review of Sebastiano del Piombo da Giorgione a Raffaello e Michelangelo: Un pittore musico tra Venezia e Roma (1501–1511) by Enrico Maria Dal Pozzolo, with Cristina Farnetti, appears in the April 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
The title of this important and absorbing book makes two things admirably clear from the outset. One is that its more than 400 pages will be focused on the first decade of the activity of Sebastiano del Piombo (c. 1485–1547), and crucially will follow him from the start of his career in his native Venice to his move to Rome, where he was then to remain. The other is that it will pay unprecedented attention to Sebastiano the musician, which explains the expert collaboration of Cristina Farnetti. In effect, we are being given two authoritative and original studies, admittedly of very different lengths, for – so to speak – the price of one.
In fact, the text is divided into three parts, but the first one (‘Sources and documents’), which runs to a mere 20 pages, is by way of a prelude to the main body of the work. Having said that, it includes a fascinating exploration of the fact that Vasari, in both the 1550 and the 1568 editions of his Lives, singles out no fewer than 30 artists who were also musicians. (Mauro Lucco had already signalled this connection in an essay in the catalogue of the 2008 Sebastiano exhibition at Palazzo Venezia, but did not explore it in depth.) What is more, Vasari claims that Sebastiano was a lutenist before he was an artist, and also underlines the ‘divine’ gifts of his artistic mentor, Giorgione, when it came to playing the lute and singing.
The Virgin and Child with a View of Venice (The Tallard Madonna) (c. 1506–13), attrib. to circle of Giorgione, possibly Sebastiano del Piombo. Photo: © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
In Venice, it had become customary well before the end of the 15th century to depict angel musicians at the base of the Virgin’s throne, in altarpieces of the Madonna and Child with Saints type, and their instruments were portrayed with unusual accuracy. After 1500, actual musical scores, some of them identifiable, began to be included in paintings, and both musicians and actual concerts – the Concert champêtre in the Louvre is only the most celebrated – came to be represented. In the specific case of Sebastiano, the sole such image from his Venetian years is the Man with a Flute in Wilton House, which was to inspire numerous copies and also such derivations as Giulio Campi’s Saint Antoninus in Santa Maria di Campagna, Piacenza. Later on, he also executed his dreamily romantic Young Man with a Lira da Braccio Bow (today in a private collection), here reproduced in colour for the first time, which is inscribed with the date 1518.
Turning to the third and final section of the book, whose subtitle (‘I dipinti’) straightforwardly explains that it will be concerned with the paintings themselves, it seems important to place Dal Pozzolo’s approach in context in terms of the longstanding differences between Italian and Anglo-American conceptions concerning the extent of the body of work Sebastiano produced prior to his move to Rome (they broadly agree about what happens thereafter).
The year 1980 saw the publication by Rizzoli of Mauro Lucco’s L’opera completa di Sebastiano del Piombo, in a long-running series that invariably combined a brief introduction by an elder statesman (in this instance, Carlo Volpe) with 64 colour plates and a very full catalogue of autograph works, as well as near – and sometimes rather far – misses accompanied by small-scale black-and-white images. In 1981, this was followed by Michael Hirst’s very different monograph on the artist. The comparison between them underlines the deep divisions between the inclusionist Italians and the exclusionist anglophones, although almost immediately afterwards, Hirst was to accept two small panels of the Birth and Death of Adonis – now in the Museo Civico Amedeo Lia, La Spezia – which he had previously denied to Sebastiano.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, Dal Pozzolo’s conception of Sebastiano’s Venetian oeuvre is expansive, and indeed tellingly adds undervalued or completely new pieces to the mix. A half-length of a Young Woman at Buscot Park, which is directly related to the good mother in the artist’s Kingston Lacy Judgement of Solomon (c. 1505–10), falls into the first category, while the second is represented by another half-length in a private collection, this time of a Young Woman in Profile, which also adorns the book’s cover. At the same time, he entertains the possibility that Sebastiano had a part to play not only in Giorgione’s Three Philosophers in Vienna, as already asserted in the 16th century by Marcantonio Michiel, but also in his Virgin and Child in the Ashmolean and his Benson Holy Family in the Washington National Gallery.
The Holy Family (probably c. 1500), Giorgione. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
It should be added that alongside all these additions, Dal Pozzolo also on occasion engages in exercises in subtraction. One that sees him removing a painting from Hirst’s minimalist corpus involves him in following others in favouring the attribution of the Portrait of a Young Woman in Budapest to Cariani. What is for sure is that the essentials of the invention inspired Bernardino Licinio’s somewhat later Portrait of a Lady in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. Another casualty, also in the Alte Pinakothek, and in this case championed by Lucco, is the Portrait of a Young Man in a Fur Coat, here given to Palma Vecchio, but currently regarded by the museum itself as a work by Giorgione.
Arguably even more important than the whodunnit aspect of Dal Pozzolo’s presentation of the paintings, however, is the sheer quality of his critical response to them as works of art. Sadly, these days by no means all art historians seem to believe it is their primary responsibility to look with passionate attention at the objects of their study, and even fewer have the gift of communicating what they see and understand. Happily, this particular author sets us all an example of how it should be done.
Sebastiano del Piombo da Giorgione a Raffaello e Michelangelo: Un pittore musico tra Venezia e Roma (1501–1511) by Enrico Maria Dal Pozzolo, with Cristina Farnetti, is published by ZeL Edizioni.
From the April 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.