Next to these paintings, and certainly several years before the _Three
Ages_ and the _Sacred and Profane Love_, the writer is inclined to place
the _Bishop of Paphos (Baffo) recommended by Alexander VI. to St.
Peter_, once in the collection of Charles I.[11] and now in the Antwerp
Gallery. The main elements of Titian's art may be seen here, in
imperfect fusion, as in very few even of his early productions. The not
very dignified St. Peter, enthroned on a kind of pedestal adorned with a
high relief of classic design, of the type which we shall find again in
the _Sacred and Profane Love_, recalls Giovanni Bellini, or rather his
immediate followers; the magnificently robed Alexander VI. (Rodrigo
Borgia), wearing the triple tiara, gives back the style in portraiture
of Gentile Bellini and Carpaccio; while the kneeling Jacopo Pesaro--an
ecclesiastic in tonsure and vesture, but none the less a commander of
fleets, as the background suggests--is one of the most characteristic
portraits of the Giorgionesque school. Its pathos, its intensity,
contrast curiously with the less passionate absorption of the same
_Baffo_ in the renowned _Madonna di Casa Pesaro_, painted twenty-three
years later for the family chapel in the great Church of the Frari. It
is the first in order of a great series, including the _Ariosto_ of
Cobham, the _Jeune Homme au Gant_, the _Portrait of a Man_ in the Alte
Pinakothek of Munich, and perhaps the famous _Concert_ of the Pitti,
ascribed to Giorgione. Both Crowe and Cavalcaselle and M. Georges
Lafenestre[12] have called attention to the fact that the detested
Borgia Pope died on the 18th of August 1503, and that the work cannot
well have been executed after that time. He would have been a bold man
who should have attempted to introduce the portrait of Alexander VI.
into a votive picture painted immediately after his death! How is it
possible to assume, as the eminent critics do nevertheless assume, that
the _Sacred and Profane Love_, one of the masterpieces of Venetian art,
was painted one or two years earlier still, that is, in 1501 or, at the
latest, in 1502? Let it be remembered that at that moment Giorgione
himself had not fully developed the Giorgionesque. He had not painted
his Castelfranco altar-piece, his _Venus_, or his _Three Philosophers
(Aeneas, Evander, and Pallas)_. Old Gian Bellino himself had not entered
upon that ultimate phase of his art which dates from the great S.
Zaccaria altar-piece finished in 1505.[13]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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