ACCADEMIA GALLERY, The Tempest - Giorgione

The so-called "Tempest" by Giorgione da Castelfranco, who is one of the greatest geniuses of Venetian 16th-century painting, is also one of the most mysterious masterpieces. You won't often find yourself standing before a painting where merely figuring out the subject is difficult: even the ancient art critics didn't know how to define it, and simply called it "a landscape with a gypsy". X-ray analyses that revealed the presence of other figures which Giorgione successively eliminated have further deepened the mystery.

The scene was painted in the early 1500s and is marked by the presence of nature: even though you can easily distinguish two figures in the painting, the landscape is by no means a simple background, but instead takes on a leading role. It is a very rare case for Renaissance painting, and will probably make you think of an artistic movement that actually developed three centuries later: Impressionism. The slow and intense pictorial style with ultra-lightweight layers of color creates an atmosphere with strong emotions and deep foreboding....