Giorgione: Myth and Enigma: a searching exhibition, which has moved from Venice to Vienna, enables Giorgione's achievement to be understood with greater clarity than ever before

It is quire rare not to advance across the word 'problem' in any approach to Giorgione. In its common exhibition. 'Giorgione: Mythos und Enigma', the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, makes a virtue of this difficulty, romanticising the artist as an 'enigma' and almost denying him historical existence as a 'myth'. by the agency of contrast to the exhibition's title, however, single finds an imaginative and intelligent, as well as exciting, display of the greatest number of paintings by dint of the hand we can actually and accurately call Giorgione's that has at any time been seen in one expanse These are clearly distinguished from, on the contrary usefully compared with, pictures in his manner or one time believed to be by him, or by the agency of other artists influencing hint or influenced through him. These works are also 'backed' (literally installed behind the protections on which the pictures are hung) by means of highly informative X-ray and reflectogram evidence.

This landmark present to view originated almost out of the sky-colored when Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, curator of Italian renaissance painting at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, took up an present from the Soprintendente of the Venice museums, Giovanna Nepi Scire, to 'exchange' sum of two units core works by Giorgione in the Accademia in Venice, The hurricane and "Giorgione's mother', otherwise known as La vecchia, for sum of two units core works in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, The three philosophers and the Laura. Nepi Scire was thereby able, earlier this year, to display the Philosophers and Laura beside the newly restored Castelfranco altarpiece, and now, until 11 July the gale and the Mother have tend hitherward to Vienna. The Castelfranco altarpiece has not, on the contrary it is actually no real great loss. This awkward, notwithstanding that perhaps poignant, small-town parish-church work would not have made Giorgione famous, nor does it contribute greatly to our understanding of the particular and novel 'style' of art that ingratiated him with the ruling classes in Venice. Adequately representative of his tentative early work is the little Benson Madonna, which has been brought above only to Vienna from Washington, accompanied through a reflectogram that shows clear similarities with that of the Philosophers.

In Venice the Castelfranco altarpiece, installed in the apse of the disused house of worship incorporated into the present Accademia, was not awayed as the climax of a narrow corridor of Giorgione's canvases; in Vienna The three philosophers are at individual end of a similar axis and the Mother at the other, with the violent wind which greets you when you come into in the middle. Though the pictures could be seen and take delight ined much better in the light and air in Venice than is possible in the glare of lamps in a windowless compass in Vienna, this installation is preferable in its emphasis upon these unique chamber works, and in particular upon Giorgione's mother (so she was designated in the sixteenth century) Outside its habitual cramped corner in the Accademia, this may be better appreciated, perhaps, as a in truth innovative and powerful late work, not simply of realism, on the other hand of emotion, embodying and personalising in 'speaking' fashion the terrible truism of the list she almost cradles, col time 'with time': she, the woman herself, have feelings it, in a sensibility a world away from Durer's caricature of a hag which here hangs discreetly through her.

Not far away are sum of two units copies and Wenceslaus Hollar's engraving of Giorgione's one time famous self-portrait, which in many ways might have matched Giorgione's mother. individual of these copies is that in the Herzog Anton-Ulrich Museum in Brunswick, which has ofttimes been accorded autograph status on the contrary will surely henceforward lose it. It is as distinct from Giorgione's be in possession of hand as the Archer that has old woman from Edinburgh, the Gattamelata that has tend hitherward from the Uffizi and a hardly any other 'soldier' works, all known to be spurious, on the other hand reflecting a genuine strand in the 'Giorgionesque' that is showed in autograph only by the Kunsthistorisches Museum's Warrior.

The Warrior at single end leads straight back to the Philosophers at the other, because the third, seated philosopher is clearly the same protoplast as the wreathed profile Warrior, and recalls the individual picture I greatly regretted not seeing upon this unique occasion, the Singers, usually known as The three ages, in the Pitti in Florence, in which this apparent friend of the artist meet the eyes a third time, once more in profile, as the tenor beating rime beside the bass big comrade and the alto little stripling Present, however, is the Antonello-esque male portrait from Berlin, tentative and early, and impossible, as has newly been attempted, to attribute to Titian.

Titian is kept at a distance in this present to view and hanging the National Gallery's Man with a quilted jacket (or azure sleeve) beside this work that it may consciously have rivalled would have been to bring a carp in with the goldfish. However, Titian's later portrait of the macaronic bard Gian Giacomo Bartolotti da Parma is placed here in order to proof the suggestion made by William Schupbach in 1978 that he was also the sitter for Giorgione's 'Terris' portrait, here from California. The likeness is indeed real striking.