Venetian art
威尼斯艺术
The line of beauty
一线风情
Jul 27th 2006
From The Economist print edition
Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting
贝里尼，乔尔乔内，提香及文艺复兴时代威尼斯绘画
By David Alan Brown
Yale University Press; 336 pages; $65 and ￡40
WHO was the first modern artist? How about Giorgione? A far-fetched notion, perhaps, but this Renaissance Venetian revolutionised painting—and his work, focusing on secular subjects such as nudes, landscapes and female beauty, was dubbed “modern” by the leading art commentator of the day, Vasari.
谁是第一个现代艺术家？是乔尔乔内？或许有些牵强，但这个文艺复兴时代的威尼斯人给绘画带来革命，他的画作关注世俗题材比如人体，风景和女性美，这些都被当时的评论家瓦萨里授予“现代”的称号。
Giorgione was not alone, as illustrated by the excellent catalogue accompanying the exhibition “Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting” now showing at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. What made him, and the generation of artists he inspired, so special was his ability to absorb the new currents of culture then flowing through Venice. A catalyst was Leonardo da Vinci, who briefly visited Venice in 1500. In Leonardo’s drawings, Giorgione, as well as the younger artist, Titian, and their master, Giovanni Bellini, glimpsed a new conception of the human form, based on observation and expressed in smoky contours and subtle shades of light and dark.
乔尔乔内并不孤单，这正如现在华盛顿举行的 “贝里尼，乔尔乔内，提香及文艺复兴时代威尼斯绘画展”所配发的精美图册所图示的那样。他和被他所启发的那一代画家们是如此众不同，这体现在他捕捉当下威尼斯流行新趋势的能力上。达芬奇是个推动者，他于1500年短暂拜访威尼斯。乔尔乔内和比他年轻的画家提香，以及他们的老师贝里尼从达芬奇的画作中一窥关于人物形象的新理念。这种理念来自于观察，而表现在那朦胧的轮廓和微妙的光影明暗。
Over the subsequent 30 years, one of the most exciting periods in the history of art unfolded. In readable, engaging essays, David Brown and Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, the exhibition’s curators, together with a team of top scholars, tell its story. We learn how this triumvirate of Venetian painters devoured not only Leonardo’s ideas, but also those of Albrecht Dürer, the German artist whose realistic rendering of nature was known in Venice through prints, even before his sojourn there in 1506-7. Dürer’s work taught Venetian artists that landscape could be an independent element of a painting, rather than just a symbolic backdrop for religious subjects.
在其后的30年中，艺术史上最激动人心的时代画卷逐渐展开。展览的主办人大卫布朗和西尔维亚与一群顶尖学者一起用流畅易懂、引人入胜的文字向你讲述其中的故事。从中我们可以得知威尼斯画坛的3巨头不仅吸收了达芬奇的理念，同时还有丢勒的。这个德国艺术家在他1506到1507年到威尼斯短暂逗留之前，他对自然界的现实主义表现手法就已经在这里通过印刷技术广为流传。丢勒的作品让威尼斯的艺术家们知道风景可以独立成为绘画题材，而不仅是作为宗教故事的象征性的背景。 The result was a new style full of natural movement, sensuality and poetic atmosphere. Venetian painting had long been characterised by its jewel-like colour—obtained by grinding coloured glass and minerals such as lapis lazuli into the pigments—but now it was applied in a way that gave art the kiss of life.
其结果是一个全新的充满自然活动，感性和诗意的氛围。威尼斯的绘画因其珠光宝气的色彩而长期以来独树一帜，这些色彩的颜料中添加了碾碎的玻璃和诸如青金石的矿石。但现在它们被以全新的方式运用，给艺术一个生命之吻。Giorgione blazed the trail. A top student of Bellini, he later forged his own style, inspired by the current vogue for pastoral love poetry based on recently discovered ancient texts, then the bestsellers of Venice’s flourishing printing industry. He excelled at what was known among the educated elite as the paragone: a competition between painting and poetry in which painters sought to prove that they could rival poets in conveying beauty by appealing to the eyes, as well as to the mind. This was revolutionary because it implied that painting originated in the imagination of the artist, rather than being a simple recording of the great and the good, history and religion. It proved painters were creators and not just craftsmen.
乔尔乔内是这条道路上的披荆斩棘者。作为贝里尼最好的学生，他随后发展出自己的风格。他的灵感来自于其时风行的田园诗，从最近发现的古代文本来看，这得益于那个时代威尼斯欣欣向荣的出版业的畅销书。他的卓尔不群在于一项闻名于知识精英中的对比：就是诗歌与绘画的竞争，画家们致力于证明他们可以在表现美感上与诗人媲美——既可悦目亦能赏心。这是革命性的。因为它暗示了绘画产生于艺术家的想象而不是对美好事物、历史、宗教的简单记录。它证明了画家是创造者而非工匠。His most enigmatic paintings, such as “The Tempest” and “The Three Philosophers”, have no obvious subject. Instead they evoke a series of allegorical meanings that would have mystified all but his coterie of young, aristocratic patrons. Giorgione’s work displays an unprecedented feeling for landscape as a poetic and erotic space, where mortals and muses play. Even in religious paintings, such as his famous “Adoration of the Shepherds”, he emphasises the pastoral nature of the scene by placing the shepherds centre-stage and shifting the Christ Child to the side, something never before seen in art.
他最具神秘感的画作都没有明显的主题，像“大风暴”和“三贤哲”。但却充满寓意，迷惑了他几乎所有的年轻的贵族资助者。乔尔乔内的作品呈现出对自然风光前无古人的感受，那是一个诗意与爱欲的空间，凡人和缪斯一起徜徉其中。甚至在宗教题材的作品如“牧羊人的崇拜”里，他都表现出对田园趣味的偏好——让牧羊人占据画面中央，而把年幼的基督画在一旁；这在之前绘画中从未有过。
Giorgione gained an almost cult status after his tragically early death of the plague in 1510, aged 33. Hot on his heels came the ambitious Titian, who had graduated from Bellini’s workshop around 1506 and become a student of Giorgione’s. He finished Giorgione’s “Sleeping Venus”, now in Dresden, by painting the pastoral landscape in which the recumbent nude rests. But Titian realised that he needed to diversify his market and combine elite patronage with a broad studio practice like that of Bellini, whose altarpieces catered to wealthy Venetians keen to secure their salvation by donating art to churches.
乔尔乔内33岁时悲剧性地死于1510年的瘟疫。他英年早逝之后获得了人们的顶礼膜拜。接踵而来的是提香。提香在1506年左右出师于贝里尼的画室而投入乔尔乔内门下。他完成了乔尔乔内的“沉睡的维纳斯”中的田园风景，让裸体的人物休憩其间。这幅画现藏于德累斯顿。但提香意识到必须让他的市场多样化，把贵族资助和广泛的画室实践结合起来，就像贝里尼一样，其圣坛雕刻迎合了富有的威尼斯人通过捐赠教会来获得救赎的热忱。
The real prize for Titian, as for Michelangelo before him, was an aristocratic patron. So when Alfonso d’Este asked him to complete the camerino, the private exhibition hall in his palace in Ferrara, he jumped at the chance. Bellini had begun the job by painting “The Feast of the Gods” for the libertine duke, who wanted the best artists in Italy to paint canvases on themes of classical drunken revels. After Bellini’s death in 1516, Titian painted three mythological scenes to complement his work, repainting the background of his teacher’s painting so that it matched his own. The current exhibition, like the recent Titian show in London and Madrid, brings together paintings from this legendary, now destroyed, pleasure chamber.
正像先前对米开朗基罗一样，对提香最大的奖励是贵族的资助。所有但ALFONSO D’ESTE让他去完成其费拉拉的宫殿展厅时他一口答应了。贝里尼开始这项工作时为这个放荡不羁的贵族画了“众神宴”，因为后者想要意大利最杰出的艺术家在画布上为他展示古典的纵酒狂欢的题材。贝里尼在1516年去世之后，提香为了补充完整他的工作而画了3幅神话场景，并重画了贝里尼完成的背景使之与自己的画相协调。目前的展览正像最近在伦敦和马德里举行的一样，将这个已被毁坏的传说中的展厅里的画呈现给参观者。
Even the aged Bellini, patriarch of Venetian painting, was not too old to learn from the new energy around him. A sense of reverie had always pervaded his painting, but his late art, such as the altarpiece for the church of San Zaccaria (1505), possessed what Mr Brown calls a “restraint and refinement” unmatched by any of his pupils. In 1515, when he was 85, he painted a piece of silent poetry that many consider his masterpiece: “Lady with a Mirror” (a detail from which is shown above). This famous nude, at once erotic and chaste, is possibly a response to the work of his star pupils and their fashion for portraying female beauties and poetical landscapes.
即使是在威尼斯画坛上德高望重贝里尼也乐于接受周遭的新事物。他的画总是充满了幻想，但晚期的作品，如圣扎卡里亚教堂的装饰画却被布朗认为是体现了一种“内敛与精致”而在其学生中无人媲美。他在85岁那年（1515年）完成了被认为是杰作的“执镜仕女”（详细见上图）就像一首无声的诗。这幅艳情而又圣洁的著名人体或许是对于他的杰出弟子和他们刻画女性美和诗意景色的潮流的回应。
“Lady with a Mirror” was called “an apotheosis of seeing” by the late art historian, Otto Pacht. The phrase could also describe Venetian art of the first decades of the 16th century. It was as though artists’ eyes had been opened to the myriad possibilities of seeing and creating beauty.
“执镜仕女”被后世的历史学家奥托帕赫茨誉为“视觉的神化”。这也可以用来概括16世纪前几十年的威尼斯画风。艺术家们似乎看见了视觉的无限可能性并开始创造美。
The past five years have seen a flowering of scholarship on this period and the current catalogue builds on this. Anyone within travelling distance of Washington or Vienna should rush to see the new exhibition. But if you can’t, don’t despair. As the next best thing, the exhibition’s scholarly catalogue opens minds and eyes to the poetry and passion of Venetian art, just as its creators would have wished.
关于这个时期的研究在过去5年里方兴未艾，而这本画册也是基于这些研究。如果住的离华盛顿和维也纳不远那么绝对应该参观这个展览，不过如果你去不了也没有关系。随即推出的这本资料翔实的展览画册就像那些威尼斯画家们所期待的那样，将让人眼前一亮，敞开心扉投入威尼斯艺术的诗意与激情中去。
the late art historian: 这里的late 的意思是 “过世的，死去的” 。如果原文是”later”, 那么翻译的”后世的”可勉强算对。文章的许多词句翻译甚佳，希保持！