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Not Even Sunlight
John Haberin New York City
Giovanni Bellini: Saint Francis in the Desert
Giorgione: Three Philosophers
Not even bright sunlight can dispel the mystery of Saint Francis in the Desert at the Frick. How could it? The painting's glorious sunlight is its greatest miracle.
It infuses the landscape, as painting before Giovanni Bellini never could. If Francis here is receiving the stigmata, or wounds of the crucified Christ, light may also be the bearer of that miracle. Not just scholars will be arguing over it for a long time to come. As it is, no one can agree on what Bellini depicts or even the time of day. 
The saint, in legend, wrote songs while renouncing worldly goods for a life in nature, and his open mouth may express ecstasy, wonder, or the moment before singing. No other work at the Frick Madison has had its own room.
For now, though, he has a still more mysterious companion in paint, on loan from the Kunsthistorisches in Vienna. A visitor to a villa in Venice in 1525 described it as Three Philosophers, but was he right, and which three? Whatever are philosophers doing together, out of doors and far from home? What did Giorgione, its likely painter, owe to philosophy, and what was his contribution to the painting of sunlight, shadow, and landscape in oil? Did he in fact paint this one? Scholars have been looking for answers ever since, but you will just have to find your own in "Bellini and Giorgione in the House of Taddeo Contarini."
Made for each other
Giovanni Bellini completed his Saint Francis before 1480, with clean lines and clear skies that mark him as a painter of the early Renaissance. Giorgione (trust me) painted Three Philosophers thirty years later, in 1509. That, the richness of his colors, and the fullness of his forms place him in the High Renaissance in Venice. Titian, its greatest figure, entered his workshop and completed at least one of his surviving works, a Sleeping Venus. Bellini was part of the city's leading family of painters, along with his father, Jacopo Bellini, his brother Gentile, and his cousin, Andrea Mantegna. Giorgione was a stranger to Venice when he arrived from a small town to make his career.
Still, they seem made for each other. They may belong on paper to different eras, but they share that special moment when oil paint was transforming art, by allowing that richness and fullness. Jacopo himself may have introduced it to Venice, decades after Jan van Eyck and Robert Campin made it the medium of the North Renaissance. One can see it in Saint Francis with a tree, where the colors run into one another and the oil still seems wet. One can see it that much more in the warmth of Three Philosophers. One can see it in everything from the loose brushwork of a philosopher's short beard, to leaves emerging from darkness seemingly as one looks, to the translucency of a church or villa in the middle distance, to the blue of distant mountains.
The two paintings seem made for each other as well. Both depict figures in a landscape—not so much to contemplate nature as to take part in it. Nature, in turn, responds to them. That tree from Bellini leans toward Francis from across the canvas, as part of the miracle. In a minority view of the painting, after a folk tale, bright morning sunlight has appeared before dawn, calling a shepherd in the distance to his work. Two trees intertwine to frame perfectly the central of the three philosophers.
In both, the actors appear at the right. Tall rocks form natural stairs and a natural home. Francis emerges from one cave mouth, while the leftmost of the philosophers, seated, faces another. At least tradition calls it a cave, but if it is only a rock face textured by vegetation, its darkness is interesting enough for him and for me. He holds a mathematician's or artist's tools, a compass and a triangle, to take its measure. Francis faces only an ass, as stoic as any philosopher, and the light, but that, too, is enough.
In both paintings, the figures are decidedly apart from civilization and ever so close. Francis has an entire city, behind a fence and across a stream, with no need for other signs of life. Giorgione's translucent church or villa seems to arise from its place in the landscape like a vision, with another an indefinite distance behind it. Both buildings give way to far-off hills, covered with greenery and dissolving into blue. Some historians see the color, which to me looks natural, as unexplained, perhaps a further miracle. Once again, nature and culture respond to each other.
And then there is the shared mystery of what is really going on. Francis has spread his arms, out of obedience or in joy. If he is indeed receiving the stigmata, though, where are the rays that in other depictions pierce his open palms? I devote a longer review (and one of this Web site's first) to the painting's mysteries, and you can read more for the whole story. I argue that sunlight itself is the source of the miracle—and, by extension, so is painting in oil. That and, for now, natural light from a Marcel Breuer window at the Frick Madison.
Philosophical enough
The paintings now face each other, as curated by Xavier F. Salomon, as if the wall across from Bellini's had been waiting all along for a companion. Marcantonio Michiel saw them both at the house of Taddeo Contarini as well. It is his account that gave Giorgione's its attribution and its name—
and there the mystery begins. Attributions to this artist have long been all over the map, and not all historians accept this one. My old Renaissance textbook does not so much as mention it. If I accept it, it is in no small part because a mere imitator would have smoothed over its enigmas.
Michiel notes that it took Sebastiano of Venice, known today as Sebastiano del Piombo, to finish it, which only adds to the puzzle. One would never know that Sebastiano came to specialize not in landscape but in portraits, with monumental poses, fleshy faces, and fine clothing. Then, too, why did the painting need him? Giorgione spent a good two years on it, and he quit as much as a year before his untimely death in his thirties. He may have seen death coming and found a need for philosophy. But then he was among the more philosophical of painters all along.
One might not know it from his reputed life as something of a libertine, but he was never fully of this world. His Madonna has a throne so block-like and so high that no human could ascend it. That sleeping Venus in an unlikely landscape seems not just dreaming but a dream. Perhaps his best-known painting, The Tempest, has three figures in a landscape, a nursing mother and a soldier, as unexplained as the one now in New York. What, though, of the philosophers? They, too, could be dreamers or the dream.
Surely we can trust Michiel that they are indeed philosophers. He could have heard it from Contarini, the Renaissance collector, who would have known from his own commission or the artist himself—unless, of course, he bought the painting from a third party. But then Michiel also gave Bellini's painting a title that the Frick still uses, which is preposterous. Francis faces not a desert but fertile soil and gorgeous Italian sunlight. Still, the three men look philosophical enough or at least sufficiently detached. But whose philosophy?
For a while observers identified them with the three Magi on their way to the Holy Family, a misplaced piety that Giorgione never knew. These men are not bearing gifts like the Magi—apart, perhaps, from a geometry lesson. The young geometer could be Pythagoras, and his body does fit neatly within a right triangle. (Remember the Pythagorean theorem?) But then Pythagoras is usually shown older, and if the other two men are his teachers, they ignore him entirely, not to mention one another. Besides, while the one at right has the full beard, robe, and dour expression of a proper Greek, the one at the center wears a turban.
They could be the proverbial three ages of man, or they could be philosophers from three traditions—the natural sciences, the East, and the ancients. The cave, if it is one, could be Plato's cave or the darkness that Renaissance science was beginning to dispel. For now, though, philosophy can explain only so much. It leaves open the enigma of nature and culture, as does painting in oil. You will just have to consult the landscape and the three philosophers for yourself. Unlike Francis, they will not be with New Yorkers for long.
"Bellini and Giorgione in the House of Taddeo Contarini" ran at the Frick Madison through February 4, 2024.