Giorgione

Giorgione worked in Venice for barely a decade, roughly 1500 to 1510, and even his death is better documented than almost anything else about his life. In October 1510 Isabella d'Este, a noblewoman in Mantua who collected art aggressively, wrote asking her agent in Venice to secure a Nativity painting she had heard the artist owned. The agent wrote back that Giorgione had just died of the plague in a Venetian hospital, and the painting could not be found.

Barely half a dozen paintings can be reliably attached to his name, and telling his hand apart from that of his younger colleague Titian, who almost certainly trained alongside or under him, remains one of the oldest disputes in art history. Giorgione's Sleeping Venus was left unfinished at his death, its landscape completed afterward by Titian, and paintings like the Concert Champetre in the Louvre are still argued over between the two names.

What survives of Giorgione shows figures caught in soft, hazy light and mood, a way of painting Venice had not seen before him and one that Titian kept developing for the next 60 years.