Selbstporträt

Giorgione died in 1510, probably of the plague that swept Venice that year, and he was likely only in his early thirties. He left almost nothing that everyone agrees is his, a mere handful of pictures, which is why a face like this one starts arguments. The Budapest panel is thought to be a fragment cut down from a larger scene, most likely one showing the painter as the young David standing over the severed head of Goliath. Whether Giorgione's own hand made it is unsettled. Some scholars call it authentic, others a close early copy of a lost original. The 19th-century connoisseur Giovanni Morelli was the one who first tied it to Giorgione, around 1880. What survives is a level, unhurried gaze, the thing his admirers always meant by his name.