Endymion and his Flock

Around 1500 educated Venetians were reading pastoral poetry, above all Sannazaro's Arcadia, printed in 1504, which set its shepherds in a country where nothing urgent ever happens. Pictures followed the fashion. This panel is about 128 centimetres wide and only 28 high, a shape cut to be fitted into the panelling above a door in a grand household, and what it holds is a shepherd asleep among his goats. An older tradition names him Endymion, the youth the moon goddess loved and kept sleeping, and that is the title the painting still carries in many catalogues; the Barnes Foundation, which owns it, calls it simply Sleeping Shepherd and dates it between 1500 and 1510, when Titian was starting out and his work is hard to separate from Giorgione's.