Nude

This battered figure is the only piece of Giorgione's work as a fresco painter that survives anywhere. In 1508 the German merchants' warehouse in Venice, the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, had just been rebuilt after a fire, and the wall facing the Grand Canal, the side every boat passed, went to Giorgione, while the young Titian took the flank along the alley. We know how the job was divided because Giorgione went to the Venetian magistrates in December 1508 to argue that his fee was too low, and the record of that dispute survives. Salt air and damp ate the paintings away over the centuries, and by 1937, when this fragment was lifted off the wall, nothing else of his facade was left. Titian's surviving fragments from the other side hang in the Ca' d'Oro, further up the same canal. The woman stands in a painted niche holding a sphere, and whatever else would have identified her came away with the plaster.