Shepherd with a Flute

Around 1510 Venice was inventing a new kind of picture with no story to tell, just a young shepherd, a pipe, and a mood. This is one of them. When Charles I of England bought it, he was certain he owned a Giorgione, the painter who died young of plague that decade and left almost nothing signed. For a long time everyone agreed. Now most scholars hand it instead to the young Titian, Giorgione's collaborator, though a few still argue for Giorgione, and it may even copy a lost original by him. What survives either way is that Venetian invention: a boy who does nothing in particular and was worth painting anyway. He looks off to one side, mid-tune, his fingers still on the holes of the flute.