Portrait d'un guerrier

Around 1500 the aging Leonardo da Vinci passed briefly through Venice, and his way of letting figures rise out of shadow left a deep mark on the city's younger painters. Giorgione absorbed it most fully of all, and this armoured man looming from the dark carries that lesson. Beside him, half-lost, floats the profile of a coarse old face, and no one now agrees on what the pairing means. Little about the picture is settled. It has come down to us in poor condition, and even the museum that holds it sets a cautious question mark beside the name Giorgione, though the sheer quality of the handling keeps pointing back to him. Giorgione himself stayed a mystery, dead of plague by 1510 with barely a handful of certain works to his name.