Saint Georges

Around 1510 Venetian painting lost its brightest young star. Giorgione, who had changed how the city painted with his soft, dreamy light, died in an outbreak of plague while still in his early thirties. Into the gap stepped an even younger man from the mountains, Titian, whose early work looked so much like Giorgione's that people could barely tell the two apart. This small Saint George comes from exactly those years, probably a panel from an altarpiece the Venetian Republic had ordered. For most of the last two centuries nobody was sure whose hand it was. It was called a Giorgione, then a Palma Vecchio, then a Giorgione again, and only lately have scholars settled on the young Titian. He shows the saint mid-fight, lance lowered at the dragon, in the hushed golden light he had learned from the master he outlived.