Giovanni Borgherini e il suo precettore

Giorgione is one of the great puzzles of Venetian painting. He died young, around 1510, probably in an outbreak of plague, and left almost nothing signed, so nearly every picture handed to him gets argued over. This double portrait is one of them. The younger man is thought to be Giovanni Borgherini, a Florentine sent to Venice as a boy to study, and the older figure beside him is taken to be his tutor. The painter and biographer Giorgio Vasari, writing decades later, recalled seeing a portrait of young Borgherini in the family's house in Florence and set it down as a Giorgione. Not everyone since has agreed. For a while the picture even travelled under an invented name, the Master of the Pitti Three Ages. It hangs today simply as attributed to Giorgione, the question left open.