Il tramonto

Giorgione painted this small landscape in plague-time Venice, around 1508. Look into the middle of it and you find the clue: a man crouches tending a sore on the leg of another, who is Saint Roch, the saint people prayed to for protection against the plague. A bad outbreak had swept the Venetian mainland in 1504, and the picture was very likely a thank-offering for its end. Giorgione was among the first painters to let the landscape itself carry the feeling of a picture, and here the low golden light and hazy distance do most of the work while the tiny figures go quietly about their business. He did not have long. Two years or so after this, in 1510, Giorgione died in a later wave of the same plague.