La vecchia

Around 1506 Venice was rich, elegant, and in love with idealised beauty, smooth-skinned Madonnas and glowing young women. Giorgione painted the opposite. An old woman leans toward us over a ledge, her hair thin and escaping its scarf, her mouth open, her remaining teeth crooked, every line of age set down without flattery. She holds a small scroll and points at herself, and the scroll reads col tempo, with time. That is the whole point. She is not a particular person so much as a warning about what time does to everyone looking at her, the beauty in the next picture included. Not a memento mori exactly, remember you will die, but something gentler and stranger, remember you will grow old. The picture still sits in the frame it was given long ago.