Ritratto di un soldato con il suo scudiero

Giorgione worked in Venice for barely a decade before plague killed him around 1510, still in his early thirties, and he left so few certain paintings that nearly every one carries an argument about it. This portrait, from about 1502, is no exception. It shows an armoured man with a boy behind him, and somewhere along the way it picked up the nickname il Gattamelata, after a famous mercenary captain, though nothing really ties the sitter to him. What it does show is the new Venetian manner Giorgione helped invent, all soft light and half-shadow, the steel of the armour catching a low glow. Whether his own hand actually finished the panel is still debated.