Giovane con freccia

Around 1505 something new was happening in Venetian painting, and Giorgione was at the centre of it: small pictures of a single figure that refuse to tell you plainly who it is. This soft-faced youth in red holds an arrow, and for 500 years people have argued over what that makes him. The arrow could belong to Apollo, or to Cupid the god of love, or to Saint Sebastian, who was shot with arrows. It could also fix nothing at all. Giorgione seems to have wanted the uncertainty. His figures are made to be felt rather than named, all mood and half-light, the kind of thing his own contemporaries simply called poetic. He had very little time to develop it. Around 1510 plague swept Venice and Giorgione died of it, still in his early thirties, leaving only a handful of pictures anyone can firmly give to his hand.