自画像

Giorgione was the young sensation of Venetian painting when he made this, probably around 1509. Within a year he was dead, most likely of the plague that swept Venice in 1510, still only in his early thirties. He left very few certain works, and this face is one of the closest things we have to the man himself. He seems to have shown himself in the guise of the biblical David, the shepherd who killed the giant Goliath. The panel you see today is a fragment. It was cut down at some point, and older records show the severed head of Goliath once rested under his hand at the lower edge. What survives is the gaze, dark-eyed and turned toward you, from a painter who had barely got started.