°Tempest
Giorgione’s pastoral has come to be known as “The Tempest”, though also as “the little landscape on canvas with the storm, with the gypsy and soldier”.
The most prevalent reading - the one that heads for the painting as allegorical - is that of the encounter between Fortezza and Carita set against the backdrop of Fortuna (the oncoming storm). Though it’s also been regarded as akin to a pieta, crypto- or more loosely as materialist commentary. It’s not one of my favourite paintings, but interesting for its very, though perhaps too-formal, Lucretian composition/pastiche. It’s sometimes considered to be an unreadable painting, obscure in its meaning (or authorial intention), if not entirely illegible in its figural references - or this sense (that it is “subjectless”) is taken as its meaning. There’s something compelling about this attempt to make a final sense of the painting, but that’s not because it’s actually unreadable methinks.
A fragment, from Machiavelli’s meditations on virtu and fortuna:
although it appears that the World has become effeminate and Heaven disarmed, yet this arises without doubt more from the baseness of men who have interpreted our Religion in accordance with Indolence and not in accordance with Virtu. For if they were to consider that it [our Religion] permits the exaltation and defense of the country, they would see that it desires that we love and honor her [our country], and that we prepare ourselves so that we can be able to defend her.
All of that being a version (notes) of a first para …
