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Some curious ruins and a deserted city lie behind the figures. Above them is blue-green sky with a frail stroke of lightning and a clouded moon. Nobody knows what the painting is about. Marcantonio Michiel, a Venetian nobleman and antiquary, kept a notebook between 1525 and 1543 in which he refers to the picture as Giorgione's rendering of a soldier and a gypsy. In the 18th century, the painting was called The Family of Giorgione, out of a mistaken idea that it depicted the artist, his wife and child. (The latter two never existed.) Salvatore Settis, an Italian art historian whose book on The Tempest was first published in 1978 and appeared in English translation in 1990, argues that the painting is a veiled account of the Eden myth, that these two people are Adam and Eve and that there's a snake in the picture.
No one has ever seen this snake but Settis.A more convincing argument, detailed by Jaynie Anderson in her monograph of Giorgione (1997), is that the canvas is a pictorial version of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphilo, a romance about Poliphilo, who in his search for antiquity comes across Venus feeding Cupid, but that's only a guess. There are also scholars who believe the painting is about nothing, that it's an example of a free-form fantasy.Between my first viewing of the slide and a visit to the Accademia in Venice, where I saw the real painting for the first time four years later, I made a startling discovery. The image I carried in my mind was very accurate, with one exception: I left out the man. My memory of the painting was of the woman, the child, the landscape, the ruins, the city, the sky, the lightning - but no man.
I gave this extraordinary gaff to the heroine of my first novel, The Blindfold, who also remembers the canvas perfectly but has no memory of the fellow in the foreground. My obliteration of this man is a commentary on the painting, on me, and on the odd business of looking at paintings.Every painting is still It doesn't move. It is usually some kind of rectangle which mimics the architecture of a window. Its existence implies a spectator, just as a book implies a reader or a piece of music implies a listener. It is a dead thing animated by the presence of a living person who enters into some kind of relation with it.
Not long ago, a woman wrote a letter to The New York Times in which she cited her experience when she saw Michelangelo's David in Florence. She wrote: "What a thrill it was to stand there and soak in its beauty and power. But how long I had to wait in the gallery for things to quiet down so that I could concentrate on it."Two things interest me about her statement. First, that she experiences the David as if it were active and she were passive - she "soaks" in the statue - and second, that she needs quiet for this saturation to take place Her view of looking at the statue is a common one.
The stone David radiates something in her direction and she prefers to have no distractions during those emanations We rarely experience other inanimate things in this way Think of a fork, for example, or a chair Art is made to be seen. It is activated both by a cultural mythos that has decidedly religious undertones and by a real, even transforming, relation between the viewer and the thing viewed.I have looked closely at The Tempest in the Accademia only three times. Each time is a repetition of my first rapture before that projected image in the classroom. I now know there is a man in the picture and that he serves as the vehicle of my entry into an image I don't fully understand, but understand enough to be fascinated. The staff he holds suggests that he is on a journey, that he has been walking. Now in repose, he looks over at the undressed woman calmly nursing her baby in a storm He looks at her, but she is not looking back at him.
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