When Giorgione Died: A Rebilungsroman in Two Volumes

This brilliant two-volume publication joins an art historian’s memoir with a biography of the mysterious painter Giorgione.

No artist of the Renaissance is more elusive than Giorgione. Authentic paintings are rare, perhaps nonexistent, and little is known about his life, although speculation abounds in the scholarly literature devoted to fleshing out an identity for him. As fictive as he is real, as loved by art forgers as by art experts, this strange, shadowy figure is the subject of Seeing Double, the first of the two volumes. Thinking Twice, the second volume, presents Giorgione’s contemporary counterpart, an unemployed, melancholic art historian who cannot connect with the magnificent art and architecture surrounding her in Florence.

Delivering a series of imaginary slide lectures, she doubles back over her past, searching for transformative experience in Europe and back home in the US. Her search leads to humor-laced musings about the pitfalls of an elite education in art history. To enlarge her perspective, she turns to novels and poetry by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Henry James, and William Gaddis to name just a few of the authors called upon for guidance. The wide-range and verve of this double book will surprise even seasoned aficionados of art history. Brimming with insights, it shows there is nothing more difficult–nothing more rewarding–than trying to be true to both art and life.