Welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. For our best subscription offers, visit lrb.me forward slash pod.

Georgione was born in about 1477 and died of plague in 1510. He's unique among famous European painters,

in that at different periods he's been credited with entirely different pictures.

Even today there's great disagreement about what he actually painted.

Of the 47 exhibits listed in the catalogue of the show at the Royal Academy,

14 were described as attributed to so-and-so, meaning that their authorship is still controversial.

My own view is that this is an understatement, and that the attribution of more than

half of the paintings is open to question.

Although Georgione had already been mentioned a couple of times in print, the basis of his

fame was the biography included in Vasari's

lives of the artists, first published in 1550. This was based on notes of paintings that Vasari

himself had seen during a visit to Venice about eight years earlier, at a time when he seems

to have had no intention of writing a book and no reason actively to seek out information about artists.

Most of the attributions were clearly wrong,

because in the second edition, published in 1568,

the majority of works previously given to Georgoni were credited to other artists,

and were replaced by various portraits, some of which

Georgoni certainly never painted. Vasari's book established the idea that Georgoni was an

outstanding artist, a sort of Venetian counterpart to Leonardo da Vinci, but Vasari was vague about

what was distinctive about his work, beyond indicating that all Venetian

painters worked in the idiom of Giovanni Bellini until about 156, when Georgiani introduced a

different and apparently more atmospheric way of painting, in which preliminary drawings played no part. Because he was very famous,

...