Day Trips from Venice - Venice and the Veneto - page 461

porary of Titian's but an early death in 1510 left an adoring public with just six acclaimed
canvases. Luckily for Castelfranco, one of his surviving works, an altarpiece known
simply as the Castelfranco Madonna , still hangs in the Cappella Costanza in the Duomo MAP
GOOGLE MAP (Vicolo del Christo 10; 9am-noon Mon-Fri) F .
Like Titian, with whom he worked on the frescoes of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in
Venice, Giorgione is credited with revolutionising Renaissance painting, freeing it from its
linear constraints and using a refined chiaroscuro technique called sfumato ('smokey') to
blur hard lines and enhance the emotional quality. The Castelfranco Madonna is a perfect
example: the light that suffuses the painting appears to have no clear source; is the sun
rising, or setting, or is the scene illuminated from another unseen source as the figures of
the St Francis and the armoured saint suggest? What's more, all three figures seem with-
drawn and mysteriously preoccupied with events or emotions entirely disconnected from
their physical setting. It is an intriguing composition, and profoundly moving.