The acquisition by the trustees of the National Gallery (with the help of the National Art Collections Fund) of four small panels by Giorgione, all in perfect condition, is bound to cause a flutter in the world of art experts. Giorgione is the rarest of the great masters. Indeed, scholarship has succeeded in reducing the number of his incontestably authentic works to one - namely the so-called "Tempest" which used to belong to the Giovanelli family and is now at the academy in Venice. There are half a dozen works of whose genuineness there is little doubt, but if these panels are proved undoubted Giorgiones, the world's stock will have increased by something between 40 and 400%.
Naturally, such considerations do not affect the beauty of the paintings, but the evidence in favour of authenticity is worth summing up:
1. They originally formed the doors of a cupboard or perhaps of the case of a musical instrument. Giorgione is known to have painted such panels.
2. They illustrate scenes from an eclogue by the poet Tebaldo, a friend of Giorgione's patron, Pietro Bembo, and almost certainly of the painter.
3. In style they bear an obvious resemblance to the Tempest. Not only is the idyllic mood the same, but also the trick of leaving the centre of the picture empty and leading the eye past the figures down a long vista into the distant landscape. Minor details are repeated in the "Tempest".
4. The pastoral feeling and the mountainous settings suggest Giorgione's boyhood among the hills of Castelfranco. The flatter landscape of the later Tempest is the work of a man succumbing to the urban influence of Venice.
But authentic or not, these panels, each on eight inches square, are masterpieces, so sure is their sense of scale, so easy their handling of paint, and so uncanny the way in which figures and landscape are fused into a single lyrical whole. In the first, Damon, a young shepherd, sits disconsolate under a tree, thinking of his lady love's cruelty; in the second he listens to the consoling words of his friend Thyrsis. The third shows his suicide. In the last Thyrsis finds the body of his friend. The panels are are full of naivetes, but they are obviously the work of a young genius and a poet. If Giorgione did not paint them, who did? Who could?
The manner of their coming to the National Gallery is as startlingly simple and romantic as the panels themselves. That story can be told in 14 words. Mr Kenneth Clark, the director of the gallery, found them in a dealer's shop.
