Giorgione, La Vecchia (The Old Woman)

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:04][music] >> When I was last in the Accademia in Venice, there was one painting that stopped me in my tracks. In fact, I stood in front of it for quite some time and felt deeply connected to it in a way that was unusual. We're looking at Giorgione's painting of an old woman that's known as La Vecchia, which in Italian means the old woman. She makes eye contact with us. Her mouth is partially open as if she's speaking, and her body turns to us as if she wants to engage us, too. Her eyes turn toward us.

[00:00:41]There is nothing in the background. It's just darkness. And so we have nothing else to focus on except [clears throat] the figure who is very close to us.

[00:00:50]She's very close to us, but she's also a little bit removed because right in front of her, there's a stone parapet that tells us there's some architecture around her, but where she is exactly, we don't know. And this is unlike other portraits like Lorenzo Lotto's portrait of the collector Andrea Odoni, where he appears with all of the classical antique sculptures that he's collected.

[00:01:11]Here, Giorgione places us directly in conversation with this figure, whoever La Vecchia might be. When we walk through the galleries, we expect to see portraits of people who have the wherewithal to commission a portrait in the first place, which was expensive.

[00:01:28]And generally, with a portrait that you're commissioning, you get dressed up. You look your best. You put on your jewelry. And here, we see her neck, her collarbone. The white hair cap looks like it might come undone, or she needs to tuck her hair back inside and adjust it. Even that shawl looks like it might slip off at any moment. So that's actually a clue that this is not in fact a portrait. There are Renaissance Venetian portraits where people are very obviously trying to look their best. One example would be Titian's portrait of Isabella d'Este. She appears in this portrait very youthfully, with smooth, full, supple skin, and she was actually in her 60s at the time Titian painted the portrait. She has a kind of faraway gaze that distances us from her. She has dignity by not engaging with the viewer.

[00:02:22]And so we have a kind of public persona.

[00:02:24]And that's clearly not what we're looking at with La Vecchia. Her clothes are plain. We can compare her headdress to Rogier van der Weyden's Portrait of a Lady, where all of the pins are very neat, and you can even see the folds of the freshly pressed fabric. The second clue that La Vecchia is not a portrait is that banderole. It reads Col Tempo, which means in Italian with time. And she points to herself with what is known in art history as a dexter manus, a right hand that indicates truth-telling, as if, "With time, you the viewer, you will become like me, old." And in this way we can think of the painting as analogous to a memento mori, Latin for a reminder of death. Sometimes we see memento mori portrayed with skeletons, which are pretty obviously associated with death, but this painting might be more accurately called a memento senescere, a reminder of aging. To be reminded of growing old is a reminder of how the beauties, the pleasures of this world are temporary. In many ways this painting is not really a memento mori or even a memento senescere, but a vanitas image. The idea that the things of this world that we value so highly, youth, beauty, money, possessions, will eventually be gone. And many art historians have found Giorgione's La Vecchia analogous to Dürer's image known as Avarice, but might more accurately be called a vanitas image where an old woman clutches greedily to a bag of money trying in vain to hold on to the things of this world. Petro Genia is always so interesting because he never quite gives us enough to read the painting in a traditional way. Is it a portrait? Is it a vanitas allegorical image that stands for something like greed or vanity? What are we looking at?

[00:04:20]We do have one clue and that is from an inventory. This painting was first mentioned in 1569 in the possession of a nobleman in Venice named Gabriele Vendramin who was an exceptionally wealthy man. In 1569 an inventory was made of Vendramin's paintings and it describes La Vecchia as a portrait of the mother of Giorgione which is very unlikely to be the case. Not only do people avoid painting unflattering portraits in general, it's unlikely anyone in the Renaissance wanted a portrait of a working man's mother. So we're helped out by a later inventory that was made in 1601. The 1601 inventory implies that La Vecchia was covered by a portrait of a man. That's highly unlikely but is most common is portraits of elite men and women with painted covers. A lot of Renaissance portraits came with covers of emblems of the coat of arms of the sitter's family or of allegories and we actually have some examples of those in portraits that were painted on both the front and the back. At the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan, there's a portrait by Andrea Previtali of a man who appears very simply as a bust in plain black clothing and a plain black hat with nothing in the background. But if you turn the painting over, there's a skull resting on a parapet and a Latin inscription that reads, "It is the law that out of all of this beauty, all of this form, all that will remain is vanity." In a way, putting a vanitas moral on the back of your portrait is a way to avoid looking like you're too vain. It's a way to hedge against charges of self-aggrandizement.

[00:06:08]There's a beautiful portrait in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. of Ginevra de Benci by Leonardo da Vinci and similarly has a painted reverse in which we see a sprig of juniper and a palm leaf. The juniper tree behind Ginevra is most likely a reference to her name, Ginevra, meaning juniper, and the banderole reads, "Virtutum forma decorat," meaning beauty adorns virtue.

[00:06:33]So, it's all right that we have this portrait that celebrates this young woman's beauty so much because it is a testament to her virtue. On the other hand, that leaves us with Giorgione's La Vecchia. We know that a lot of paintings in the Renaissance had covers. Some were made of wood and some were made of canvas. And it's pretty thinly painted, all of which implies that it's more casual than a fully finished portrait.

[00:06:56]And because they were their own images, they added meaning to the portraits they covered. And so, if this painting is indeed a cover, a painted canvas on top of a portrait, it adds this element of drama to what lies beneath, what was probably a much more conventional image than La Vecchia, and it marks the portrait as special. It can't be seen until it is revealed. We have to think about the effect of time, the passage of time. And in that way, it really justifies the existence of portraiture.

[00:07:28]The young man who is portrayed in the portrait will never look the same again.

[00:07:33]We will have no way to know what he used to look like without Giorgione fixing time, defying the inevitable laws of the universe that col tempo we will all age, we will all change. The words col tempo with time when Leonardo da Vinci was studying water, he used that expression in his notebook. He wrote in the margins, col tempo ogni cosa va variando, meaning with time everything changes. And Giorgione from centuries ago speaks to us in an experience we will all have. If we're lucky, unlike Giorgione.