A Note on Giorgione’s Tempesta with Comments on Giorgione Poetic Allegories by Edgar Wind

Bernardino Branca
University of Kent, UK
https://orcid.org/0009-0004-7509-6163

Volume 10, April 2026

Abstract Wind’s explanation of the opposing forces embodied in Giorgione’s imagery provides us an apparently very straightforward and persuasive solution to the enigma of the symbolic meaning of these paintings. However, as Wind and Paul Oskar Kristeller pointed out in a 1962 letter exchange concerning Lodovico Lazzarelli, only a small group of patrons, courtiers, artists and humanists understood the ideas embodied in the symbols of fifteenth and early sixteenth-century Italian imagery. Wind and Kristeller agreed that Platonism as well as Hermeticism played an important role in the elitist ‘Spiritual World’ of the time.

Keywords Embodiment, Giorgione, Kristeller, Lazzarelli, Wind

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Bibliography

Branca, Bernardino, Edgar Wind filosofo delle immagini (Milan: Mimesis Edizioni, 2019).

Kristeller, Paul Oskar, Renaissance Thought and the Arts (Princeton University Press, 1990).

— ‘Lodovico Lazzarelli e Giovanni da Correggio, due ermetici del Quattrocento, e il manoscritto II D I 4 della Biblioteca Comunale degli Ardenti di Viterbo’, in Biblioteca degli Ardenti della Città di Viterbo: Studi e Ricerche nel 150 della Fondazione, ed. by Augusto Pepponi (Agnesotti, 1960), pp. 13–47.

Warburg, Aby, ‘Francesco Sassetti’s Last Injunctions to His Sons’ in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, trans. by David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999), pp. 233-236.

Wind, Edgar, Giorgione’s Tempesta with Comments on Giorgione Poetic Allegories (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969).

— ‘Platonic Tyranny and the Renaissance Fortuna’ (1961), in Edgar Wind, The Eloquence of Symbols, ed. by Jaynie Anderson, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).