Andrea Previtali  c. 1480–1528
NG 4884 
Four Episodes from the Tale of Thyrsis and Damon

Nicholas Penny, 2004

Extracted from:
Nicholas Penny, The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings, Volume I: Paintings from Bergamo, Brescia and Cremona (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2004).

NG 4884.1:
Damon Brooding 
Damon killing Himself

NG 4884.2:
Thyrsis speaking with Damon 
Thyrsis finding Damon Dead

c. 1510

Oil on two panels of wood, 45.2 × 19.9 cm (each)

Support

The two panels have been identified as almost certainly poplar.¹ They are both between 0.5 and 0.7 cm thick. The grain is vertical to the images. The dimensions of each painting within the black borders are between 19.7 × 18.4 cm and 19.8 × 18.5 cm. There is an Austrian customs stamp on the back of both panels.

Materials and Technique

The black borders, which seem to be original, follow incised lines. They must relate to the original framing of the paintings, presumably on some piece of furniture – perhaps the case of a musical instrument. The paintings look as if they were hastily executed. Some of the execution is wet‐in‐wet, for example the foliage in Thyrsis finding Damon Dead, and the sails on the ships and parts of the figures were painted over the landscape in that picture. The outline of a rock may be seen to continue below Damon’s face in the scene where he is shown brooding, and the line of the wall continues through Thyrsis’s hand in Thyrsis speaking with Damon.

Conservation

The paintings were cleaned by Sebastian Isepp in Vienna in April 1937, more thoroughly in the skies than elsewhere. Before the cleaning the paintings were said to be ‘quite black’.² No doubt this was an exaggeration, but it is likely that they had not been cleaned for more than half a century. After they were acquired by the National Gallery in July 1937 and before they were displayed in October, the varnish was replaced by Helmut Ruhemann. He also removed a repainted tree in Damon killing Himself (Isepp’s attempt to make sense of vestiges of paint in this area). Some small burnt and encrusted passages in the top left‐hand corners of Damon Brooding and Damon killing Himself were scraped down and retouched. Abrasion on the black border was also retouched. In 1997 the paintings were surface‐cleaned and revarnished.

Condition

There are vertical splits in both Thyrsis speaking with Damon and Thyrsis finding Damon Dead; these are more apparent in the latter. There are some unexplained bumps in the horizontal black borders of Damon Brooding and two small brown knobs on the upper edge of the same, and there is a projection near the upper edge of Thyrsis speaking with Damon, to the right of the sky. There are a couple of small wormholes in the latter picture. There is some evidence of abrasion, notably in the black borders and in the landscape of Damon killing Himself, where a tree seems to have been largely eradicated, save for a few blobs on the mountain top. Residues of old varnish remain in parts of the landscape in all the panels: the far more thorough cleaning of the skies is very evident under ultraviolet light. The chief change in the appearance of the paintings is the darkening of many of the ‘copper‐green’ glazes in the greens of the landscape.

Subject

Soon after acquisition, the paintings were identified by Ernst Gombrich at the Warburg Institute as illustrating the four key episodes of the Second Eclogue of the Ferrarese poet Antonio Tebaldeo (1456–1538).³ In the first scene the shepherd Damon broods over his unrequited love for Amaryllis. Neglectful of his sheep, he rests his cheek on his right hand – the hand with which he has been playing the instrument he holds in his left. In the next scene his friend Thyrsis urges him to abandon his sad and solitary ways. In the third, Damon, having broken his instrument, which now lies on the ground beside him, plunges a dagger into his breast. In the last, his body is discovered by Thyrsis. In some accounts the instrument has been called a psaltery, since the soundboard, although pierced, seems to be continuous beneath the strings.⁴ But the instrument is shaped like a lyre and is surely meant to suggest one – in the poem it is referred to as a ‘cetra’. A fuller account of this highly popular poem is provided in Appendix I.

Attribution and Date

When the paintings were put on display on 20 October 1937 it was announced that they were by Giorgione, but in the Burlington Magazine for November of that year Kenneth Clark described them as ‘Giorgionesque’.⁵ Borenius proposed an attribution to Palma Vecchio, but when G.M. Richter published the proposal that the paintings were by Previtali, Borenius supported it.⁶ In 1939 Clark published the paintings as ‘Giorgione ?’.⁷ Twenty years later, Gould catalogued them as ‘ascribed to Previtali’, finding the similarities ‘so striking as to leave little doubt’, but adding that ‘some caution must be observed in view of the fact that no works of humanist subject definitely by Previtali are known, nor any in which he approaches quite so close to Giorgione’.⁸ In recent decades the attribution to Previtali has not been doubted.⁹ A fuller account of the disputes about the attribution and the circumstances of acquisition is given in Appendix II below.

The fringed profile of the foliage against the sky and the schematic half‐stars of yellow by which light is rendered on the leaves are typical of Previtali, as is the use of nearly vertical hills resembling flat screens. An especially telling comparison is provided by the background in the early signed painting of the Virgin and Child in the Detroit Institute of Art (figs 1 and 2), where the shepherd is posed rather like Damon and black sheep appear in the flock just as they do in the third scene here. The central tree in the painting of Damon brooding has the same curious, nearly horizontal branching that is seen in many of Previtali’s works – a good example is his Saint Jerome (Sotheby’s, London, 11 December 1991, lot 2), but [page 292][page 293][page 294]see also NG 1409. The comparison with the Detroit painting suggests a date early in the first decade of the sixteenth century for the National Gallery panels, in which case they could be imagined as a response to the recent publication of Tebaldeo’s poems, but it is hard to be sure that they were not painted as much as a decade later.

Provenance and Acquisition

Conte Luigi Da Porto, Schio, near Vicenza. Sold in the summer of 1936 to ‘Podio’, exported to Austria (perhaps via Czechoslovakia). With Oskar Salzer in Vienna when shown to Kenneth Clark by Leo Planiscig in April 1937. Bought after a special meeting of the Trustees on 6 July 1937 for £14,000, with a contribution of £2,000 from the National Art Collections Fund. A receipt from Salzer dated 9 July also includes a ‘guarantee that the said pictures have been exported from Austria with proper legal sanction and that I had full authority to sell them’.¹⁰

Confirmation that the paintings come from the Da Porto family has kindly been supplied by Dott. Francesco da Schio, whose cousin Loredana, daughter of Conte Luigi, recalls their presence in the family collection.¹¹ It is very likely that they were in the Da Porto family’s possession for half a century. The rumour that they were acquired from the Manfrin Collection may be the result of a confusion with other works in the Da Porto Collection. Certainly the pictures do not correspond to any of the items described in the catalogues of that collection (the source of so many Giorgiones and possible Giorgiones). Previtali’s Virgin and Child with a Donor now in the Wadsworth Atheneum also came from the Da Porto Collection (before 1910, when it belonged to ‘Yerkes’). An earlier sale from this collection was Mantegna’s Virgin and Child, presented to the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, in 1904 by James Simon.¹²

Framing

The two panels are mounted without frames in a mahogany shadow‐box lined with crimson velvet and (originally) glazed. This way of presenting small old masters, especially those with delicate integral or attached frames or those which were fragments, was much favoured in the first half of the twentieth century. It survives in some private collections and in one or two public ones, notably the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and the National Gallery of Scotland.

Appendix 1 I
Tebaldeo’s Second Eclogue and his other poems

This poem is in terza rima and its 151 lines consist of a dialogue which is followed by a monologue. Thyrsis (Tirse) asks Damon why he is so sad. Damon expresses a preference for solitude ‘among thorns and brambles in a remote and dismal place’ (‘fra spini e sterpi, in loco oscuro e fosco’). His friend’s further tender enquiries are rebuffed. Alone, Damon determines to kill himself, lamenting the fate of his flock, which wolves are keenly watching. Having broken his lyre (‘cetra’) on a stone he utters his last words:
Alas, where I am I cannot now tell!
Shadows lengthen before night falls:
Amaryllis, I forgive you: Amaryllis, farewell.
(Oimè, ch’io non scio più dove mi sono!
Le tenebre son gionte intanti sera:
Vale, Amarili mia, io te perdono!) Thyrsis returns, pondering how changed his friend has become. Seeing Damon outstretched on the grass, his flock scattered, Thyrsis approaches softly, supposing him asleep. Alarmed to see blood, he fears that a wild animal has attacked Damon, but then he sees the weapon in his left side. Thyrsis wonders how the world will understand such a deed. Unable to summon the shepherds to a funeral, he resolves to adorn the tomb with these few words with which the poem ends:
Here Damon lies who had no rival with his lyre.
Thyrsis, who found him dead, did him commit
Solemnly to earth. What caused an end so dire
Who knows? – Unless it were Love which drove him to it.
(Damon qui giace, primo in toccar cetra.
Tirse, morto trovollo, e per suo honore
gli die’ sepulchro; de sua morte tetra
La cagion non si scia, se non fu Amore.) Tebaldeo’s vernacular poems enjoyed great success for at least two decades after the printing of the editio princeps by the press of Domenico Rococuola in Modena with the date of 13 October 1498.

Indeed, the poems seem to have been in great demand before this date, since the idea of printing them was said, in the dedicatory epistle to Isabella d’Este by the author’s cousin and editor, Jacopo Tebaldeo, to have been prompted by the proliferation of inaccurate manuscript transcriptions. The Opere of ‘M. Antonio Thebaldeo da Ferrara’ were reprinted in Modena in the following year, 1499, and also in Brescia. [page 295]Two Venetian printers issued them in July and August of 1500. Between then and 1520 there were ten further printings in Venice and four in Milan. These volumes were all in quarto, but the poems were printed in dodicesimo and sedicesimo in Venice in 1513 and 1515 and in octavo in Milan and Venice in 1515 and 1519 – a sure sign of great popularity. The Second Eclogue was also printed separately, and without a date, as the ‘Eloga del Thibaldeo da ferrara. Interlocutori Thyrso et Damon’.¹³

Appendix II
Kenneth Clark’s Giorgiones

‘Mr. Kenneth Clark, King Stork succeeding to King Log, is the first Tamer of the Trustees in Trafalgar Square since Poynter was trammelled.’ This was the tactless but well‐informed opinion of the artist, critic, polemicist and former Keeper of the Tate Gallery, Dugald Sutherland MacColl, expressed in a letter to the Daily Telegraph. It had been written on New Year’s Day 1938, when, to the indignation of many, Clark appeared in the honours list as KCB. ‘Youthful, precociously learned, brilliant, independent because well‐to‐do, and of an attractive, if disdainful, nature, he has laid a charm upon his Board.’¹⁴ Clark used to meet the Trustees over luncheon, which at that date was served ‘on gold plate at Philip Sassoon’s house in Park Lane’. Afterwards, Clark recalled in his autobiography, he and the Trustees would arrive at the Gallery for meetings looking ‘offensively prosperous and well fed’.¹⁵ What excited the hostility of his curators was the conviction that Clark did not really think of them as colleagues, and the condescending formula he used to describe them in his autobiography – ‘what I suppose must be called the academic staff’ – suggests that they were right.

On 20 October 1937 the four paintings were placed on display in Room VI. A press release headed ‘Four Newly discovered Giorgiones for the National Gallery’ announced the ‘rediscovery and purchase’ as an event of ‘great importance’. The Manchester Guardian responded promptly, praising the poetic beauty of the pictures and reporting that ‘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 fourteen words. Mr. Kenneth Clark, the director of the Gallery, found them in a dealer’s shop.’¹⁶ The curators had not been in favour of either the acquisition or the attribution, nor had they been consulted about the rash publicity; now [page 296]they heard what had seemed to them a capricious shopping expedition by the Director described in terms of awe.

Years later Clark conceded that it ‘would have been wise to have delegated more of the work of the Gallery’, only to add that he ‘couldn’t delegate purchasing’.¹⁷ The paintings had been first discussed by the Board of Trustees at a special meeting on 6 July 1937. Clark drew to the attention of the meeting the fact that the curators were not in favour of the acquisition. Martin Davies, when questioned, ‘stated that he had no opinion on their attribution or date, except that he thought them genuinely of the earlier sixteenth century’. He emphasised that his view was shared by Mr Maclaren and Mr Pouncey. When questioned as to his opinion of the paintings as acquisitions simply of the Venetian School, he put forward the view that they would not ‘add anything to the gallery’.¹⁸ Unfortunately, the Trustees, aware of the curators’ aversion to the Director, must have felt able to attribute their negative reaction to personal motives. No doubt they were impressed by Clark’s report that ‘Dr. Saxl, Mr. Ruhemann, Sir Sidney Cockerell, Mr. Hendy, Sir Augustus Daniel and Lord Lee’ had all agreed that ‘if anything can be called Giorgione these pictures can be’.¹⁹ Yet not a single leading expert on early sixteenth‐century Venetian painting had been consulted.

The ‘startlingly simple’ story as recounted by the Manchester Guardian was somewhat misleading. Clark recalled that he had first been shown the pictures in Vienna ‘in the apartment [at Opernring 21] of an entertaining but equivocal expert on Venetian sculpture named Planiscig’.²⁰ The date was 21 April 1937 and the paintings were in the process of being cleaned.²¹ In other words, they had been drawn to Clark’s attention rather than spotted by him, and he believed that he was getting a privileged first look. Clark informs us that he ‘fell in love with them, began to dream about them, and, when they appeared in London for sale, could not resist showing them to the Trustees.’²² This makes the decision to involve the Board sound like the impulse of a rash lover. In fact, Clark himself had written to Leo Planiscig on 28 May urging him to send the pictures to London specifically in order to show them to the Trustees – ‘if you can arrange for them to be sent over here, it might be possible to arrive at some agreement.’²³

What was it about these paintings that so captivated Clark? His fullest account of them appears in Landscape into Art, published in 1949, the book based on his Slade lectures composed over the winter of 1945–6. He found in them:… in simplified form the structure of the new Arcadian landscape. On either side are dark masses of tree and rock, like wings of a theatrical scene, which leaves the centre of the picture free. Even the figures, which are completely one with the landscape, are sometimes placed at the side; sky and distance take the principal place. It is the composition which, with every refinement of variation, was to form the basis of Claude. We know that it occurred in one of the earliest Giorgiones, the lost Finding of Paris, and it also underlies the one essential and indubitable Giorgione, that quintessence of poetic landscape, the Tempesta.²⁴

Today the rather schematic profiles, the bold if flat masses and the near‐repetitions in the figures may recall some of the slightly gauche pictorial ideals of the Bloomsbury artists whose work Clark had collected. At least one other small painting with naïve figures met with some support as a Giorgione in the same period.²⁵ In any case, it was structure and tone to which Clark was responding, not touch; he seems to have given little attention to Giorgione’s very distinctive handling. And it was not only the pictures themselves but their part in a chain of artistic development that excited him.

It is seldom beauty alone that cripples prudence, but the prospect of possession, the prospect of making a great discovery and a great acquisition. Prudence would have insisted on careful consultation, since this was to be a ‘speculative’ purchase (the adjective Clark used in his letter to Planiscig). As had sometimes been the case with his acquisitions for the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford,²⁶ Clark was here buying in the way he did for his own private collection. It is fascinating to note that, only a few years previously, he had purchased a highly damaged fragment of a sixteenth‐century north Italian mural, which he later claimed that Ruskin believed to have come from the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice.²⁷

In his autobiography Clark claims that he told the Trustees that the paintings were ‘not necessarily, or even probably, the work of Giorgione’ and that he was ‘embarrassed’ by their enthusiasm.²⁸ Certainly they were enthusiastic, voting unanimously in favour not only of the acquisition but of offering £14,000 – that is, £2,000 more than Clark himself proposed.²⁹ The minutes do not record Clark’s dwelling on any lack of certainty about the attribution, but much that was said must have been omitted. We can easily imagine the pressure: when senior potentates permit themselves to be tamed by a golden youth, they like the world to know how golden he is. An offer of £14,000 was accepted by the dealer, and the minutes of the meeting of 13 July announcing this also record the Trustees’ satisfaction with the receipt, which included a guarantee of legality drafted by the Treasury solicitor.³⁰ At the meeting of 12 October there was official confirmation that the National Art Collections Fund could contribute £2,000. There is no record of any discussion as to how the paintings should be described – but, again, this is not surprising. Clark recalled that he was persuaded, ‘in a moment of unforgiveable weakness’, to label the pictures ‘Giorgione’.³¹ Sir Robert Witt, one of the Trustees, was said to be especially keen that they should be announced thus, and Clark may well have feared that the crucial extra support would melt away if he were to add too many sober qualifications to the case he had made in favour of the paintings.

Meanwhile, enemies of Clark were watching keenly the events in Trafalgar Square, and had probably been preparing their attack well in advance of the press release of 20 October. Chief among them was Tancred Borenius (‘my old friend’, as he is ambiguously designated in Clark’s autobiography³²), who may well have resented Clark’s authority in an area of expertise that he himself had dominated for decades. Borenius first learned about the paintings at a ball on 14 July 1937 when the young Benedict Nicolson asked him what he thought [page 297]of them – an indiscretion which Nicolson, then a junior member of the Gallery’s curatorial department, deeply regretted and which was later (but wrongly) connected with his departure from the Gallery later that month.³³ By September the whole art world knew about them.

Borenius had an ally, Charles Bell, who was noted for nursing grievances and for his serpentine scheming. It was Bell who had done more than anyone to encourage Clark as an art historian, and Clark’s first work, The Gothic Revival of 1928, had been dedicated to him. Clark had succeeded Bell as Keeper of the Department of Western Art at the Ashmolean Museum, and Bell is said to have taken offence at his rearrangements there. Clark’s close relationship with Berenson was also probably resented, and Bell had strongly opposed the Italian art exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1930, which Clark did much to promote. It may also be relevant that Bell had a great contempt for Planiscig (as is very clear from the marginal annotations of Fortnum’s manuscript catalogue of bronzes in the Ashmolean Museum).³⁴

In print both Borenius and Bell were polite. Borenius wrote to The Times on 21 October 1937, declaring the panels, which he admitted were works of ‘interest and charm’, to be by Palma Vecchio. This was not a very astute blow, and Robert Witt was able to point out two days later in the same paper that the piping faun in Munich to which Borenius compared the paintings was not certainly by Palma but had been attributed to Lotto, Correggio, Titian, Dosso and, indeed, Giorgione.³⁵ However, the press had by now sniffed a scandal, and many people were happy to help make it one, for the art world was filled with acquaintances and associates who felt they had been dropped, if not, indeed, betrayed, by the Director, whose time and charm were now so much conserved for higher ranks of society.

Bell’s opinion was published in The Times on 5 November. Amid a gratuitous exhibition of erudition it included a judicious estimate of the character and merit of the pictures – ‘these most charming little sportelli, originally made, one likes to imagine, for a cupboard to contain some newly printed Aldine volumes of classical authors. Their rank is with such things as the best woodcuts in the Hypnerotomachia and Ninfale Fiesolano or the maiolica plates of the Correr and Gonzaga‐Este services.’ He thought them ‘scarcely suitable acquisitions for the National Gallery’.³⁶ At about that time the November issue of the Burlington Magazine appeared, in which Clark made the case – albeit with some reservations and under the title ‘Four Giorgionesque Panels’³⁷ – for the paintings being by Giorgione. It must have seemed as if he were beginning to back away from his former convictions. Some scholars had been recruited to defend Clark, notably Georg Gronau (who wrote to The Times on 23 November) and Ludwig Justi (who drafted a long article asserting that they must be by Giorgione).³⁸ But by November it was widely known that George Martin Richter, whose monograph on Giorgione had appeared earlier that year, had attributed the paintings to Previtali. On 26 October he wrote a letter to The Times – ‘but this letter was withdrawn a few days later with the kind consent of the Editor of The Times as I had come to the conclusion that it would be more appropriate to continue this discussion in the Burlington Magazine.’³⁹ Richter had in fact shown his letter to Clark, who in replying had disparaged the forum chosen by Borenius: ‘Does he think the cause of scholarship can be advanced by a letter to The Times?’⁴⁰ The contents of Richter’s letter were leaked to the Telegraph (doubtless by Borenius) in December. It also appeared in the Burlington in January, by now much longer than anything The Times would have considered publishing.

Richter claimed: ‘On October 22nd I had the opportunity to see the panels again, this time exhibited in the National Gallery, and now the scales fell from my eyes.’⁴¹ However, in his catalogue entry for the pictures in 1959, Cecil Gould asserted: ‘The attribution to Previtali, suggested by Pouncey, was first published by G. M. Richter.’⁴² This could be taken to indicate a coincidence, but the patchwork of photographic details with which Richter’s article was illustrated was made up of photographs in the National Gallery’s library, which retain the pencil guidelines used by the Burlington’s plate‐makers, and the comparisons are as characteristic of Philip Pouncey as they are uncharacteristic of Richter, whose discussion of paintings seldom descended to such minutiae. The comparisons were decisive, and Borenius, who had published a letter in the December Burlington reiterating his attribution to Palma, now added a postscript to Richter’s letter supporting the attribution to Previtali (whom he described as ‘an imitator of Palma’).⁴³

In his reply to Richter on 3 November Clark had written ‘I confess I see your reasons’, and he also acknowledged that he found the theory ‘most ingenious’. Although not wholly convinced, he had obviously begun to have doubts about his own position.⁴⁴ In a letter of 8 January 1938 to James Byam‐Shaw, Clark admitted that ‘in the present instance I may well have made a mistake, as anyone may, but I should be sorry if on the strength of one mistake my judgement was permanently mistrusted.’⁴⁵ On 29 January he made the gesture of hanging one of the Gallery’s Previtalis next to the panels.⁴⁶ The following year a question mark was added to Giorgione’s name in the Supplement to the 1929 Catalogue, although there was no mention of Previtali. A decade later Clark conceded that the creator of these paintings had been a ‘craftsman’ – albeit one whom the ‘glow of Giorgione’s personality’ had illuminated.⁴⁷ Finally, in his autobiography of 1974, he declared: ‘the panels were almost certainly early works by a second‐rate painter named Previtali, by whom we had five pictures in the Gallery already.’⁴⁸ What he neglected to mention was that the discovery had been made by a junior member of the ‘academic staff’ whom he so breezily disparaged – although it is only fair to add that elsewhere he did warmly acknowledge Pouncey’s talents.

By January 1938 the affair was no longer just about attribution. Questions in Parliament revealed the sum paid to the dealer. Rumours – almost certainly without foundation – were circulated to the effect that the same dealer had offered the paintings elsewhere for much less. The Times reported that its correspondent in Milan had discovered that they had been sold by a Venetian family to the ‘antiquary Signor Podio’ for [page 298]4,000 lire – ‘less than £40 at the present rate of exchange’.⁴⁹ The Telegraph, meanwhile, claimed to have discovered that they had been found in Malta, had cost Podio a pound apiece, and had cost ‘Herr Salzer’ a hundred pounds apiece.⁵⁰ The Maltese story may have been invented by Podio, who did not relish anyone revealing his mark‐up to his supplier and was also worried about the trouble he might find himself in were he accused of exporting works by Giorgione. The Maltese provenance stuck, and even received some support in Valletta. The curator of the museum there wrote to the Gallery more than a decade later about a ‘strong rumour’ that the panels had come from ‘an old noble family noted for its collection of fine arts’.⁵¹ But the Times story was correct (or nearly so – the family was in fact from Vicenza). Clark himself explained to his Trustees on 14 December 1937 that the pictures ‘had been found in the Veneto and had been seen in Venice in the possession of Podio. They were next smuggled into Czechoslovakia and thence imported into Austria. The import seals were on the backs.’⁵² There is no record that any of the Trustees expressed concern about this.

In fact, Podio’s conduct had not been as irregular as all this suggested. At the Trustees’ meeting on 8 February 1938 Clark reported that the Italian police had ascertained that the panels ‘had been seen before the sale and before cleaning by Fogolari, inspector for the district, who had passed them as of no importance.’⁵³ Concern over the export of the pictures from Italy dwindled, not only when Gino Fogolari’s opinion of the pictures was known, but also when the opinions of other Italian authorities were elicited – Roberto Longhi declared them to be minor Bergamask productions, and Giuseppe Fiocco agreed.⁵⁴ It is curious to reflect that had the paintings been widely acknowledged as by Giorgione, the Gallery may have come under more serious attack.

Clark’s Trustees stood by him. ‘The Prime Minister, Mr Neville Chamberlain, came to look at the pictures, and loved them almost as much as I did. He took my article on them down to Chequers, read it carefully and told me not to worry.’⁵⁵ As for the pictures, Clark expressed the hope that they would ‘continue to hold some place in the gallery long after Tancred is in Valhalla (or wherever Finns go to)’,⁵⁶ but after the war they were relegated to limbo – the ‘so‐called reference section’, as Clark called it.

One possible legacy of this whole affair was the curators’ determination to acquire Giorgione’s Tramonto to fill the gap left by the panels on the main floor, and the reluctance of the Trustees to agree to doing so (at least at first) was perhaps another.⁵⁷ A further consequence was clear to some commentators at the time.⁵⁸ In August 1937 Duveen purchased Giorgione’s Allendale Nativity and set about obtaining support for its attribution to Giorgione. Early in October, when the National Gallery’s new acquisitions were being prepared for display, this painting was taken to Clark for his opinion (he had once doubted that it was by Giorgione, but now agreed that it was).⁵⁹ So it was well known that the painting was on the market (it was bought for the Kress Foundation in July 1958), but by then it had become impossible for the National Art Collections Fund to launch an appeal. In slightly different circumstances Clark would have been the perfect person to secure this great painting for Trafalgar Square, as he had Piero di Cosimo’s Forest Fire for the Ashmolean Museum.

Notes