Special Guest Post by Damian Dibben, Author of The Colour Storm: The compelling and spellbinding story of art and betrayal in Renaissance Venice

Available from Amazon UK and Amazon US

Venice, 1510. The world's greatest artists gather to enjoy fame, fortune, and colour. When a wealthy merchant discovers a mysterious new pigment, he knows it would create a masterpiece in the right hands. For struggling artist Giorgione 'Zorzo' Barbarelli, success is far from reach. Until he's commissioned by the merchant to paint a portrait of his wife, Sybille. Impress him, and Zorzo could acquire the most coveted colour in the world - and write his name in history.

Discovering Giorgione and the Venetian painting scene.

 

My latest novel, The Colour Storm, is set in the cutthroat art-world of renaissance Venice, and is about the search for a new colour. The daring, young painter, Giorgione, is in the fight of his life to beat his rivals - including Leonardo, Michelangelo and Titian – and find it first.
The colour is prince orient and is allegedly more miraculous than the hitherto star of the renaissance, ultramarine.

The idea for the novel was hatched after a visit to the Royal Academy in London six years ago. Seeing In the Age of Giorgione. I realized how little I knew of this young artist, an almost forgotten figure, but who truly stood his own against the more famous figures of the era. When I started to investigate him further, and the world of Venice in the early 16th century, and how artists’ workshops operated there, the story took shape.

Venice in 1510, when the novel is set, was possibly the richest, most dynamic city on earth. It sat exactly between east and west and was a meeting place and melting pot of many cultures. All the treasures of the world - minerals, silk, porcelain, spice; from Arabia, India, China and Africa - all threaded through its ports. With the prolific burgeoning of trade, the era of exploration and discovery, Venice became unimaginably rich. A new class of patron arose, who were hell bent on leaving their mark.

Not just goods came through Venice, but ideas too, new philosophies and disciplines of learning. In 1510 Europe was still going through a period of seismic change. It had begun in the previous century with the sacking of Constantinople, the city that had been the centre of thought, science and ideas for a thousand years. 

Italy was the beneficiary, as the scholars and thinkers and their myriad texts flooded there, most of them arriving in Venice first. Added to which the printing press had been devised. Books, once only put out in their hundreds, were soon being produced in their millions. Oil paint was also a relatively new invention, and it became the medium for expressing the wonder and wealth of the times.

Given all these influences, this state of astonishing flux, and the money pouring in, it was not surprising that artists flourished and studios sprung up all over the city. These workshops were the dream factories of their day, like film studios now, with dozens of craftspeople working in unison to create finished canvases. In the largest there might be sixty apprentices: carpenters, model makers, paint grinders, brush makers, varnishers, gesso and tempera artisans. 

Others would be required to work on geometry, mathematics and perspective, whilst some worked off site, erecting scaffolding and preparing painting on location. Every notable artist had their own studio, and each studio was in competition with the other. The art world of the renaissance was fiercely, often dangerously, competitive.

Like everything else, colour, in the form of minerals, more often than not arrived in Venice first, in ships from around the world. You have to imagine being an apprentice in 1510 and seeing pigments unveiled for the first time. Apart from lapis, there would have been cobalt and azurite for blues, malachite and verdigris for green, porphyry and hematite for reds. When the minerals had been found, the grinding began, with pestle and mortar first, then on slabs with stone rolling pins, and finally on glass until the powder is ready to mix into paint and be applied.

Colour was sourced from vegetation as well as minerals. Berries, roots, flower petals and vines all contain distinct hues, while saffron produces yellow, red-pepper seeds burnt red, and almond and peach stones shades of black. Workshop apprentices would be sent to the country of the Veneto to dig down into the earth for ochres and umbers, collect insects in the fields for grub for molluscs on the shore. Tyrian purple was derived originally from a particular shell found on shores of that ancient city.

The studios in Venice were producing a different type of work to those in Florence, Rome and Milan. Those schools of painting, from which Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael came, had just one, true focus: man, or woman. They started from the soul of a person, using line, and drew out. The human form, the body, muscle, sinew, mass. The Venetian starting point was different. The atmosphere came first: the hour of the day, the time of year, the weather, the light, the feel of the sky, and the land. And they started, not with line, but with colour and space.

The Bellini brothers, for whom Giorgione apprenticed, were one of the first proponents of this novel way of recording life, but Giorgione took it one step further. He was not so concerned with telling a literal story, about specific people in the painting, and much more with how a painting made a viewer feel, and what place – beautiful, mysterious or dangerous - it transported them too. He truly thought about how a sunset might appear, or a thunderous sky, or harsh morning light, or mist.

Giorgione was also perhaps the first artist to paint a landscape, on its own merits. His La Tempesta was one such revolutionary work. A turquoise summer sky riven by a bolt of lightening is the focus, much more than the three humans - a soldier, a nude woman and her infant. And those people are not characters from the bible, or from mythology, or from public life, the subjects of just about every other painting of the time. Instead each figure is mysterious in itself and even more curious as a group. Because of the mystery, we’re invited to create a narrative for ourselves, use our imaginations.

With his particular and genre-defying viewpoint, Giorgione did not only pave the way for Titian, Veronse and Tintoretto, in Venice, but somehow foreshadowed the work of the impressionists three hundred years before Monet and Renoir.

Venice would have been an astonishing, exciting, vibrant, noisy place in 1510, full of ideas, texture, colours, languages and smells; the earth in miniature, and Giorgione - who would surely have become a household name had he not died so young - was one of the first to capture this lightning in a bottle.

Damian Dibben

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About the Author

Damian Dibben is a best-selling British author. His novels have been translated into twenty-seven languages, in over forty countries. Damian has worked extensively as a screenwriter on projects as diverse as Phantom Of The Opera and Puss In Boots. He lives on London's Southbank with his partner Ali and three dogs, Dudley, Daphne & Velvet. Find out more at Damian 's website at https://www.damiandibben.com/ and find him on Facebook and Twitter @DamianDibben