The Tempest

A soldier stands at the left, a half-naked woman nurses a baby at the right, a pair of broken columns rises between them, and lightning cracks over the town beyond. No one has convincingly explained what binds them, and that may be the point: Giorgione seems to paint mood and weather rather than a story, letting the charged Venetian light and the gathering storm carry the picture. It is among the first paintings in which the landscape all but swallows the figures. Giorgione died young in a plague, leaving very few certain works.