Repeat prescription

Walter Sickert was once shown a room full of paintings by a proud collector, who had purchased them on the understanding that they were authentic Sickerts. The painter took one look around, then announced genially, none of these are mine, ‘But none the worse for that!’ Were Giorgione to return to life, and take a stroll around the Sackler Galleries at the Royal Academy, he might echo those words.

Few of the works on show, in all probability, were actually executed by Giorgione, but they are none the less magnificent for that. This is — wisely — not an exhibition that attempts to reassemble the artistic personality of that enigmatic figure (there have been quite a few of those over the years). It is concerned with a moment, one of the most fascinating in Western art.

Multiple influences came together in Venice in the first decade of the 16th century — those of Leonardo and Albrecht Dürer, both of whom briefly passed through La Serenissima, of classical antiquity and of the local maestro Giovanni Bellini. Out of this came a novel way of working — at once more softly and more boldly — in oil paint, often on canvas. Here, more than in Rome, Bruges or Florence, began the grand European tradition that runs from Rembrandt and Velázquez through to Manet and Freud. Portraiture, landscape and the female nude started to become dominant subjects. In the exhibition, three rooms are devoted more or less to portraits, and one to landscape (though always populated by a few figures). And in the middle of it all, somewhere, was Giorgione.

The curators have put together an exhibition that is so rich it’s worth visiting not just once, but returning to several times. Among the attractions is a series of masterpieces by the young Titian, who dominates the long gallery assigned to religious paintings with three big, confident works painted around 1510.