Show explores Giorgione

(ANSA) - Venice, June 5 - A show highlighting the majesty of 15th-century art and dress through textiles as symbols of power will go on display at the Casa del Giorgione Museum in Castelfranco Veneto beginning October 27.
    The museum dedicated to the Venetian painter will showcase fabrics such as velvet, satin, silk, as well as brocades and symbolic objects representing the world as seen through the artist's political and allegorical renderings.
    The show's itinerary culminates in a visit to the city's Duomo cathedral, which houses the famed 1504 Giorgione panel titled "Madonna and Child Between St. Francis and St. Nicasius", commonly known as the Castelfranco Madonna.
    The exhibition, titled "The Storylines of Giorgione", is sponsored by the City of Castelfranco Veneto with the support of the Italian Culture Ministry (MiBAC) and the Veneto Museum System Association, and is curated by Danila Dal Pos.
    The show examines two historical tracks - art and textiles - to follow the evolution of Italian and European dress across two centuries, from 1500 to 1700.
    Allegory is an important key to the show, starting with the Castelfranco Madonna, which is both a devotional artwork as well as a political one, given the rich fabrics used to dress the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus in the painting and the surrounding saints.
    Dal Pos said in that painting, nothing is "only" what it seems, beginning with the five different textiles that Giorgione represents in a stunningly lifelike way. She said the aim of the painting was to send a precise message to reassure the Venetian Senate that the painting's commissioner, the nobleman Tuzio Costanzo (whose father was the vice king of the island of Cyprus), planned to permanently settle with his assets in Castelfranco and not Cyprus.
    Giorgione therefore created a painting for private devotion, with a chess-board floor opening onto a landscape, a red velvet curtain draped behind St. Nicasius and St. Francis and separating them from the outdoors behind.
    Other artists in the exhibition include Lotto, Titian, Jacopo Bassano, Paolo Veronese and many other painters of the time, along with textiles in the form of original period dresses, bodices, gloves and purses on loan from Venice's Mocenigo Palace.