"Il ‘fuoco giorgionesco’ da Angelo Conti a d’Annunzio"

The friendship between Gabriele d’Annunzio and Angelo Conti is particularly intense in the years 1894-1900, in the context of Venice. Both of them reflect about Venetian painters and especially Giorgione, whose picture they interpret as an expression of Venetian magnificent life. I analyze the meaning of the form fuoco giorgionesco, also used by Walter Pater in his well-known essay The School of Giorgione. I examine in particular Conti’s references to this text, in order to verify their accuracy. I put forward the hypothesis that, when Conti wrote the monograph Giorgione, his knowledge of the English author was incomplete and came largely from articles published in magazines, from conversations with friends, and from the translation into Italian of only short extracts. I argue that it was unlikely that Conti (and d’Annunzio) had read Pater’s whole work in English, which at the time was little known in Italy.