An Idyll: A Mother and a Halberdier in a Wooded Landscape

This painting is informed by the bucolic poetry of such classical sources as Virgil’s Georgics and Eclogues, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The subject of printed, painted, and drawn images, landscapes of shaded groves, musicians, shepherds, and languid nymphs were a quintessentially Venetian genre in the early sixteenth century. The most celebrated, and perhaps most enigmatic, of these is Giorgione’s Tempest, which shows the same configuration of a seated woman and a standing figure found here. The purpose, subject, and meaning of these evocative paintings is still unclear, leading some scholars to argue that they inaugurated a new genre of landscape painting, one based on secular rather than sacred sources.