Entre l’Éden et l’Arcadie. À propos d’une source visuelle possible de la Tempête de Giorgione

This essay discusses Hans Belting’s and Bernard Aikema’s recent studies on Giorgione’s Tempesta. The authors connect this enigmatic masterpiece with Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia, the Renaissance notion of a Golden Age and the debate on the origins of humanity, common in North European humanistic culture. Furthermore, it analyzes an illumination by Jean Bourdichon which seems to confirm the evocative link between Giorgione’s Tempesta and the nordic iconography of the Wild Man and his family, a symbol of an utopic escape from the corrupt social system, like the melancholic exile of poets-shepherds in Sannazaro’s Arcadia.