Giorgione, Dante and the Sydney Incunable

While preparing for an event at the University of Sydney in 2017, a librarian turned to the back page of the library’s 1497 copy of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy and made a curious discovery. In red chalk was a drawing of a woman and baby, and an inscription in Italian: "On the day of 17th September, Giorgione of Castelfranco, a very excellent artist, died of the plague in Venice at the age of 36 and he rests in peace.

This discovery would shine the international art history spotlight on Sydney and begin a project that has seen state-of-the-art imaging techniques used alongside good old-fashioned archival research in a quest for answers. Was the drawing on the endpaper actually by Giorgione? Was Dante his inspiration? Do we have for the first time the dates of Giorgione’s birth and death? How should we reimagine Giorgione’s chronology? And how did the early edition of Divine Comedy end up in Sydney?

Bringing together scholars from art history, Italian studies, librarianship and book history from Sydney to the Vatican, Giorgione, Dante and the Sydney Incunable tells the story of the provenance and significance of this remarkable discovery.