"Fabulous and illusive": Giorgione and Henry James's "The Aspern Papers" (1888)

Abstract

This essay suggests that Henry James's "The Aspern Papers" (1888) is obliquely conscious of the history of Giorgione, whose fading frescoes on the Fondaco dei' Tedeschi at Venice emblematized for nineteenth-century critics the mysteriously lost biography of a great artist. Goiorgione's achievement had been most prominently discussed before James's tale in Pater's "The School of Giorgione" (1877), which produced a model of artistic identity that was both shadowy and celebrated . Pater was partly referring to himself, but his formulation of a more general notion of mysterious fame haunted the complex transactions of James's tale. Considering the history of Giorgione in "The Aspern Papers" focuses critical attention away from the well-recognized issue of the dangerous invasions of biography towards its investment in a concept of artistic identity that remains both fêted and secret.