listen to part of a lecture in an art history class to prepare for today\'s class, I asked you to look at a painting from Italy called The Tempest. Sometimes it\'s called the storm. That\'s the same thing. It was painted in the city of Venice early in the 1500s so it\'s an example of Italian art from the Renaissance. A definition, please. The Renaissance is the period from about the 14th through the 16th centuries when the culture of Europe underwent a lot of changes. So a period of transformation. Okay, so what\'s this painting The Tempest all about? Do you think it just shows some people in a landscape with lots of rocks and trees, and behind them is a river with a bridge across it, and some stone buildings and Blue Storm clouds rolling all over the sky with flashes of lightning, the oncoming storm and the light, you know how the light outside changes when a storm is coming. That\'s how it looks in the painting. Okay, now let\'s compare this with the other paintings from the Renaissance that you\'ve seen already. What are the typical subjects of those paintings? Portraits of famous people, religious images, a commemoration of an important event, yes, but this painting doesn\'t clearly refer to anything outside of itself. It seems to have come straight out of the artist\'s mind. This artist was called Giorgione. He\'s known by just the one name. Giorgione is a somewhat enigmatic figure. His artistic career was brief, only about 15 years, and we have practically no biographical information about him. What we do know is that he was an innovator who had a powerful influence over both his contemporaries and over future generations of painters. You can see this revolutionary quality and the tempest in a number of ways. First of all, it\'s one of the earliest paintings in Western art to feature a landscape in such a prominent way, giving nature a starring role, so to speak. Giorgione\'s aim seems to be to evoke a certain kind of mood, something poetic and dreamlike. In later eras, views of the wilderness or the countryside became a popular subject for Western artists. Coupled with that is the display of independence we just noted the freedom to make up a scene and to put in anything you want. That freedom has been claimed by many artists ever since right down to the present. In fact, you can\'t imagine modern art without it. Gagnon, then there\'s artistic technique. Giorgione was one of the first artists in Venice to use oil paints. Oil paints are pigments coloring substances such as powdered minerals that are suspended in oil. Depending on how you apply the paint, how many layers, the direction of the brush strokes and so forth, you can create wonderful effects by controlling the way the light bounces off the pigments. So that\'s why the tempest has that look, that feeling like a storm is coming. Yes, Giorgione eally knows how to create a sense of drama with his paints, and that technique was copied by other Venetian artists. So much, in fact, that art historians have often had difficulty knowing whether a particular work was done by Giorgione or by someone else, or by both of them working collaboratively Didn\'t he sign his work? Unfortunately, no. Not only that, but many of his paintings were made to decorate the homes of individual clients in Venice Renaissance painters got commissions to make public artwork, say a mural in the city hall that usually resulted in a dated, signed contract for these private paintings of giorgiones. There\'s no such documentation. In fact, as I said, we know practically nothing about his life other than where he was born and where he did his art training, we finally did discover one more fact about him recently, but even so, it was entirely by accident. A librarian in the rare books department of a university library was examining a 500-year-old book in its collection, and on the very last page, she noticed a sketch of a mother and child, there was an inscription indicating that it had been done by Giorgione and noting the date of his death, which we didn\'t know before. Now, isn\'t that something? Who knows what other surprises are waiting in obscure places like this?