The Three Philosophers  

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The Three Philosophers is an oil painting on canvas attributed to the Italian High Renaissance artist Giorgione. The work was commissioned by the Venetian noble Taddeo Contarini, a Venetian merchant with an interest for occult and alchemy.

The Three Philosophers was finished around 1509, one year before the painter died. One of Giorgione’s last paintings, it is now displayed at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. It shows three philosophers — one young, one middle-aged, and one old.

The current name of the work derives from a writing of Marcantonio Michiel, who saw it in a Venetian villa. The three figures portrayed are allegorical: an old bearded man, an Arab, and a sitting young man, enclosed within a natural landscape. In the background is a village with some mountains, the latter marked by a blue area whose meaning is unknown. The young man is observing a cave on the left of the scene, and apparently measuring it with some instruments.

The general meaning of the work has not been clearly defined by scholars. According to a famous interpretation, the three men would not be the three Magi facing Jesus' grotto, but they would represent the three stages of human thought: the Renaissance (the young man), the Muslim expansion age (the man wearing a turban) and the Middle Ages (the old man). Other hypotheses connect it to astrological and alchemical theories, one of the philosophers being Contarini, a scholar of those matters.




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "The Three Philosophers" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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