Giorgione, Dante and the Sydney Incunable

Jaynie Anderson, John Gagne

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English

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRES
01 January 2026

History of Art & Design Styles; Literature, Poetry & Criticism

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.

By: Jaynie Anderson, John Gagne
Imprint: MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRES
Country of Publication: Australia
Dimensions: Height: 250mm, Width: 190mm,
ISBN: 9780522881844
ISBN 10: 052288184X
Pages: 208
Publication Date: 01 January 2026
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Jaynie Anderson is professor emeritus in art history at the University of Melbourne. In 1970 she was the first female Rhodes Fellow at Oxford, where she lectured until 1991. She was Herald Chair of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne from 1997 to 2014, and from 2008 to 2012 was president of the International Committee for Art History. In 2015 she received a knighthood from the President of the Republic of Italy for her distinguished research on Venetian Renaissance art. John Gagné is Cassamarca Associate Professor of History at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Milan Undone: Contested Sovereignties in the Italian Wars (Harvard University Press, 2021), co-editor with Stephen Bowd and Sarah Cockram of Shadow Agents of Renaissance War: Suffering, Supporting, and Supplying Conflict in Italy and Beyond (Amsterdam University Press, 2023), and co-author with Timothy McCall of Fabric of War: The Material Culture and Social Lives of Banners in Renaissance Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2025). His research has appeared in Renaissance Quarterly, Sixteenth Century Journal, Art History, and I Tatti Studies in the Renaissance.