ALCOBA GIORGIONE
"NO-SMOKING" ROOM

This bedchamber was originally the girls’ bedroom, and has a queen bed and a desk.

Like all “Estrella de Belem” bedchambers, it has insulated windows, radiant heat floors, air conditioning,  an LCD television, high-speed internet access, electronic safe and direct-dial telephone.  The furniture is French country style and is made of alder, a tree from the British Isles that the Celts and Scots believed was sacred.



The oil painting that decorates the room is a copy of “The Adoration of the Shepherds” by Giorgione, which is believed to have been painted prior to 1506.    Giorgione was familiar with the works of Leonardo and his influence can be noted in this work, particularly in the atmospheric sensation created in the landscape and the integration of the figures. 



Giorgio da Caltelfranco, known as Giorgione, was a Venetian painter whose life and works are both mysterious.  He was born in 1479 and died in 1510, probably because of the plague.  Almost nothing is known of his life and only a handful of paintings can be definitively attributed to him, but he holds a momentous place in the history of art. He had achieved legendary status soon after his early death and through the centuries he has continued to excite the imagination in a way that few other painters can match. The extraordinary discrepancy between his enormous fame and the small  amount of works is explained by the fact that he initiated a new conception of painting. He was one of the earliest artists to specialize in cabinet pictures for private collectors rather than works for public or ecclesiastical patrons, and he was the first painter who gave more importance to evoking a mood than to subject matter.  It is clear that his contemporaries sometimes did not know what was represented in his pictures.