Kabdebo knows well the source-based traditional method of art historians since he head studied this subject in Rome in his youth. He knows the importance of documents all the more since he had one of the most traditional jobs in Europe, as a librarian. However, in his book, Tracking Giorgione there are some other, fictitious documents, due to the fact that the author became a writer during the decades he has spent in Britain, South America and Ireland. In his earlier novels he has often mixed art and cultural history with the personal histories of his figures (The Handmaiden of Rome, Budapest 2006).
Does it mean that his present book is a fictional investigation? Not at all. He was searching the story of Giorgione as a writer, looking for his works, including those of uncertain attributions, the documents about him, and the legends around him, visiting the places where the painter stayed, and worked once. During the time of search he met several people, professionals, antiquarians and private owners of paintings, among them descendants of one-time noble families. These events caused different metamorphoses in his mind, and in the world.
A metamorphosis of a librarian or a scientist is unimaginable in modern European sciences. Although, during our researches we often consider a change in our mind, but it is only literature which permits the authors to accomplish it. Thomas Kabdebo wrote his book as a personal story of his search but instead of himself, the narrator became an Italian-born young man. On the other hand, this British student's name Barbatella is nearly identical with the painter's, Giorgio Barbarella from Castelfranco. The author's double metamorphosis is accomplished in his mysterious allusion to the sweetheart of Giorgione, and a possible descendant.
His other figures are also transitory characters mixed from the author's friends, and acquaintances, and the real and imagined personalities of Giorgione's own world.
The first important suggestion of the author by these metamorphoses is that the past survives in human beings and humanities (in Europe) in our relations, knowledge and sentiments. I mentioned Europe not only because many European nations are represented in the characters of the book, as a result of the “liberated Europe”, but because, in accordance with the author's view: Europe is a cultural community. It depends on us, readers, if this feeling should be fictional or the basis of our existence.
Regarding the fictitious character of this book of cultural history, may I mention another contemporary novel, Pierre Assouline's bestseller Le portrait (Gallimard, 2007) just to strengthen my earlier impression. A portrait by Ingres, an eyewitness of the history of its owner's family, the Rotschilds, tell us the one and a half century long history of Europe in the novel of the French author. Its position seems to be the only standard in the very checkered history. What about the art of Giorgione?
In another book of the author, Danubius Danubia he held together the history of politics and individuals, past and present by placing human history in and around nature. Beside culture, nature is the home of human beings in the author's mind. Is it not one of the main Renaissance ideas? Is it not the key of the oeuvre of Giorgione? From this view-point of the author: the painting Tempesta (Storm, see on the cover) represents nature as reality, and figures as real or mythical elements. Both could live together in the human mind as in nature. This second statement of the book is not less important.
The main goal of researches in the book is to find those paintings of Giorgione in which Isabella d'Este was interested in 1510, at the time of the death of the painter. We, readers, become participants in the search which could have happened also in the early 16^th century, due to the above-mentioned complexity of the figures, and the perfectness of the fake documents created by our author. The readers can visit the birthplaces of Giorgione's paintings, the places where they are today, meet the owners whose characters are almost as interesting as the objects themselves. Visiting Genova, Milan, Mantova, Ferrara, London, Prague, Castelfranco and Rome we finally arrive to Dublin where the author placed the missing picture in the National Gallery but – as it necessary in a fiction – it could not be found there anymore, and where even the old catalogue which could have recorded it, is missing today.
In the meantime a prayer book called “Book of Hours” has been discovered and attributed to Giorgione or one of his contemporaries. The presentation of that fictional art object and its owner is as interesting as the real excursion in the book.
This way the author's phantasy reaches not only the otherwise still uncertain oeuvre of Giorgione, to the pleasure of all, but it also touches a piece of local history of Ireland, and its famous collections. Last but not least his searching figures discover their own existence and reality. Let me finish this presentation with a personal memory.
I went through an exceptional art experience at a moment when I caught sight of a painting of Giorgione, the Venus in a museum of, at that time, East German Dresden, which the Hungarians could visit during the age of the iron curtain. Later I became an art historian, dealing mostly with modern Hungarian art, and its connections with Europe. In the meantime I have met an Irish family living in Budapest, the Egans, relatives of a partly Hungarian – partly Indian woman painter of the early 20^th century, the subject of a monography of mine. Just as a justification of the cultural community of the world, I mention an Irish member of possibly the same family, Patricia Egan, who published an important study on another Giorgione painting, which I have visited in Paris, the Concerto. Of course, like in other cases of Giorgione's work, the label in the Louvre attributes this painting to Tiziano.
If I were a novelist, I am sure, I should write “original” letters and documents to verify the authenticity of that extremely attractive painting, following the method of Thomas Kabdebo, as I am sure that it was painted by Giorgione, master of Tiziano, and pupil of Giovanni Bellini in Venice, at the beginning of the 16^th century. In conclusion I'd like to say that, in my opinion, dream is as important in a novel as reality. Writers have free dreams, just like the author of Tracking Giorgione. I quote his dream from the end of his novel on Giorgione:
“Then a tall man came along, lute in his hand. He wore a doublet with a wide lace collar and a soft round hat. A pair of pantyhose on his legs, one red velvet, the other blue. He had a multicoloured feather in his cap, a bag on his left shoulder. He had yellow chamois leather boots on his feet. He did not see me. He settled in the shade of an oak tree, took out a folding card and a set of brushes from his shoulder bag. The sea was swinging and rocking driftwood. The painter fished out a flat piece – perhaps it was a plank of pine wood – and dried it with his breath. But there was no paint about, not even a cuttlefish to provide him with ink. I squirmed. Slowly approached him. Coughed. Spluttered. Cut my finger on the blade of a sharp seaweed. He had red paint now, from me. The contact has been established between Barbatella and Barbarella.”