Thronende Madonna mit den Heiligen Liberale und Franziskus (nach Giorgione) (Pala di Castelfranco)

August Wolf's 1876 copy of the Castelfranco Madonna — Giorgione's masterpiece altarpiece in Castelfranco Veneto — reproduces one of the most enigmatic and celebrated paintings of the Early Venetian Renaissance. Giorgione's original, the only altarpiece definitively attributed to him, shows the enthroned Madonna with Saints Liberalis and Francis in a landscape setting of haunting poetic beauty. The sacra conversazione format is given by Giorgione a spatial and emotional depth that anticipates later Venetian painting. Wolf's copy made this relatively inaccessible provincial altarpiece available to the Munich public.

Wolf reproduces Giorgione's distinctive qualities — the soft, atmospheric modeling, the mysterious landscape background, the warm, poetic color — with careful attention to the compositional geometry that gives the original its sense of serene, slightly melancholy grandeur.