A group of nine Giorgione paintings have been examined with new scientific techniques reveal much about how the artist worked. “What has become clear with the infra-red discoveries is that Giorgione was a radical modernist when he drew. Giorgione doodled as he worked out compositions, just like 20th-century artists. But why did Giorgione, ‘the modernist’, paint such free and fanciful images only to delete them or adapt them into more restrained ones?