Dosso Dossi: Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara

by Peter Humfrey, Mauro Lucco, Andrea Rothe (Contributor)

Imagination, sensual delight, a sharp wit—these qualities were enormously prized in sixteenth-century Ferrara, where one of the most cultured and powerful courts of the High Renaissance held sway. Dosso Dossi was the idiosyncratic, brilliant painter most responsible for turning those values into a glorious artistic reality. Dosso's rich color schemes are akin to those of his fellow North Italian Titian; he learned something about innovative composition from Raphael and about the force of the body from Michelangelo, but his paintings have a very individual appeal. In leafy natural surroundings containing an array of animals and heavenly bodies, events unfold that are often enigmatic, enacted by characters whose interrelationships elude definition. Dosso's painted world shares the spirit of contemporaneous epic poetry - such as Ariosto's Orlando Furioso - imbued as it is with mystery and transformation, energy and invention.

Along with his predecessor Giorgione, Dosso was one of the first painters to improvise on the canvas. Rather than following careful preparatory drawings, he composed and recomposed as he painted - a remarkably free process that is clearly revealed in new x-ray and infrared photographs. Dosso's virtuosic painting performance was thus itself a kind of magical invention. The play of his imagination is evident not only in the many pictures representing mythological or literary subjects but also in his religious paintings, which are lyrical and original, filled with spectacular visual effects and touches of humor.

When Ferrara's fortunes changed, at the end of the sixteenth century, most of Dosso's paintings were taken to Rome and ultimately dispersed. For this exhibition, almost all the surviving paintings have been brought together; in the catalogue entries each one receives a fresh and comprehensive scholarly discussion. The catalogue also contains essays that describe Dosso's artistic career and the highly charged world of the court at Ferrara and that probe the visual poetry and subtle wit of his work. The illuminating results of an extensive campaign of technical examination, undertaken in connection with the exhibition, are discussed and illustrated in additional essays and in observations that accompany the catalogue entries throughout. The book includes a full review of the scholarly literature, color reproductions of the paintings, many comparative illustrations, a chronology, and a complete bibliography.  [This book was originally published in 1998 and has gone out of print. This edition is a print-on-demand version of the original book.]

Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press

Genres: Art

328 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1998

Reviews

[Monica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Peter Humphrey works for one of my favorite professors, Graham Smith. Goodreaders in Scotland, if you can catch one of Smith's lectures at St. Andrews, you will not be sorry. Dossi was a genius at landscape painting. Aside from nativities, madonnas with children and saints, he painted allegories, of which a few of my favorites are: "Circe," Jupiter, Mercury, and Virtue," "Allegory with Pan," "Circe and Her Lovers in a Landscape" and the "Allegory of Music." Dosso, also a musician, created several paintings with musical themes. One shows "Vulcan and Venus at a forge signifying the invention of music." In the "Allegory of Music," a hammer on the seat and ground are "inscribed VIII and XII...a reference to the orderly sequence of sounds made by hammers of differing sizes," and the description continues: "Pythagoras supposedly came to understand the foundations of musical theory by listening to the sounds made by blacksmiths at work....two women symbolize the beauty of music; the canons inscribed on the tablets are Franco-Flemish in style and exhibit the sophisticated virtuosity that characterized vocal music at the Ferrarese court." The catalog goes on to say that the "circular piece of music is close in style to that of Adrian Willaert, who held a court appointment in Ferarra beginning 1515." There are also extremely beautiful friezes Dosso painted for Alphonso's ''camerino" depicting stories of Aneas, Mars and Venus which were bought by a Borghese Cardinal and have been dispersed as far away as Ottowa. Like I said, they are extremely beautiful. Tucked away in my book I found some small mementos: "Strange Beauty: A Century of Mannerism 1520-1620" at Richard L. Feigen & Co. on 68th Street, the NYTimes listing for the show, a flyer listing four lectures given at the Uris Center and Grace Rainey Rogers Auditoriums, and, last but not least, a card from the Gramercy Tavern.