Dosso Dossi Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara

by Peter Humfrey, Mauro Lucco

Hard cover with dust jacket, kept in mylar cover. Beautiful over sized art book 222 pages full color plates, covers all of Dossi's fresco murals and paintings. Kept in mylar cover

Genres: Art

328 pages, Hardcover

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.