Dosso Dossi: Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara

by Peter Humfrey, Mauro Lucco

The court of Ferrara was a leading centre of Renaissance art in the 16th century, and Dosso Dossi was its greatest and most idiosyncratic painter. Published to accompany a 1999 US exhibition of Dosso's work, this book examines nearly all his surviving paintings - mythological, literary and religious. While Dosso learned much from his contemporaries Titian, Raphael and Michelangelo, he developed a unique style marked by imagination, sensual delight and sharp wit. Each painting is reproduced and discussed in detail, and essays probe the artist's career and the visual poetry of his works, and present documentary information as well as technical analyses of his innovative working methods.

Genres: Art

312 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.