Painted in collaboration with the Garofalo, the works of Dossi from Ferrara include, above all, the celebrated Circe or Melissa in the Borghese Gallery in Rome, which, through its superb fusion of plastic and chromatic compositional values, stands among the most evocative images of our Romantic, or even pre-Surrealist, Cinquecento. There is also a so-called minor production by D., in which the transfigurations of flora and atmosphere and the phosphorescent touch of the brush, operating in almost Impressionist freedom of synthesis, bring the master of the Po Valley very close to modern taste (it will suffice to cite the so-called Departure of the Argonauts, formerly in the Contini Bonacossi collection in Florence and now in the gallery in Washington). Despite formal lapses and heavy chiaroscuro effects, D. represents the dominant artistic personality of the entire Emilia-Romagna region in the 16th century, after Correggio and Parmigianino. From his school emerged, besides his younger brother Battista (q.v.), almost all the finest masters of late Ferrarese Cinquecento.
BATTISTA. — Only the date of his death is known: 1548. He actively assisted his elder brother, replicating his forms and chromatic harmonies with often mediocre results and accentuating, through direct contact, the heavy, bituminous impastos. Yet certain of his landscape motifs in the frescoes at the Imperiale near Pesaro, the panel of the Madonna in Majesty in the Town Hall of Portomaggiore (Ferrara), the Virgin and the Confraternity of the Snow in the Estense Gallery in Modena, and the Martyrdom of St Stephen, formerly in Berlin in the possession of Dr. Gottschewski, attest to a modest, if genuine, inventive capacity. — See pl. CXIX.