DOSSO. - GIOVANNI DOSSI, known as D., son of the Trentino Nicola dei Luteri, born at Ferrara probably after 1480, died there in 1542.
The first certain record of his activity as a painter, at Mantua, dates from 1512. A pupil of Lorenzo Costa, he scarcely reveals his stylistic descent from him in the Circe (formerly in the Benson collection, London, and now in the National Gallery of Washington); yet in this composition, alongside a relish for analytical Flemish naturalism, the influence of Giorgione is already perceptible. It becomes more marked in the canvas Nymph and Satyr (Pitti Gallery, Florence), while in the Jester (Estense Gallery, Modena) there appears his uninhibited spirit of psychological introspection, which seems to anticipate Velasquez. Having become the official painter of Alfonso I d’Este, he executed at Ferrara, until his death, a vast quantity of mural decorations (all destroyed, whereas those painted in the Castello del Buon Consiglio at Trento and in the Villa dell’Imperiale near Pesaro are preserved), as well as easel paintings, which often document, with ardent pictorial energy and at times not without sardonic harshness, the customs of life at the Este court (see the rhomboid pictures with allegorical scenes in the Modena gallery, the Bacchanal, in the manner of Titian, in Castel Sant’Angelo, Rome, and the late Genre Scene or Witchcraft in the Pitti Gallery). In his full maturity, to his assimilation of Titian’s pictorial manner and to his figurative exchanges with his fellow citizen Garofalo, D. added the imitation of Raffaello, as is chiefly attested by the St. Michael in the Dresden Gallery, and he fostered incipient Mannerism. Fully expressive of his independent talent and of his palette, fond of emerald greens, fiery reds, and glints of steel and gold, remain such works as the St. Sebastian, the Baptist, and the St. George in the Brera Picture Gallery in Milan; the Sleeping Antiope in the collection of the Marquess of Northampton; the Madonna with SS. Michael and George in the Modena Gallery; the majestic polyptych in the Ferrara Picture Gallery, painted in collaboration with Garofalo; and above all the celebrated Circe or Melissa in the Borghese Gallery in Rome, which, through its superb fusion of compositional, plastic, and chromatic values, ranks among the most evocative images of our Romantic, or surrealist before its time, sixteenth century. 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 perfect freedom of almost Impressionistic synthesis, bring the master from the Po valley very close to modern taste (it will suffice to mention the so-called Departure of the Argonauts, formerly in the Contini Bonacossi collection in Florence and now in the Washington Gallery). Despite formal inaccuracies and heavy chiaroscuro effects, D. represents the dominant artistic personality of the entire Emilia-Romagna region in the sixteenth century, after Correggio and Parmigianino. From his school emerged, besides his younger brother Battista (v. sotto), almost all the finest masters of late sixteenth-century Ferrara.
BATTISTA. — The only date known is that of his death: 1548. He actively assisted his elder brother, reproducing his forms and coloristic harmonies with often mediocre results and, through his direct contacts with the Roman milieu, accentuating his heavy, bituminous paint mixtures. Nevertheless, certain of his landscape motifs in the frescoes of the Imperiale, near Pesaro; the altarpiece of the Madonna in Trono, in the Town Hall of Portomaggiore (Ferrara); the Vergine e i confratelli della Neve, in the Estense Gallery in Modena; and the Martirio di s. Stefano, formerly in Berlin, now with Dr. Gottschewski, attest to a modest, though genuine, inventive capacity. — Vedi tav. CXIX.