Dosso

DOSSO. - GIOVANNI DOSSI, called D., son of Nicola dei Luteri of Trentino, born in 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 barely reveals his stylistic descent from him in the Circe (formerly in the Benson collection, in London, and now in the National Gallery of Washington), but in this composition there is already perceptible, alongside the satisfactions of an analytic Flemish naturalism, the influence of Giorgione. This becomes more noticeable in the canvas Nymph and Satyr (Pitti Gallery, Florence), while in the Jester (Estense Gallery, Modena) his unscrupulous spirit of psychological introspection manifests itself, seeming to anticipate Velázquez. Having become the official painter of Alfonso I d'Este, he executed at Ferrara, until his death, a vast quantity of wall decorations (all destroyed, while those painted in the castle of Buon Consiglio, at Trent, and in the villa of the Imperiale near Pesaro survive), and of easel works, which often document, with fervent vivid energy, and at times not without sardonic harshness, the customs of courtly life under the Este (see the rhomboidal paintings, with allegorical scenes, in the Modena gallery, the Bacchanal, of Titianesque taste, in Castel Sant'Angelo, in Rome, the late Bambocciata or Witchcraft of the Pitti gallery). In full maturity, to the assimilation of Titianesque pictorial taste and to the figurative exchanges with his fellow citizen Garofalo, D. added the imitation of Raphael, as chiefly attested by the St. Michael of the Dresden gallery, and gave encouragement to incipient Mannerism. Works such 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 Marquis of Northampton, the Madonna with Sts. Michael and George in the Modena gallery, the majestic polyptych in the picture gallery of Ferrara, painted in collaboration with Garofalo, and above all the celebrated Circe or Melissa of the Borghese gallery in Rome, remain fully expressive of his independent talent and of his palette, fond of emerald greens, fiery reds, and steel and gold gleams; the latter work ranks, through the stupendous fusion of plastic and chromatic compositional values, among the most suggestive images of our romantic, or avant la lettre surrealist, Cinquecento. There is, moreover, a so-called minor production of D. in which the transfigurations of flora and atmosphere and the phosphoric touch of his brush, operating in perfect freedom of almost impressionist synthesis, make the Po Valley master very close to modern taste (and 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). D., in spite of formal incorrectnesses and heavy chiaroscuro effects, represents the dominant artistic personality of the entire Emilian-Romagnan region in the 16th century, after Correggio and Parmigianino. From his school came, besides his younger brother Battista (v. below), almost all the best masters of the late Ferrarese Cinquecento.

BATTISTA

Only the date of his death is known: 1548. He actively assisted his elder brother, replicating his forms and color harmonies with often mediocre results and, through his direct contacts with the Roman milieu, accentuating their heavy, bituminous impasti. 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 Virgin and the Confratelli della Neve, in the Galleria Estense in Modena, and the Martyrdom of St. Stephen, formerly in Berlin, in the collection of Dr. Gottschewski, attest to a modest inventive capacity. - See plate CXIX.

Alberto Neppi