Word: dosso
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Dosso's job was hardly simple. A 16th century court painter was expected to turn out anything and everything, from ceremonial portraits to painted coach panels, from large allegorical paintings to banners for tourneys, costumes for masques, sets for the theater (which Alfonso delighted in) and perhaps the occasional crucifix or emblem of chastity for the ducal mistress's bedroom. Dosso had to second-guess the veering tastes of his boss--flatter him, keep him interested. And then there were the courtiers to deal with...
...then pass the ideas on to Perugino, one of her court artists, with instructions not to invent anything of his own. Something of this kind may have happened at Alfonso's court, whose star poet was none other than Ludovico Ariosto, author of the enormously successful epic Orlando Furioso. Dosso did some paintings that were illustrations of episodes from Ariosto, and is known to have designed sets--long since vanished--for Ariosto's plays...
...hothouse atmosphere of the Este court shows in Dosso's major works: they tend to be playful, elaborately poetic and almost impossible to connect to the usual literary sources, as though they were suggested by highly sophisticated people dreaming up ever more obscure secular concetti. In a word, the paintings are totally mannerist; even today scholars don't agree on what they're actually about. Their oddity is deepened by the fact that Dosso made them up as he went along, adding figures and painting them out as the whim took him, rather than sticking to a preset program...
Thus we still don't know, and perhaps never will, what is going on in Dosso's Allegory with Pan, circa 1529-32. Maybe the lascivious goat god (if it really is Pan, and not just an ordinary faun) is lusting after the beautiful Titianesque nymph asleep on the ground--who has been variously argued to be Antiope, Pomona, Echo, Canens and Syrinx, among other nymphs with literary pedigrees. But who is the old woman, and what is she doing? If her outstretched palms are protecting the girl, she's facing the wrong direction--away from...
...Titians ever gave posterity that kind of trouble, but another Venetian painter always has--Giorgione, creator of the lyrical and utterly mysterious The Tempest. Dosso's work appealed to tastes fostered by Giorgione. And Giorgione certainly influenced Dosso, particularly in his treatment of landscape. From him Dosso learned how to unify his figures and the details of landscape around them--lush, wild, tinged with ominousness--in a comprehensive atmosphere instead of going from one sharp detail to another; and the weather effects of Dosso's paintings--storms, lightning bolts, sunsets, blue distances--are Giorgionesque...