Word: dosso
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...16th century Italian painter Dosso Dossi (1486?-1542) isn't a big name in America, unlike his contemporaries Titian, Raphael and Michelangelo. In fact, the show of his work that has just opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City--it was shown late last year in his home city of Ferrara, and will go to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in April--is the first retrospective he has ever had. It comes on the 400th anniversary of the dispersal of most of his work, which was taken from Ferrara by papal edict...
Practically nothing is known of Dosso's life, except for a few dates and contracts. But it was protected: he spent almost all of it working for two rulers of Ferrara, first for Alfonso I d'Este and then, after Alfonso's death in 1534, for his son Ercole II. Dosso was not, of course, painting for a wide public. At the court in Ferrara his audience consisted of the duke and his entourage, including whatever humanists, poets and assorted hangers-on happened to be on the payroll. All courts tend to be self-referential and mannered, and that...
...those in the court, some of Dosso's images must have been read as comments on the duke's relaxations. Jupiter, Mercury, and Virtue, circa 1523-24, is Dosso's praise of painting. He translates it to Parnassus, where the god Jupiter sits before a canvas, his administrative thunderbolt laid aside at his feet. Jupiter is painting butterflies--a divine hobbyist. On the right is a figure of Virtue, who has come to complain about the indignities she has had to suffer in the world below. Between them sits Mercury, a finger to his lips, telling her, in effect...
...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...
...drawings and prints. For comparison, there are a further 200 or so works by the Venetian artists who shaped him -- Giorgione, Giovanni Bellini -- and by those who were inspired by him. The latter group, ranging from Veronese, Tintoretto and Jacopo Bassano in Venice to Savoldo in Brescia and Dosso Dossi in Ferrara, is large, since Titian was one of the half a dozen or so most influential painters who ever lived. Among Venetian artists of the cinquecento, only Lorenzo Lotto, that great independent, resisted the pressure of his style...