The Magic Greenwood Of Dosso Dossi

Contemporary Review, Sept, 1999 by Donald Bruce

The introductory studies, such as Humfrey's account of Dosso's admittedly uneventful life, have the virtues and faults of laborious research. Thoroughness can be called a failing only when it lacks style and felicity. These studies, reliable and scholarly though they are, are neither well-constructed nor incisive; but the compilers' catalogue of Dosso's paintings, with marginal glosses as well as footnotes, is an erudite source likely to be helpful to some future more lively investigation.

Andrea Bayer's article on the Estense court rescues Alfonso from his reputation as a warlord who trifled with minor crafts and built up his gallery merely in emulation of his sister Isabella's collection at Mantua. Bayer does not add that Alfonso treated his painters better than did his uncle Borso, who paid Cossa for his frescoes by the square foot and the expense of the colours he used; but she relates a charming anecdote about how Alfonso climbed the scaffolding of the Sistine Chapel to beg Michelangelo for an easel painting which, sadly, he never received. Yet Alfonso melted down part of Michelangelo's bronze of Pope Julius II, whom Alfonso detested, and used the metal to cast a cannon named the Guilia. Bayer's detailed description (with a ground plan) of Alfonso's state rooms provides a symbol for a Renaissance seignoriality. To house his study (decorated by Dosso with scenes from the Aeneid) and its ante-chambers, he built a bridge over the market-place between his palace and the old fortress, in the dungeons of which his rebellious brother Guilio, who had debauched (or been debauched by) his sister-in-law Angela Borgia and attempted to depose Alfonso, spent fifty-two years: urbanity and learning founded on the produce of the people, and always ready for war and coercion.

The technical observations by Andrea Rothe are revealing. She explains how Dosso's vibrating light is produced by long strokes with a lightly loaded brush, through which the underlying pigment glimmers. Her scrutiny of the underpaintings, now exposed by radiography, helps to decode some works by Dosso so cryptic that earlier commentators, in their perplexity, called them allegories without explaining what they are allegories of; in particular the Borghese Circe. Although Dosso's final versions of his pictures must be respected as what he wanted one to see, their embryology is curious and often elucidatory, although in one work it presents a dilemma. The so-called Allegory of Pan in the Getty Collection, Los Angeles, fails to honour Dosso's ultimate intention, although one would be sorry if it did so. A figure he painted out, a sweet-faced huntress-nymph whose loss one would regret, was restored in the nineteenth century. After eliminating the nymph he added, on the other side of the picture, the woodgod Pan, whose face remarkably resembles that of Alfonso d'Este in his guise of Neptune in Bellini's Feast of the Gods.

The excision and the addition make a mystery of what was before only a puzzle. The Getty picture is one of two related works by Dosso. The other goes under the timid nomenclature of A Mythological Allegory in the Borghese Gallery. The central figure in both canvases is a young pregnant nude attended by an old woman, presumably a midwife. In the Borghese version a maiden in classical dress stands alongside and points to the sky. A radiograph reveals that Dosso painted over a fourth female rushing towards the others. On this evidence, the traditional title, Diana and Callisto, may be correct. Callisto, violated by Jupiter, is in labour; perhaps menaced by Jupiter's jealous wife, Juno, later obliterated. Diana, who was forced to expel Callisto from her virgin band, although Callisto was her favourite, now heartens her former nymph by indicating that, although Juno will spitefully turn her into a bear, she will escape Juno's persecution to become the constellation Ursa Major. In its original form the Getty picture may have been another version of Diana and Callisto with Pan as a pastoral accessory or, more whimsically, with Pan-Alfonso watching the picture being painted for him.