From the September 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
Nothing is clear-cut about Dosso Dossi’s painting of a naked woman, who may or not be a nymph or a goddess, asleep by a river. As Pierre Curie of the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris explains, perhaps that is precisely the point.
Life in Italy in the early 16th century must have been rather draining. On top of the everyday hardships of early modern life, the Italian peninsula played host to a succession of brutal conflicts, primarily between France and the Holy Roman Empire. The French repeatedly launched invasions of Italian territory, but they weren’t the only ones: in 1527, Habsburg troops from Austria marched into Rome and sacked the city, taking no prisoners.
It’s little surprise, then, that artists from Italy – which was divided into dukedoms and principalities that were also at war with each other – began to spread throughout Europe. Some headed for France: Rosso Fiorentino and Francesco Primaticcio established the School of Fontainebleau near Paris, which sowed the seeds of Northern Mannerism. But many artists, particularly those in more provincial areas, stayed put and weathered the storm.
One such artist was Dosso Dossi (c. 1486–1541/42). Born Giovanni di Niccolò de Lutero in Dosso Scaffa, Mantua, he adopted the name Dosso – artists during the Renaissance often took the name of the village they were born in – though was not known as Dosso Dossi until the 18th century. He was from a good family; his father was a bursar employed by the Duke of Este in Ferrara, which gave Dosso good connections within the House of Este. He received commissions not only from the duke but also from other nobles and the Church. Perhaps it is for this reason that, apart from some trips to Venice and a visit to Florence, the artist is not known to have strayed from the patch of northern Italy between Mantua, Ferrara, Bologna and Modena.
Dosso and his younger brother Battista Dossi (c. 1490– 1548) were members of the School of Ferrara, which drew much inspiration from Venetian painters. Dosso was not widely known outside his small region – his fame did not compare with that of Titian, Veronese or Giorgione – but while he may have been provincial, he was certainly an original artist. If he can be considered an exponent of the Venetian strain of the School of Ferrara, he expressed this Venetian influence in a highly personal way.
The artist assimilated other influences too. Mantua was home to a key site of the Renaissance: the Palazzo Te, which contained frescoes by Giulio Romano, with which Dosso would have been familiar. Romano came to Mantua from Rome in 1525 and introduced the beginnings of Mannerism to the area. Dosso sits somewhere between the Venetian tradition – through Titian, Giorgione and Bellini, one of whose paintings he finished – and the new Mannerist style. He produced so many paintings in the same style that they are not easy to date, but his Ferrarese attributes are easily recognisable: strong colours and a sharp approach to drawing.
This latter is proof that even though Dosso may never have left Italy, he was not immune to international influences. One of the most important artists of the School of Ferrara was a predecessor of Dosso’s, Francesco del Cossa (c. 1437–76/77), whose expressive drawing style was strongly influenced by German artists who came through the Alps and spent time in what is now Emilia-Romagna before heading to Rome. What these artists introduced to Italy was printmaking. The first printers in Italy were in Padua, Mantua and Venice, cities with strong links to German culture. Dosso and other Ferrarese painters were especially responsive to printing and the expressive style it fostered: when you draw, you must insist on the line.
Mythological Allegory (detail; c. 1486–1541/42), Dosso Dossi. Galleria Borghese, Rome. Photo: © Galleria Borghese
Dosso made religious paintings and a few very interesting portraits, but he remains best known for his mythological scenes, which read as allegorical paintings. What they are allegories of has always been hard to discern. His Mythological Allegory (c. 1529), which was likely commissioned by Duke Alfonso I d’Este for his mistress Laura Dianti, is a prime example: since it entered the villa gallery of the Roman collector and cardinal Scipione Borghese (1576–1633), around 80 years after it was painted, interpretations of the painting have continually evolved. In the very first text about the gallery, written by one Giacomo Manilli around 1650, it was called ‘Sleeping Venus with Two Nymphs’. Then, in the gallery’s first complete inventory in 1693, it was given no particular title, described instead as ‘A large landscape with three women, one of them on the ground with a crown on her head’. In another inventory made about a century later, the subject is identified as ‘Callisto with Diana’, after a tale in Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which Zeus forcibly impregnates the nymph Callisto, who later flees to safety with the goddess Diana. This title stuck throughout the 19th century, until 1914, when Henriette Mendelsohn declared it ‘The Myth of Pandora’, on account of the mysterious amphora towards the right of the painting – a vessel that Mendelsohn believed was implied to contain all the ills of the world. Then, in 1968, Felton Gibbons proposed that the painting was depicting another tale from the Metamorphoses: that of the nymph Syrinx, who arrived at the bank of the river Ladon seeking refuge from the amorous god Pan.
All of these interpretations might have been brought to bear by visitors to Borghese’s villa in the 17th and 18th centuries. The sheer mystery of the painting – as well as its moods, colours, dramatic lighting and elements of its composition – bears the influence of Giorgione, pioneer of the Venetian School of painting; the inscrutability of Giorgione’s The Tempest (c. 1503–09), currently in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Venice, may have loomed especially large when Dosso was working on Mythological Allegory. In these paintings, each element could signify multiple things; you could draw on either history or mythology to parse them. It was a kind of intellectual game for viewers at that time, who would strive to find new ways of understanding the work and sometimes write poetry based on these interpretations.
Mythological Allegory (detail; c. 1486–1541/42), Dosso Dossi. Galleria Borghese, Rome. Photo: © Galleria Borghese
Since Dosso himself was likely trying to create an image that could be discussed and debated, it’s fitting that his work was acquired by Borghese, who had a special interest in classical allegories and symbolism. As a collector and curator of his own villa gallery, Borghese was keen to foster ‘dialogues’ between his paintings and his antique sculptures, sometimes even commissioning paintings specifically to pair with some of those sculptures. Such an approach grew out of the art-historical debate known as paragone, or ‘comparison’, which raged during the Renaissance and pitted sculpture and painting against each other in a battle for supremacy.
The strategy of juxtaposing different works and media – sometimes to draw comparisons, sometimes to evoke contrasts – was at the heart of the Villa Borghese. Because of its mysterious subject, Mythological Allegory was particularly well suited to encouraging debates. Visitors to the villa – art lovers, collectors, nobles, travellers – would have discussed it at length. One might say that the Villa Borghese was one of the first recognisable museums in Europe: it existed to show paintings and sculptures for people to admire, comment on and reflect on. Any curator today who enjoys juxtaposing modern art with centuries-old works would do well to remember that Scipione Borghese got there first.
Given that he was from Rome, the cardinal’s interest in the School of Ferrara was unusual. Alongside several works by Benvenuto Tisi, better known as Garofalo, that other well-known Ferrarese painter, Borghese owned seven paintings by Dosso – probably the most important collection of Dosso’s work outside his native region. Borghese’s tastes were admirably broad: he owned work from all over Italy, by artists such as Antonello da Messina from Sicily, Titian and Veronese from Venice, and Andrea Solari from Lombardy – not to mention Roman painters. This suggests that he had a remarkably open mind about what would make for a good gallery. (He also loved nudes. He owned around 50, including some very large erotic paintings – though that may now seem strange for a cardinal, at the time it would have been unremarkable.)
Borghese had a buyer called Enzo Bentivoglio, whose job it was to source paintings from Ferrara. It’s not clear how Bentivoglio acquired the Ferrarese paintings: whether the Dosso paintings were still even owned by the House of Este in the early 17th century is uncertain. (Alfonso I’s grandson, Alfonso II, died in 1597; Ferrara itself was annexed the following year by Pope Clement VIII, and incorporated into the Papal States.) In any case, Cardinal Borghese was so powerful that people were loath to refuse him anything, and the end result is that a great number of paintings arrived in his villa in Rome in 1608 from Ferrara and Modena.
Not all the works in Borghese’s collection would have been oil on canvas, but the Ferrarese ones generally were. Venetian artists were the first to use canvas as a ground for painting, beginning in the early 16th century; elsewhere, artists such as Bronzino in Florence were still painting on wood, using tempera, which is made from eggs. This was a far more complicated technique. Pupils found it much easier to make attractive paintings using canvas, with its smooth and sensual surface, and oil, which carried a certain lustre and allowed for generous impasto.
Mythological Allegory (detail; c. 1486–1541/42), Dosso Dossi. Galleria Borghese, Rome. Photo: © Galleria Borghese
Mythological Allegory illustrates this well. Dosso’s landscapes are always magnificent; this one is luminous and vividly rendered, particularly the greens – his paintings often feature those precisely painted round leaves. It’s like a dream: when you look at it, you wonder if the background is even meant to be real. In this respect it’s quite different from the work of Leonardo, who tried to paint mountains in the background with verisimilitude, using sfumato to capture the varying thickness of the atmosphere. This is not Dosso’s way – Mythological Allegory is almost like a painting you might find in a manuscript, with very strong colours and a sense of unreality.
Compositionally, it’s not as sophisticated as paintings found in Florence and other Italian cities around this time. There is a winning naïvety to the whole thing: what comes across is a deep, personal attachment to nature. Meanwhile, the flowing river, perhaps intended to be the Ladon, hints at the passage of time. The symbolism in itself seems fairly clear: the laurel crown is generally associated with glory, and the amphora often with sin, particularly in the myth of Pandora. The figure on the right is gesturing to the heavens in a manner found in many biblical paintings: Saint John the Baptist, for example, is often seen pointing in such a way, suggesting that his messages are the word of God. But in Mythological Allegory, put all these symbols together and it’s difficult to make it all add up.
So if you were a wealthy patron keen to commission a work that would keep art historians arguing for hundreds of years, you could do worse than call upon Dosso Dossi.
As told to Arjun Sajip by Pierre Curie, general curator of the Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris.
‘Masterpieces from the Borghese Gallery’ is at the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris from 6 September–5 January 2025.
From the September 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.