Puzzles of A Courtier

The 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 and split up among various collectors, most of them Roman. His output has never been seen whole since. A team of scholars, headed by curators Peter Humfrey and Mauro Lucco, has done an impressive job of reassembling what remains of it. Dosso emerges from this show as an idiosyncratic, uneven court artist--not remotely an equal to Titian, but stronger and more complex than he'd seemed.

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 of Alfonso I d'Este was no exception. The duke was considered fairly eccentric. He had a passion for do-it-yourself projects: in his own workshop he made tables, chessmen and elaborate boxes; he created ambitious ceramics as well, and even artillery.

By 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, to shut up and back off: Jupiter is too busy painting to worry, for the time being, about moral issues.

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.

The more educated the patron, the more difficult life could get for the artist. Alfonso's elder sister Isabella, the Marquesa of Mantua, was always cooking up complicated literary programs for potential paintings with the help of her court poet; she would 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.

But the 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 of images.

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 Pan. Who is the woman in the green dress and the gold armor? Virtue? Chastity? What are the bound music manuscripts doing on the ground, and the overturned lapis lazuli pitcher? And why are the lemons on the tree so big and out of scale?

Few 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.