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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.