A Portrait of Talent Obscured

When Dosso Dossi (1486?-1542) began to paint court commissions for the Este family, rulers of the duchy of Ferrara, southwest of Venice, the young artist quickly found himself wedged between a rock and a hard place.

The rock was Raphael, just a few years Dosso’s elder, whose precocious talent as a draftsman soon rocketed him to the top of the heap in the competitive cultural milieu of Rome. The hard place was Titian, perhaps just a year younger than Dosso, whose unique sense of painterly color fueled a meteoric rise in Venice.

Dosso worked almost exclusively in Ferrara, though, and while the court of Duke Alfonso was an extraordinarily refined and intellectually exciting place, it was also comparatively small and insular. Dosso traveled to Rome and Venice and spent considerable time learning from other artists (including Titian). But, as the absorbing exhibition of Dosso’s paintings newly opened at the J. Paul Getty Museum demonstrates so well, he ended up a very large fish in a rather small pond. Dosso was that always discomfiting creature--a major provincial artist.

Thanks to the insightful efforts of the Getty, and to its industrious colleagues at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Ferrara, where “Dosso Dossi: Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara” has already been seen, we now have a new Old Master. Virtually ignored in the standard surveys, and known only fragmentarily to most Renaissance specialists, Dosso has been nudged by this lovely and fascinating show into what will henceforth surely be a secure place in the second tier of Italian Renaissance artists.

Dosso’s paintings have a special resonance for contemporary sensibilities. Nowhere is the power of his work more convincing than in the magnificent “Jupiter, Mercury and Virtue” (circa 1523-24), which is one of several knockout pictures among the 53 lent for the unprecedented event by American and European collections. The sizable canvas, about 4 feet high and 5 feet wide, persuasively argues a case for imaginative liberty as the agency for art, rather than smug morality.

In the center, a robust, seated figure of Mercury, winged messenger of the gods (and himself god of eloquence and cleverness), turns to shush the complaining figure of Virtue, who has rushed in at the right demanding an audience with Jupiter, the monarch of Mt. Olympus. Mercury is guarding Jupiter’s serene contemplation: The bearded elder has laid his terrible thunderbolt at his feet and picked up a brush and palette, with which he is painting delicate, colored butterflies on a cerulean canvas lit by a rainbow.

Remarkable Paintings, First-Rate Scholarship

The linchpin for Dosso’s art was Giorgione, whose radical invention of a new type of painting replaced specific subjects with evocative, enigmatic moods. Dosso’s painting is a tour de force of sumptuous painterly effects, particularly of light and color, that make the pictorial fantasy convincing.

The show is accompanied by a first-rate catalog that helps unravel the unusual method with which Dosso built on Giorgione’s amazing precedent. For one thing, no drawings by Dosso are known. Rather than create a series of preparatory sketches to establish a final composition, which would then be transferred to the canvas, he worked out the image as he painted.

Take the marvelous “Melissa” (circa 1515-16), in which the exotic, sumptuously dressed heroine of Ariosto’s fantastic epic romance “Orlando Furioso” is shown seated in a glittering landscape; a mature and oddly empathetic dog sits by her side, gazing plaintively at a glistening suit of armor. Originally, as X-ray studies of the picture reveal, the sad-eyed, frustrated dog was a gallant, bearded knight, a character in the story that Melissa rescues from having been turned into an animal by an evil witch.

However, at some point during the process of making the painting, Dosso decided to go back to an earlier moment in the tale, to show the dog yearning for restoration to human form. Melissa--whose gaze is no longer directed at the (now over-painted) knight, but at a strange cluster of doll-like fetishes tied to a tree--gathers force to work her spell on the mutt.

The painting no longer celebrates a done deed. Now, it’s a lush, pregnant, psychically involving moment, set in a mysterious landscape.

Or, consider the Getty’s own “Allegory With Pan” (circa 1529-32), an exquisitely beautiful conundrum of a painting (and one of three terrific pictures by the artist in the museum’s collection) whose precise subject still eludes scholars today. Beneath a fruit tree groaning with sunny lemons, Pan cackles behind a bare-breasted crone hovering protectively above a recumbent nude, asleep on a bed of flowers. Behind the two women, a third darts out from behind a tree, dressed in a courtier’s finery, while a cluster of cupids hovers on a nearby cloud above a sparkling landscape that unfurls into the distance.

This sexy encounter in the enchanted forest is enough to make your head spin. The delightful confusion isn’t helped by the results of an unknown but overeager conservator, who was unaware of the artist’s unusual working method. Sometime in the 19th century, the conservator discovered the figure of the courtier beneath a portion of the landscape, which Dosso had painted over, and restored her to view.

Ambiguity and the Unexpected

Dosso’s evident interest in psychological ambiguity and the joys of the unexpected emerges early in his career. A haunted, bust-length portrait of “St. George” (circa 1513-14), the slain dragon’s head an odd fusion of bird and beast, doesn’t offer us a charmed picture of an invincible hero. Instead, with his brow furrowed and his lips slightly parted, as if in the midst of a slow and arduous exhale, St. George appears exhausted--and not a little surprised--by the ferocity of his battle. The saint is a mortal man who has escaped with his life by some inexplicable means.

In this early painting (recently acquired by the Getty), as in so many later ones, Dosso’s flickering, broken brushwork does double-duty: It serves his magnificent color, which ranges from crisp and dazzling to atmospheric and moody, and it acts as a physical trace of his painterly inventiveness, worked out directly on the picture’s surface.

This is important because, in the Renaissance, drawing emerged as the chief signifier of artistic thought. Drawing is what elevated an artist, as a thinker and intellectual, above the ranks of mere craftsmen, who humbly fabricated useful things. Linearity, as visual evidence of invisible thought, lifted painting from craft into the realm of the liberal arts.

But Dosso found another way. He didn’t draw; linearity is rarely an attribute of his finished pictures. Through lively brushwork, poetic color, elaborate wit and--overall--an uncanny ability to pull the viewer’s imagination into an open-ended narrative, his paintings not only don’t lack for significant inventiveness, they ratchet it up a notch.

In addition to Dosso, the Getty show also includes five pictures by his rather less-gifted younger brother, Battista, who often assisted him, and an interlude of five portraits precariously attributed to Dosso. The portraits are fascinating because they are all so different in execution that it’s hard to see how one hand could possibly have produced them, and easy to see why the attributions are in dispute.

“Dosso Dossi: Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara” sets a high standard of achievement. As if it weren’t enough to build from a strength within its own collection, rescue a remarkable artist from obscurity and produce an abundance of important new scholarship, the Getty has also given a platform to a historical figure with surprisingly contemporary lessons to offer. Not bad for the first major painting exhibition organized by the museum.

* “Dosso Dossi: Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara,” J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, (310) 440-7300, through July 12. Admission free; closed Mondays.