Dosso Dossi Research Articles

Two Allegories by Dosso for the Court of Ferrara

Notoriously impervious to the probings of the iconographer's curiosity are the paintings of Giorgione, whose symbolic meanings, even in this age of iconography, in large part remain embedded in the mystery generated by their golden idyllic moods. A scholar has even suggested that some of Giorgione's works may have no specific content at all, and supported this notion by quoting the earliest description of the works of Dosso Dossi, follower of Giorgione and court painter to the dukes of Ferrara, written by the historian Paolo Giovio in the middle I520'S when Dosso was in midcareer.' As Gilbert's association of Dosso and Giorgione suggests, the Ferrarese's works also remain surrounded by a good deal of iconographic mystery, due in part to the lack of scholarly attention which has been given over the past fifty years to the widely dispersed and often damaged paintings of Dosso. But I believe that some of these paintings, reconsidered in the light of recently developed iconographic methods, can be shown to have symbolic content which reveals much about court life at Ferrara in the early sixteenth century. Dosso's iconography, by implication, may even offer some clues about Renaissance imagery in the Venetian area in general and hence about the intriguing paintings of Giorgione. This note attempts to analyze the symbolic content of two of the allegorical works done by Dosso for the Ferrarese court in the I53o's.2

Girolamo Marrettis barettsmycke

Summary In this essay the attention is directed towards a painting in the National Museum in Stockhohn, which usually is ascribed to Girolamo Romanino and sometimes to Dosso Dossi, and which earlier has been regarded as depicting Cesare Borgia, Duke of Valentino. The painting came to the National Museum in 1919 and can be traced via English private ownership to the Orleans Collection in Paris and from there to the ownership of Queen Christina in Rome. The painting is entered as a portrait of the Duke of Valentino in all the inventories of Queen Christina's art collections, the first time in 1677. The portrait is also mentioned by the Swedish architect Nicodemus Tessin the younger, when he at his last visit to Rome in 1687–88 wrote a description of Queen Christina's art collection in the Palazzo Riario. In the inventories the painting is attributed to Correggio. Tessin states it is a work of Tizian, this possibly being suggested to him by the well known art‐historian Giovanni Pietro Bellori who acted as a ...