Art: Raphael on Acid - mannerist painter Dossi Dosso - Brief Article

Dosso Dossi was not the strangest painter of his generation-that honor is shared by Rosso Fiorentino and Domenico Beccafumi-but he came very close indeed. A kind of Michelangelo on speed or Raphael on acid, he produced some of the oddest and most eccentric images of his time. Court painter to the worldly and sybaritic Alonso d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, he was a friend of Ariosto, the great poet who in one inspired moment sends the paladin Astolfo flying to the moon on a chestnut mare. And there is something similarly lunar in the works of this mooncalf Dosso, a nocturnal mystery that shrouds even his depictions of day. More than with any of his contemporaries, night always seems to be falling across Dosso's canvasses, whether in the stormy skies over his Saint George (in Dresden) or in the almost radioactive Holy Family (in the collection of the Queen). In the Costabili Polyptych, Saint Ambrose and Saint Augustine are both provided with their own full moons, suspended a few feet above their weirdly glowing heads.

Dosso (c. 1479-1592), the subject of a fine exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York that moves next to the Getty in Malibu, was one of the foremost proponents of what is known as Mannerism. And it has been fashionable for some time to view this movement as a kind of Modernism ante litteram, a style that, in its highly eccentric response to the political and religious convulsions of the 16th century, presaged the pictorial liberties of our own time. Yet this notion is inaccurate: Dosso's choice of subject was prompted by the whims of his patron, and his abundant symbolism by the intellectual preoccupations of court scholars.

More important, Dosso, like his contemporaries, forges an original style from the flotsam of artistic possibilities present in the environment in which he works. As a provincial painter in Ferrara, he hears only muffled reverberations of the great events of the artistic capitals: Venice, Florence, and Rome. And as these influences reach him, they are oddly transformed in their transit and then further transmuted in the crucible of his highly erratic temperament. Somehow, everything in the European painting of his day seems to wash up sooner or later on the shores of his art. Correggio is there in the lighting of a face. Figures express now the effeteness of the Antwerp Mannerists, now the statuesque sublimity of Michelangelo. The landscapes shift from the Venetian campagna of Giorgione to the Martian terrain of the Danube School.

As befitted the tastes of his worldly patron, Dosso is one of the least religious artists of his time. The first image that one sees on entering the exhibition is the famous depiction of Circe, decked out in gorgeous robes of russet and ultramarine. A pagan sensibility is further elaborated in Dosso's Allegory with Pan and in his rendering of Hercules and the Pygmies. But perhaps its most charming incarnation of all is the allegorical Jupiter, Mercury, and Virtue, in which the father of the gods can be seen painting the wings onto butterflies.

Dosso is an artist of several potent if disparate virtues. First of all, he is one of the most committed colorists of the first half of the 16th century. He loves gorgeous interplays of gold and pink that emerge from a shimmering black background. In his landscapes, he is one of the pioneers of the color green, a hue that had surprisingly little currency in the art of his time. Though he is not famous as a portraitist, there is real psychological penetration in his portrayal of the Sibyl, and real beauty in his depiction of the trappings of wealth and swagger in his Raphaelesque Portrait of a Man (National Museum, Stockholm).

Dosso is also a master of drapery, which he usually depicts as a brilliant afterthought, set in an intense light and held aloft by a strong wind. You find it in the titular figure of the Allegory of Fortune, otherwise nude, as well as in the depiction of Mercury in the painting referred to above. Unexpectedly, Dosso is a master of anatomy too. This is often overlooked, because so many of his figures appear impossibly fleshy and round-shouldered. But his gift for depicting the vitality of flesh, for suggesting muscle and organs beneath pink epidermis, is, at its best, almost without parallel in the art of the period.

All of these virtues are summed up in what may be his masterpiece, the Apollo, from the Galleria Borghese in Rome. To revive a trope from the art writing of the time, you can almost hear the strings of the viola trembling still as the god concludes his music. He raises his bow in the air in a gesture of dramatic finality that forms a compelling X shape. The musculature of the torso is easily the best thing Dosso ever produced in this regard, and rarely in the Cinquecento has the color green been used to such memorable effect. Unfortunately, the painting is in the catalogue but not actually on view. Nevertheless, it suggests what pictorial pleasures await the visitor to this fascinating exhibition.

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