Ariosto, in canto XXXIII of Orlando Furioso, mentions the Dossi brothers among the painters whose fame will always remain as long as we read and write, like Leonardo, Mantegna, Bellini, Michelangelo, Raphael, Sebastiano del Piombo and Titian . Dosso, the most famous of the Dossi brothers, achieved glory and received commissions from the most important Renaissance courts.
The exhibition, set up in those same rooms that between 1531 and 1532 saw him protagonist in Trento together with his brother Battista in the decoration of the Magno Palace of the Buonconsiglio Castle, will tell the extraordinary journey of this eccentric Renaissance painter. Conceived by the Uffizi Gallery in Florence as part of the "The city of the Uffizi" project, the exhibition will offer around thirty paintings that will compare the works of Dosso and Battista, tracing the artistic stages of Dosso at the court of Alfonso d'Este in Ferrara, in Pesaro at the duchess Eleonora d' Urbino up to Trento in the service of the prince-bishop Bernardo Cles.
These magnificent paintings made by Dosso during his long and successful career they will dialogue with the frescoes of the castle. The prince-bishop Bernardo Cles, adviser to the emperors Maximilian I and Charles V, a great humanist, a friend of Erasmus of Rotterdam and a cardinal who came close to being elected pontiff, has words of praise and admiration for Dosso. After all, Dosso arrives in Trento preceded by such great fame as to be paid twice as much as his colleagues Fogolino and Romanino, who were also committed to making the princely residence magnificent.
The exhibition will also be a way to remember the bond that united the Dossi family to the city of the Council: Trento was in fact the city that gave birth to Niccolò Lutteri, the father of Dosso and Battista, and where he lived before moving to Mirandola at the end of the fifteenth century . Probably a very young Dosso began a training course in Mirandola that led him to get to know the older ones Renaissance masters. In Dosso's complex painting, original, elegant and allegorical, the influence of the great masters constantly emerges: from Venice he learned the lesson of Giorgione (the famous flute player from the Galleria Borghese will be on display), from Rome he experienced the mastery of Raphael (on display some prints by Raffaello di Marcantonio Raimondi), with Titian (on display there will be a portrait of a knight of Malta from the Uffizi) there was a constant artistic conversation, in Ferrara he met Michelangelo (on display two magnificent drawings by Casa Buonarroti ).
From the beginning of the sixteenth century he soon became the favorite painter of the Dukes of Ferrara, leaving the court only on two occasions, the first in Pesaro in the service of the Duchess Eleonora of Urbino and the second in Trento when he frescoed various rooms in the Castello del Buonconsiglio. Court life, his. From the Trentino valleys to the Este court in Ferrara, that is to say one of the most refined cultural centers in the world at the time. Here, but also elsewhere, he found an intelligent, stimulating, not contrary, indeed very open to welcoming his marvelous creations, which are influenced and resonate with sacred, mythological stories with the filter of invention, of alchemical knowledge, of a subtle vein of intelligent irony and fun.
The exhibition, curated by the art historian Vincenzo Farinella, and coordinated by the director of Buonconsiglio Franco Marzatico, will bring to light new documents and it will be possible to draw an unprecedented portrait of the great Este painter. The possibility of setting up the exhibition in the Dossesque halls of the Castle will stimulate a revision of the delicate problem of the collaboration established in Trento between the two brothers, summoning other works of the same chronological context, dated shortly before or after the creation of the Buonconsiglio decoration, similarly fruit of the joint intervention of Dosso and Battista.
The exhibition will be divided into five sections, aimed at shedding light in particular on the activity carried out by the two painter brothers in the third and fourth decades of the sixteenth century, upstream and downstream of the intervention in the Magno Palazzo by Bernardo Cles. Among Dosseschi's masterpieces there will also be the magnificent painting Jupiter Painter of Butterflies, a picture as enigmatic as Giorgione's Tempest. The history of the painting, preserved until a few years ago in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and now kept in the Wawel Castle in Krakow, has fascinated scholars for the message it conceals and for the extraordinary executive quality. A work confiscated in 1939 by the Nazis from the family of Count Lanckoronski, it is one of the most significant proofs of the maturity of the Ferrarese painter. It is a clear homage to painting, represented by Jupiter intent on painting some butterflies on the canvas while Mercury addresses a female figure asking her to be silent so as not to disturb the divinity. Naturally there will be Dosseschi's masterpieces kept in the Uffizi, the Palatine Gallery of Palazzo Pitti, the Estense Gallery in Modena, the National Art Gallery in Ferrara, the Roberto Longhi Foundation in Florence, the Cini Collection in Venice, the Brera Art Gallery in Milan, the Bourgeois of Rome.
