Volume 46, Number 3 · February 18, 1999
Mysterious Masterpieces
By Francis Haskell
Lorenzo Lotto: Master Painter of the Renaissance 1997-March 1, 1998; the Accademia di Belle Arti, Bergamo, April 2-June 28, 1998; the Grand Palais, Paris, October 12, 1998-January 11, 1999.
an exhibition at the National Gallery, Washington, D.C., November 2,, Catalog of the exhibition by David Alan Brown, by Peter Humfrey, by Mauro Lucco
National Gallery/Yale University Press, 272 pp., $55.00
Dosso Dossi: Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara Ferrara, September 26-December 14, 1998; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, January 14-March 28, 1999; and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, April 27-July 11, 1999.
an exhibition at the Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea,, Catalog of the exhibition by Peter Humfrey, by Mauro Lucco, edited by Andrea Bayer
Metropolitan Museum of Art/ Abrams, 312 pp., $40.00 (paper)
Dosso's Fate: Painting and Court Culture in Renaissance Italy
edited by Luisa Ciammitti, by Steven F. Ostrow, by Salvatore Settis
The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 420 pp., $50.00 (paper)
An excellent exhibition of paintings by Lorenzo Lotto left Washington last March and, after traveling to Bergamo, went to the Grand Palais in Paris, where it was finely installed. Meanwhile an equally fine exhibition, similar in its ideal size of about fifty paintings, of works by Dosso Dossi, which began in Ferrara, has recently opened in New York[1] and will travel to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The two artists were contemporaries (Lotto 1480-1557, Dosso 1486?-1557), but their careers were utterly different. The styles of both of them are in general related to that of the Venetian school of the High Renaissance—Lotto was born in the city and spent several years working there and Dosso paid many visits and was, for a time, in close touch with Titian. But there is no evidence of any contact, direct or indirect, between them. However, two small allegorical paintings by the young Lotto in the National Gallery of Art in Washington share with a number of paintings by Dosso a magic of a very special kind—small, mysterious figures in romantic landscapes, illuminated by Wordsworth's 'light that never was on sea or land/The consecration, and the poet's dream'—a magic that is likely to make a similar appeal to connoisseurs. In fact, the same Anglo-Italian team (Peter Humfrey and Mauro Lucco) has been responsible for both exhibitions,[2] and it is difficult to imagine that anyone visiting either or both in any of their locations will not have found the experience an intense one—as well as unusual, almost haunting, in a way that we no longer expect when looking at sixteenth-century Italian paintings in museums and galleries.
Review, 5101 words
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