A Recovered ‘Fortune’ : Renaissance Work Cost $1,000, Sold for $4 Million

Listen up, all you swap meet lovers and estate sale hounds. Here’s a tale that proves you really can strike it rich. As for you doubters who say the J. Paul Getty Museum can’t build a great collection at this late date because all the art worth having is already in museums, well. . . .

The story concerns Italian artist Dosso Dossi’s painting “An Allegory of Fortune” (circa 1530-45), which recently went on view at the museum in Malibu. The masterful portrayal of two symbolic nudes looks as if it has had a good life ever since it was commissioned by Isabella d’Este in the court of Mantua, but the truth is more interesting than that.

Last seen in the Litta collection in Milan during the 19th Century, the painting had disappeared until late 1988 when it turned up at Christie’s New York--tied to the top of a van.

The unidentified owner had bought the painting for $1,000 at a warehouse clearance of unclaimed property in New England or Upstate New York. The painting was in sorry condition, but he thought it might be worth something--say $1,500--so he headed for New York.

Measuring roughly 6 by 7 feet, the canvas didn’t fit in his van, so he tied it on top with rope. Instead of taking the painting to the auction house’s luxurious digs on Park Avenue, he dropped it off at Christie’s East on 67th Street (where collectibles are sold) and told an attendant that he would accept as little as $1,500 for his find.

When Christie’s Old Masters expert Ian Kennedy saw the new arrival, he knew what he had: “A fabulous picture. Dosso Dossi isn’t a difficult artist to recognize,” said Kennedy, who considers the painting “one of the better Italian Renaissance paintings in America.”

Christie’s put the painting in its Old Masters auction on Jan. 11, 1989, with an estimated price of $600,000 to $800,000. London dealers Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox bought it--dirt, damage and all--for $4 million, a record for the artist. (Most of the money went to the unidentified seller.) Two months later, the Getty purchased the Dosso from the dealers at an undisclosed price.

“It’s a grand gallery picture, of which there are very few to be found,” Getty curator George Goldner said.

The museum owns Dosso’s earlier painting, “Mythological Scene,” which depicts figures in a landscape in a Venetian manner adopted from Giorgione and Titian. The new acquisition exemplifies a later phase in Dosso’s career, after he is thought to have gone to Rome and studied Michelangelo’s monumental figures in the Sistine Chapel.

“What’s interesting about this painting is that it shows the Roman influence (in the bold pair of foreshortened, seated figures) and, at the same time, Venetian influence in the richness of painting and texture,” Goldner said. Dosso’s renowned “crazy, inventive quality” appears in his decision to seat Fortune on a fragile soap bubble instead of balancing her on a terrestrial or celestial sphere, as was customary.

Goldner was eager to add the Dosso to the museum’s collection, but restoration presented an obvious problem, so he consulted with Andrea Rothe, the Getty’s conservator of paintings.

“At first I thought it was hopeless,” Rothe said. One leg of the male figure had been punctured in several places, either during the trip to New York or the warehouse sale. A horizontal row of chips across the center of the canvas indicated that, at some point many years ago, the canvas had probably been attached by loops to a horizontal crossbar to prevent sagging when it was hung at an angle, he said. Glue used in this process eventually contracted and caused small bits of pigment to fall off. In addition, the painting was so dirty and the background so dark that many of its subtleties were lost.

But Rothe had tackled more challenging salvage jobs than this and the image was “so compelling” that it was well worth the effort, he said. The restoration turned out to be a three-year project including extensive study.

X-rays revealed that Dosso executed the allegory over an unfinished painting of figures in a landscape, Rothe said, flipping through a stack of photographs documenting the project.

Rothe finished cleaning the painting only to make a time-consuming discovery. “I had always been dubious about the background,” he said, “but I discovered that the dark brown was a sloppily applied, flat coat of paint added later to cover cracks.” This addition had to go--microscopic bit by microscopic bit. “It was a slow, tedious process--really mind-boggling,” Rothe said. But his work paid off. The original, warm gray background that emerged lends the picture a haunting, atmospheric tone.

He repaired holes, filled cracks, restored losses of paint and gave the painting a coat of varnish. The result is dramatic, but visitors will only see the impact of the finished work: a massive pair of luminous, pink-skinned figures who are bathed in eerie moonlight.

As to their meaning, associate curator Dawson Carr has done considerable research. The female figure is certainly Fortune, he said, because Dosso followed tradition in portraying her as a nude woman with billowing drapery holding a cornucopia. She has one shoe on and one bare foot “to show that she not only brings good fortune but also misfortune,” he said. The substitution of a soap bubble for a globe “signifies that fortune is not only unstable, but fleeting,” he said.

The male figure was more difficult to identify, but Carr believes he represents Chance. The fistful of strips he holds--as if to keep them away from Fortune and drop them into a golden urn--are lottery tickets, he said. “Lotteries as we know them began in 1530 in Florence, and they spread like wildfire,” Carr said. Isabella d’Este, who reputedly loved obscure symbolism, adopted a bundle of lottery tickets as a personal emblem to signify her changing fortunes in the court of Mantua after the death of her husband, Francesco Gonzaga.

A pair of interlaced crowns on the urn--revealed during cleaning--may refer to the joining of the Gonzaga and d’Este families, or to a marriage that Isabella arranged for her son with a bride she selected after his former mistress had stolen the allegiance of Isabella’s courtiers, Carr said.

Taking conjecture one step further, Carr said that the painting may have been designed as a decoration for her son’s marriage festivities. “If so, it was a very wry comment on her son and his mistress,” Carr said.

Whether the allegory was intended to remind a young couple that life is a game of chance or to refer to Isabella’s vacillating fortunes will probably remain a matter of art historical debate. What is certain is that the Getty has given scholars and the public another reason to visit the museum.