Renaissance for an Unknown

What do you make of a little-known Italian Renaissance artist who paints beefcake and butterflies, Pygmies and mournful animals? An artist who portrays an anguished St. George with a bedraggled, gasping dragon; perches the goddess Fortune on a soap bubble; casts the Christ child in shadows, cuddling a rooster; and spotlights feet so often that he appears to have had a foot fetish?

A lot, if you are the Getty.

The artist, Dosso Dossi, is an eccentric but unusually inventive painter who lived from about 1486 to 1542 and worked in the court of Duke Alfonso I d’Este and the duke’s son Ercole II d’Este in Ferrara, about 50 miles southwest of Venice. Until recently known mainly to scholars as a follower of Venetian masters Giorgione and Titian, he is becoming a star on his own terms, thanks to “Dosso Dossi: Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara,” the first broad survey of the artist’s work in 400 years. The show, which was launched last fall at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Ferrara and presented earlier this spring at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is the first major loan exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum’s new home at the Getty Center.

Beginning Tuesday and continuing through July 11, 52 of Dosso’s paintings--and five by his younger brother Battista Dosso--will fill the museum’s second-floor gallery devoted to temporary exhibitions, and the museum has pulled out all the stops to make the event both a scholarly landmark and a popular success. If Dosso Dossi doesn’t become a household word, it won’t be for the Getty’s lack of trying everything from an international symposium to street banners all over Los Angeles and special menu items at the Getty Center’s cafe and restaurant.

Anyone for eel risotto or pumpkin dumplings? Those are only two of about 200 dishes from the Emilia Romagna region--many of them from the Este family cookbook--selected by the Getty’s executive chef, Gwen Gulliksen, who just happens to have a master’s degree in Italian Renaissance art history.

Why all the fuss over an artist most people have never heard of?

John Walsh, director of the Getty Museum, has lots of reasons. “We decided a long time ago when we were planning this museum that we would do loan shows, but they wouldn’t be typical of large exhibitions that most big city museums use as magnets for heavy attendance. We were going to have heavy attendance anyway,” he said in an interview at the museum. “We wanted to use exhibitions to let the public discover, and explore with us, new aspects of the history of art.

“We also wanted to do exhibition projects that would result in something lasting in the way of new work, new knowledge. We wanted our exhibitions to be a reason for scholars to work on problems that might not have been approached in quite such a systematic way.

“Dosso fits both those patterns,” Walsh said. “He is unfamiliar to the broad audience, but he’s an artist with an imagination, a sense of invention and surprise and humor that people who are unfamiliar with the subject matter of Renaissance painting are nevertheless going to be able to grasp.”

Though his work is known to specialists, it hasn’t been well understood, Walsh said. “There was a lot we didn’t know about him before this project started. Art historians didn’t even agree on what [painting] came after what, or who painted what, where the boundary gets drawn between the very young Dosso and other artists, or the aging Dosso and Battista Dosso.”

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In 1996-97, when the exhibition was still on the drawing board, the museum joined forces with the Getty Research Institute, then directed by Salvatore Settis, to stage a two-part conference on the artist in Los Angeles and Trent, Italy. “We cast quite a wide net and included all kinds of interesting people, not just art historians, because the paintings get into many aspects of court life as well as visual culture,” Walsh said. “Dosso worked for princes who had complicated political, economic and social lives, which set the tone for the intellectual life of their time. All this is synthesized and epitomized in paintings that are often enigmatic and not at all conventional.”

Staging the symposium well in advance of the show had the advantage of applying new scholarship to the exhibition in its formative stages, Walsh said. Findings have been published in a dense tome, “Dosso’s Fate: Painting and Court Culture in Renaissance Italy,” and incorporated in the much more readable exhibition catalog.

The oddities of Dosso’s art still have scholars guessing, so the show is a continuing forum for debate. The exhibition is “a kind of traveling examination” offering “three different chances to really study the pictures in three different configurations,” Walsh said.

In addition to these altruistic motivations, the Getty has its self-interest at heart. “One obvious reason we are excited about this project is that one of our paintings is the star,” Walsh cheerfully admitted.

The museum acquired its first Dosso, “An Allegory With Pan”--portraying a sleeping nude woman and three other figures in a landscape--in a private deal in 1983, at the urging of then-curator George Goldner, who left the Getty in 1993 to chair the departments of drawings and prints at the Met. The second painting, “Allegory of Fortune”--depicting the goddess sitting on a soap bubble, while her partner, Chance, clutches a batch of lottery tickets--turned up at auction in 1989. The Getty grabbed it for $4 million.

“That gave us quite a different aspect of this artist, a monumental, Michelangelo-like painting,” Walsh said. “And all of a sudden, Dosso was our most important Renaissance painter. The two most imposing and beautiful and memorable High Renaissance paintings in our galleries are by this artist.”

Walsh hasn’t forgotten the Getty’s spectacular--and far more expensive--works by Dosso’s much better-known contemporaries, including “Portrait of Cosimo I de’ Medici” by Jacopo Pontormo (purchased for $35.2 million in 1989) and “The Holy Family With the Infant St. John” by Fra Bartolommeo (acquired for $22.5 million in 1996). But those are single examples of celebrated bodies of work, better represented elsewhere.

“Given the whole work of Dosso,” he said, “I think those two paintings may be the most important, relative to the artist who painted them.” Recently, when the show was on view in Ferrara, the Getty purchased the portrait of St. George that was loaned to the show by a London dealer. “When you add the St. George to our other two paintings, Dosso is a real center of gravity at the Getty,” he said.

Goldner proposed a Dosso show before his departure, but it was organized by Dawson Carr, the Getty’s associate curator of paintings, with Andrea Bayer, a curator at the Met, and Andrea Buzzoni, director of the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Ferrara. Andrea Rothe, senior conservator for special projects at the Getty, directed technical research.

When the museum purchased “An Allegory With Pan,” Rothe soon realized he wasn’t facing a routine cleaning job. “There is a piece missing on the left side, about a foot I think, so we don’t know what’s happening there,” he said. Bits of landscape on one of the figures indicated that Dosso had painted it over and, many years later, a restorer had removed the landscape. When Rothe X-rayed the painting, he found that the artist had painted full bodies on a group of flying cherubs, but then covered their legs with clouds.

“Allegory With Fortune” brought surprises too, including the discovery of a completely finished landscape under the figurative composition. Intrigued with an artist he had only known in passing, Rothe began to study other works by Dosso and found that one of the artist’s most consistent qualities is that he changed his mind in the midst of big projects.

Perhaps the most remarkable example is “Melissa,” a large painting depicting an elegantly costumed enchantress in a landscape. Based on a legend about a sorceress who transformed her lovers into beasts--and her alter ego, Melissa, who reversed the process--the painting portrays Melissa with a sad-eyed dog, next to a suit of armor. But an X-radiograph--to be displayed in an educational gallery at the Getty--shows that Dosso originally painted a knight next to the woman, then decided to portray another moment in the story, when the man had been turned into a beast.

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Throughout his research, Rothe looked for common denominators to help identify Dosso’s paintings--all but one of which are unsigned. But his conclusions go far beyond technical details. “If there is an artist of the cinquecento [16th century] who has a quality that is modern, it’s Dosso,” he said. “No other artist is as free and spontaneous as he. Not even Titian, who is considered to be the forerunner to Impressionism.”

Carr views Dosso as a charming character whose work is accessible, even if its meaning is unclear. Born Giovanni de Luteri, he was nicknamed Dosso after a small family property. “ ‘Dosso’ is a word used to refer to a hilltop or ridge line,” Carr said. “Somehow Giovanni was just not right for him, even as a little kid. So he became Dosso. It’s like calling him Rock. He was known as Dosso of Ferrara during his lifetime. Later, art historians wanted to give him a last name, so he became Dosso Dossi, but it’s totally made up.”

Dosso served as Ferrara’s city decorator, painting frescoes, carriages and stage sets as well as individual canvases. And the dukes apparently liked him so well that they took his sense of humor in stride. In one work, “Hercules and the Pygmies,” which Carr calls “16th century beefcake,” Dosso honors Ercole II d’ Este as a mythical hero who tosses off an army of tiny warriors but also mocks him as the male version of the traditional female reclining nude.

Dosso has been forgotten partly because he lived in the age of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Georgione and Titian, “in the midst of a great flowering of art,” Carr said. “It’s also important to remember that Michelangelo and Titian in particular [who died in their late 80s] had very long lives next to Dosso [who only reached his mid-50s]. Dosso never reached that level of amazing genius; he’s at the second level of genius, but it’s still wonderful.”

Dosso’s talent also has been obscured because he spent most of his career in Ferrara, Carr said. “Just a little more than 50 years after he died, the Este dynasty of Ferrara died out, and the pope moved in, exercised his ancient feudal rights and took over the city. The Estes had often pitted themselves politically against the Holy See, so they paid the price in the end.

“Dosso’s work got carted off to Modena or Rome, where there’s a great concentration of it at the Galleria Borghese, one of the most generous lenders to the exhibition. But in Ferrara today, other than one stupendous altarpiece and one small painting in the exhibition, there is nothing of Dosso left. It’s very sad.”

The Getty’s celebration is “the perfect learning experience,” said Diane Brigham, head of education at the museum. While introducing the public to the artist and presenting new scholarship, the project also creates a context for his work, she said. A concurrent exhibition, “Ercole de’ Roberti: The Renaissance in Ferrara,” will present 12 works by Dosso’s predecessor. Other related events include a lecture series and a concert of music from the court of Ferrara, performed by Musica Viva of Santa Barbara on May 2. An educational gallery will illuminate themes in the show, and the museum’s audio guide will have new information on Dosso’s work.

But the main thing is the art, Walsh said. “I haven’t used the word ‘beautiful,’ ” he said, reflecting on his mental list of reasons for the Dosso extravaganza. “We would gladly do a Dosso show simply because the pictures are so beautiful in so many surprising ways. They run the gamut from powerful and almost crude to amazingly refined. He is one of the great landscape painters who ever lived, and who knows that?

“He also painted one of the supreme masterpieces of the Renaissance, which shows Jupiter painting butterflies--Jupiter, who is too busy to talk to a visitor, too busy to be reminded of the world of duty, of obligation, because he’s got something more serious to do. He’s got to get those butterflies right. I find that as a statement by an artist just so dazzlingly bright and funny.” *

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* “Dosso Dossi: Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara,” J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive. Opens Tuesday. Regular schedule: Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 11 a.m.-7 p.m.; Thursdays and Fridays, 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Ends July 11. Free admission; parking is $5 per car. Parking reservations required: (310) 440-7300.