Adoration of the Christ Child

Luteri Giovanni called Dosso Dossi

(Tramuschio? 1487 ca - Ferrara 1542)

This painting was almost certainly made for Duke Alfonso d’Este or his wife Lucrezia Borgia. It entered the Borghese collection later, after Olimpia Aldobrandini married Paolo Borghese. The work is clearly marked by a few of the key features of Dosso’s style, drawn from different artistic currents, which the artist mixed in a personal, unmistakable way.

Object details

Commentary

The work can be traced in the inventory of 1592 of Lucrezia d’Este d’Urbino (Della Pergola 1959) and it may have been commissioned by Duke Alfonso I or Lucrezia Borgia, theories that can be considered based on the dating proposed for the work on the basis of style (Herrmann Fiore 2002). Besides this purely technical information, the angels in the upper part of the painting are holding three sheets of paper, two of which are partly legible: the one on the far left reads ‘Te deum laudamus’, and the one in the middle is inscribed ‘Gloria in ex[cel]sis’, followed by a few illegible words and the date 1519. This dating is proposed in the most important monographs on the artist (Ballarin 1994-1995; Romani in Ballarin 1994-1995) and is supported by the powerful theatrical emotion of the composition, infused with Giorgionesque lyricism and emphasised by the ancient ruins that create a perfect backdrop crowned by the pathos of the frenetic flight of the angels blown by the wind. These elements seem to anticipate the same effects found in works from the early 1520s: the Allegory of Music in the Museo Horne, Florence (inv. 80) and the Learned Man with a Compass and Globe now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Ferrara (inv. FE 104). Other scholars have instead dated the work to the early 1520s (Longhi 1940; Mezzetti 1965; Gibbons 1968), still others to 1517 (Humphrey 1998) or, expanding the time frame, to between 1512 and 1520 (Mendelsohn 1914).

Listed in the fideicommissary document of 1833 as a ‘Holy Family, by Benvenuto Garofalo, 1 palm, 4 oncie wide; 2 palmi, 3 oncie high, on wood with a curved top’, Adolfo Venturi, in his catalogue for the Galleria (1893), considered this painting to be ‘sketch made up of strokes of colour and flashes of light’. To date, there is no known altarpiece that could have been inspired by this small painting, and so it is more likely that it was a devotional painting commissioned for the private chapel of an aristocratic palazzo in Ferrara.

The votive function of this work is revealed by the way the figures have been arranged on the ground. The Christ Child, who has been carefully placed on a white cloth, is sleeping while his mother lovingly covers his head with the hem of her blue and gold mantle, her own head covered with a sumptuously coiled golden turban. Next to them, his nude left foot in the foreground, the elderly Joseph leans on a staff, his beard and hair blown by the wind from the left, revealing the features of his face. Above, almost transported by the breeze that comes in from the beams of the ceiling of the ruined building sheltering the Holy Family, three angels with multicolour wings and crowns of leaves and flowers are wrapped in red, green and white drapery, hues connected to the three theological virtues: Charity, Hope and Faith.

Lara Scanu