Melissa

Luteri Giovanni called Dosso Dossi

(Tramuschio? 1487 ca - Ferrara 1542)

This painting is datable to the early years of the Ferrara painter’s mature period. It depicts a commanding woman in the foreground wearing a turban and brightly coloured, sumptuous clothing. Set in a woody landscape, she is sitting in the middle of a circle marked with symbols that evoke the Jewish Cabala. She holds a torch in her left hand and a tablet covered with geometric drawings in her right.

The woman has been identified as a sorceress, initially Circe and later Melissa, according to the description in Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (8.14–15). In this episode, Melissa frees some knights from an enchantment, reference to which might be found in the small human figures hanging from the tree on the left.

The restoration of the painting revealed some changes of mind, most importantly the initial inclusion, in place of the mastiff, of a standing armoured male figure, who was the recipient of the sorceress’s gaze.

The painting probably entered the collection of Scipione Borghese in about 1607-1608, arriving from Ferrara through Cardinal Enzo Bentivoglio.

Object details

Commentary

An original and early work among the extremely popular body of images drawn from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, this painting was part of the group of works from Ferrara that entered the collection of Cardinal Scipione Borghese during its early years. It is first mentioned by Jacopo Manilli (1650), who described it as ‘a sorceress casting spells, by the Dossi brothers’, correctly attributing the work from the start.

While at first identified as a generic sorceress and then as Circe, the enchantress with the beautiful curls described by Odysseus in Canto X of Homer’s Odyssey, Julius von Schlosser was the first (1900) to recognise the figure in this important painting as Melissa, featured in Canto VIII of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. The benevolent godmother of the Este line is represented here casting the spells that will free Ruggiero and his knights from Alcina’s enchantment, which turned them into flowers, trees and animals. Dosso structured this image as a complex emblem celebrating the sorceress and hence also the Este, a role ascribed to this ‘Good Sorceress’ by Ariosto himself, who had her speak words of prophecy about the descendance of the dukes of Ferrara.

Besides the correspondence of the magic circle, the little wax men hanging from the tree trunk on the left, the dog looking at the viewer and the armour to the literary source, this interpretation is further confirmed by the X-ray of the painting (Coliva 1998). The X-ray revealed the original presence of an armoured figure inside the circle that was later covered up by the painter. This element makes the reading of the subject at once both complex and complete, pointing to the episode in Canto III when Melissa, leading Bradamante to Merlin’s tomb, speaks words of praise of the descendants of the two paladins, followed by a procession inside the sacred circle of all the Este progeny, up to Alfonso and his cardinal brother Ippolito.  Based on this reading, the armoured figure must have been Bradamante, later covered over to add elements that could be more readily understood from Canto VIII (Farinella 2008; idem 2012; idem 2014). Melissa’s imaginary speech would have been completed in the abstract by the duke, his family and the court, privileged viewers of the painting (Caneparo 2015).

The painting can be dated to the years immediately following the first edition of the epic poem (1516), and so about 1518 (Romani in Ballarin 1994-1995). This dating is confirmed by Dosso’s style, which in this work combines the eccentricity of transalpine painting with the expressive experimentation of Giorgione and Titian, found especially in the luminous palette of the landscape dominated by the monumental, Sybil-like Melissa, inspired as much by the classicism of Titian as by that of Raphael.

Lara Scanu