Mythological Allegory

Luteri Giovanni called Dosso Dossi

(Tramuschio? 1487 ca - Ferrara 1542)

This painting was probably part of the group of works sent by Enzo Bentivoglio to Cardinal Scipione Borghese in 1608. The subject, at one time thought to be Diana and Callixtus, was later identified as Venus discovering the beauty of Psyche. Often considered a collaboration between Dosso and Battista Dossi, the work is now believed to have been for the most part painted by Dosso, due to the high quality of the landscape and splendid nude in the foreground, the latter clearly influenced by classical currents in Rome, traceable in Giulio Romano’s reformulation in Palazzo Te, Mantua.

Object details

Commentary

This work was almost certainly part of the first group of paintings that entered the collection of Cardinal Scipione through the mediation of Enzo Bentivoglio. It appears in the Borghese inventory from the 1630s, where it is described as ‘a painting of a Venus with two women black and gold frame, 4 high 5 1/3 wide Dossi’. This was followed by Manilli, who reports, in the Stanza del Centauro in the Casino di Porta Pinciana ‘above the door of the open loggia, a sleeping Venus with two standing nymphs, by the Dossi [brothers]’ (Manilli 1650).

Right from these early descriptions, it is clear that the subject of the painting is not easy to work out. The scene is dominated by a woman stretched out on a yellow cloth, wearing a laurel crown – two more of which are lying on the ground in front of her – and protected by an old women wearing simple, torn clothing, next to whom stands a young woman dressed in green, white and red (the colours of the Este family’s livery), who points to the sky with her right hand and holds a shiny bronze amphora in her left. This painting was a remarkable success, judging by the mirror-image copy of the work made by Garofalo, now lost (Ciammitti 1998).

Numerous scholars have tried to decipher the true subject of the painting, tracing it to Ariosto (Zwanziger 1911), the myth of Pandora (Mendelsohn 1914), the transformation of Syrinx in Ovid (Gibbons 1968), the widowhood of Canete (Calvesi 1968; Coliva 1998), the story of Semele (Kilpatrick 2004) and a rereading of the myth of Psyche based on Apuleius (Herrmann Fiore 2002) or Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Pastore 2008). It is very surprising that such an enigmatic painting was such a big success, even though all the theories about its subject probably collapse before what must be read as evidence of Dosso’s brilliance in condensing a complex literary narrative into a concise, almost emblematic, image or summarising a complicated story into a single picture (Farinella 2014).

The composition and theme of the Borghese painting liken it to the another mythological allegory by Dosso, in the Getty Museum, Los Angeles (inv. 83.PA.15). As argued by Vincenzo Farinella (2014), the two paintings, probably made for Laura Dianti, depict the emotional journey of Psyche (with whom the companion of Alfonso I would have been expected to identify), in love with a god and whose struggles are vindicated by her union with Cupid after passing a series of extremely difficult trials.

The nocturnal scene, with its ‘extremely artificial handling of light’ (Ballarin 1994-1995), reveals the mingling of the assimilation of Giulio Romano’ painting style in the Hall of Psyche in the Ducal Palace of Mantua and the modern Northern style imported by Flemish painters like Patinir and the artists who decorated the Magno Palazzo in Trento (Farinella 2014).

Lara Scanu