WTI Magazine #46    2014 October, 29
Author : Enrico De Iulis      Translation by:

It has just come to an end another important exhibition in Trento: a rare, very interesting philological reconstruction about the activity of Dosso Dossi and one of his biggest customer: the prince-archbishop of Trento Bernardo Cles.

Giovanni Luteri was the real name of Dosso Dossi, whose family was native of Trento. Although the first documents about his life inform that his father was the accountant for the House of Este in Ferrara and he was also the owner of small farm named Dosso Scaffa, between the duchies of Mantua and Ferrara, from here on Giovanni will be known as Dosso Dossi and his brother as Battista Dossi (he was a painter too, as we will see after), with relation to his family estate.

The artistic education of Dosso is not fully documented, and those statements of the sixteenth century on which few sure news were based on, went in conflict with the awardings of great art historians as Roberto Longhi, who however got wrong in the attribution of many Luteri's works, further complicating a reconstruction not so easy anyway.

Influences are clearly of Venetian painting of the ending of the fifteenth century and Mantegna, Giorgione, Bellini and Titian are obviously part of the cultural roots of Dossi's style. Besides Dossi travelled, he kept himself up to date and even though he was the painter of the House of Este during many years, he had the possibility to get in contact with Michelangelo and Raffaello during the High Renaissance in Rome and to go to Florence, on the contrary, to sum up the rules of the early Renaissance by then metabolized by all the leading painters. But Venice and its style is clearly the real benchmark for Dosso, who for that reason was very often mistaken for Titian, because for his very big landscape performance and some really extraordinary colors.

However there is an exclusive element in Luteri's works, something pertaining to dream and magic but with very clear bibliographical references. It is not by chance that we spoke about philology at the beginning of the article: Dosso has left us a series of paintings and works whose interpretation and iconological setting is very difficult, always swinging between the literature of that period (working under the same roof of Ludovico Ariosto) and the lesser known episodes of greek and roman mythology.

Complex allegories, almost exothic atmospheres, shiny colors: his paintings were very close to the concept of modern luxury. In 1531 with an expanding court shop, Dosso and Battista Dossi took off for Trento to decorate the new palace of Buonconsiglio: that's how famous they were in the Po area.

The above mentioned exhibition proposed both frescos painted in loco and exhibited paintings, as proof of an oddity that Giovanni Luteri was wisely able to measure out in polished subjects in the more intellectual courts of the Italian Renaissance.