Collectors’ Focus
Recent rediscoveries of works by the 16th-century painter Dosso Dossi have renewed interest in the court painter to the d’Este, as well as in his contemporaries in Ferrara and Bologna
Emma Crichton-Miller on painters from Ferrara and Bologna
Although artists of the Ferrara school are not as well known as their near contemporaries Correggio and Parmigianino in Parma (a ‘vanishingly rare field’, according to Eugene Pooley, Old Master specialist at Christie’s London), or the pioneering Carracci family in Bologna – Agostino, Annibale and Ludovico – they were held in high regard in the 19th century. The strong holdings at the National Gallery in London for Giovanni di Luteri, called Dosso Dossi (c. 1486–1541/2), as well as Giovanni Battista Benvenuti (‘L’Ortolano’; fl. 1500–after 1527) and Benvenuto Tisi (‘Il Garofalo’; 1481–1559), are owed partly to 19th-century English collectors. In 1934 the legendary art historian Roberto Longhi published Officina Ferrarese, reappraising these dreamy heirs of Giorgione, Titian and Raphael, with their rich colours and learned artistry. The post-war Italian economic boom, which ran until the country’s recession in 1993, kept interest strong in Italy. Even today, Carlo Milano of London-based Callisto Fine Arts reports that there are serious local buyers for Emilian paintings at the antiques and art fair in Modena. Davide Trevisani, a director at Maurizio Nobile Fine Art, Paris, says they have found ready buyers for rediscovered works by L’Ortolano, Il Garofalo and Domenico Panetti, one of the latter’s teachers. ‘The style is not simple,’ he says. ‘You need to recognise the connection between the artists and the refined taste of the d’Este court to understand the works.’
In January 2021, a pair of lyrical oils by Dosso Dossi certainly found admirers: The Plague at Pergamea and The Sicilian Games achieved $6.2m (estimate $3m–$5m), a record for Dosso, at Sotheby’s New York. The canvases had previously impressed the discerning collector Hester Diamond, who acquired them in 1999, and who also owned works by L’Ortolano and Il Garofalo. The Dosso works, with their luxuriant landscapes, rich colours and distinctive feathery brushwork, were commissioned in c. 1518 by Alfonso I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara,
for a 10-part frieze illustrating scenes from Virgil’s Aeneid, designed to decorate Alfonso’s
camerino d’alabastro in the ducal palace. The death of Alfonso II d’Este in 1597 saw Ferrara absorbed into the Papal States, and in around 1607 the frieze was acquired by Cardinal Scipione Borghese and moved to Rome. Eventually it was sold and taken to Spain in the 19th century, where it was dispersed. Half of one panel from the ‘Aeneid’ frieze, The Trojans Building the Temple to Venus at Eryx (Fig. 1), sold at Christie’s New York in April for $400,000 (hitting its lower estimate) to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which holds the other half of the painting. The fragment had been unearthed following the unexpected rediscovery in Madrid in 2018 of The Arrival of the Trojans at the Strophades Islands, sold privately through Christie’s to the Prado in 2020.
This flurry of rediscovery has given prominence to Dosso, whose works, according to Pooley, ‘come to market very rarely’. When they do, they sell well, as indicated by the sale in July 2013 of the rediscovered Jupiter and Semele at Sotheby’s London. Estimated at £150,000– £200,000, it sold for £1.1m. Edoardo Roberti, Europe-wide head of Old Master paintings at Sotheby’s, notes: ‘There were six different bidders on this picture. Demand is very strong.’ As for Dosso’s Ferrarese contemporaries, Il Garofalo’s elegant Nativity (c. 1507–10) sold at Sotheby’s Hester Diamond sale for $214,200 (estimate $200,000–$300,000); and although L’Ortolano’s austere Circumcision (c. 1506; estimate $150,000–$200,000) did not sell, in 2019 his serene Madonna and Child, set against a luminous sky, made £112,500 at Christie’s London against an estimate of £50,000–£80,000.
Another painter active in the early 16th century, Ludovico Mazzolino, is ‘a bit of a cult artist’, Roberti says. ‘His faces are very recognisable.’ In December 2016 at Sotheby’s London, an Adoration of the Shepherds fetched £248,750 (Fig. 3) – more than three times the top estimate, although short of the £366,400 paid in July 2005 for the artist’s more elaborate Adoration of the Magi of 1522. Last April his sombre
Lamentation (1526) sold for $162,500 (estimate $120,000–$150,000) at Christie’s New York.
If the outward-looking Alfonso I d’Este made Ferrara the major centre for art in the region in the early 16th century, it was Bologna, a free commune absorbed into the Papal States in 1506, that achieved dominance at the end of the century. The Carracci family, as Pooley puts it, ‘were seismically important for the shift to the baroque’, initiating a bold, naturalistic style that drew on many influences. ‘When Annibale and Ludovico are at their best,’ Pooley says, ‘they command huge interest’ – especially from institutions in the United States. Annibale Carracci’s first work on panel, The Madonna and Child with Saint Lucy and the Young Saint John the Baptist (1587/88), achieved a record $6.1m (estimate $3m–$5m) in May 2019 at Christie’s New York. His older cousin Ludovico’s record stands at £7.4m (six times the high estimate of £1.2m) for the Ovidian idyll Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (c.
1592–95), rediscovered at Knole, Kent, in 1990, and sold at Christie’s London in July 2006.
Of their contemporaries, currently the most sought-after is Lavinia Fontana, the first truly independent professional woman artist. Her
Madonna del Silenzio (dated to the early 1590s), a version on copper of a larger canvas, Holy Family with the Sleeping Christ Child (1589), sold in November 2020 at the Dorotheum in Vienna for €235,100 (estimate €150,000–€200,000). Her portrait of c. 1590s of a young boy with a dog, a preparatory sketch for a work held by the Uffizi in Florence, sold for €162,500 – more than double the low estimate of €60,000 – at Christie’s Paris in June. Her record, however, stands at $602,500, achieved in 2012 at Sotheby’s New York for a delightful portrait of the Maselli family (estimate $200,000–$300,000). Institutional interest is particularly strong: in April the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts announced its recent purchase of her Portrait of a Lady
(1585); and Callisto Fine Arts recently sold a graceful, previously unpublished Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine (before 1577), painted on copper, to the National Gallery of Art of Victoria in Melbourne.
Among lesser-known Bolognese artists, Davide Trevisani admires Amico Aspertini (1474/75–1552). Maurizio Nobile recently sold a drawing by the artist, and has available a
Crucifixion by Lorenzo Sabatini (€120,000). Sabatini’s influence on the Carracci is acknowledged in a forthcoming monograph on the artist by Valentina Balzarotti.
In 2018 Benappi Fine Art in London rediscovered a lost oil on copper of the Adoration of the Shepherds by Ludovico Carracci, which it showed at TEFAF Maastricht the following year. ‘We have a real passion for the work from this period and from these important cities,’ says the gallery’s co-director Harry Gready. At TEFAF Online this month Benappi will be showing The Holy Family in a Landscape (1534–36; $180,000; Fig. 2) by Girolamo Da Carpi, one of many artists who moved between artistic centres, collaborating with Dosso at the d’Este court and based in Bologna for many years.
As recently as 2015 Nicholas Penny, at the time director of the National Gallery and cataloguing the Ferrara school of artists, was quoted as saying that they were ‘really unfashionable, not even noticed enough to be disliked’. He added: ‘We are, I often think, looking after them for the time when they’ll make more impression.’ Already, Gready reports that – far from being indifferent – collectors are now being drawn to these ‘jewel-like’ works.