Portrait of a gentleman, half-length

Giovanni de Lutero, known as Dosso Dossi, was unrivaled in Renaissance Ferrara, where he flourished as court artist to dukes Alfonso I d’Este (r. 1505-34) and his son, Ercole II (r. 1534-59). Celebrated for his vibrant, idiosyncratic landscapes, as well as his ability to paint freely, improvising directly on his canvas without preparatory drawings, Dosso is perhaps best known for his contributions to one of the most important commissions of the Italian Renaissance: the painting program for Alfonso d’Este’s Camerino in the Castello Estense. Like his contemporaries Titian, Giorgione, and Raphael, Dosso was also active in the challenging genre of portraiture. Payment records in the Este account books indicate that he painted several lost portraits of important sitters, including the daughters of Isabella of Aragon, the former queen of Naples who was residing at the court of Alfonso I (1524), two portraits of Ercole d’Este and one of a certain 'M. Libo' (April-June 1527), and Alfonso II d’Este (painted in collaboration with his brother, Battista in April 1540; see M. Lucco, 'Portraits', in P. Humfrey and M. Lucco et al., Dosso Dossi: Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1998, p. 229). Over the centuries, numerous portraits have been ascribed to Dosso’s hand, though nearly every candidate has been rejected by modern scholarship. A coherent group was put forward by Roberto Longhi ('Nuovo ampliamenti (1940-1955)', in Officina ferrarese 1934, seguita dagli Ampliamenti 1940 e dai Nuovi ampliamenti 1940-55, pp. 173-95. Edizione delle opera complete di Roberto Longhi, V, Florence, 1956), who signaled portraits in the Musée du Louvre, Paris; Nationalmuseum, Stockholm; Wichita Center for the Arts, and one in a private collection in Connecticut as the most likely candidates to be considered as autograph. Subsequent scholars have added a portrait in the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA, and a final work in a private collection in Milan to this group.

The present portrait has only recently come to the attention of scholars, and constitutes an exciting addition to this small corpus of portraits by Dosso Dossi. Working from photographs, Mauro Lucco has noted that its pictorial execution is very similar to Dosso’s paintings from the end of the second decade of the sixteenth-century (private communication, 16 June 2021). Accordingly, he suggests that it should be viewed alongside the Portrait of a man (Musée du Louvre, Paris) and the Portrait of an old man in a fur collar (private collection, Milan; nos. 45 and 46 respectively in the 1998 exhibition catalogue, op. cit.) as the most securely attributable of the group. In particular, he points to similarities of the present portrait with the handling of the seven rhomboidal panel fragments that were once set into the ceiling of the first ducal apartment in the Via Coperta, such as the figure of Drunkness at the Galleria Estense, Modena. Lucco also has observed that the unusual manner in which the sitter poses with one glove only partially removed from his left hand is especially consistent with Dosso’s witty pictorial inventions. Taking into account the large size of the panel, Lucco tentatively suggests a date of about 1520.

We are grateful to Mauro Lucco and Peter Humfrey for endorsing the attribution to Dosso Dossi on the basis of photographs and to Keith Christiansen, for endorsing the attribution following firsthand examination of the painting.