The Sixteenth Century In Ferrara. Mazzolino, Ortolano, Garofalo, Dosso

Trained under Domenico Panetti and Boccaccino, he demonstrated great figurative intelligence from a young age, which allowed him to promptly measure himself with all the innovations that were emerging in the major centers of the peninsula. During the first decade of the sixteenth century he approached Venetian painting and Giorgione, and then moved the center of gravity of his interests towards central Italy. Over the course of his long career, Garofalo was the main Ferrara interpreter and popularizer of Raphael’s style, whose scope he perfectly understood and whose development he followed with careful diligence. His altarpieces, with a calm and elegant manner, populate the city churches, while the precious easel paintings are present in large numbers in private collections.

Giovanni Luteri known as Dosso (c. 1486 – 1542), one of the leading artists of the court of Ferrara under the governments of Alfonso I and Ercole II, moved in parallel with Garofalo. Born in the small duchy of Mirandola, he made his debut in Mantua and in 1513 moved to Ferrara where he worked (together with Garofalo) on the famous Costabili polyptych in the church of Sant’Andrea (today in the Pinacoteca Nazionale). During his youth his painting was influenced by Giorgione and Titian, from whom he drew a magnificent depth of color and an entirely Venetian light. At the time of his first certainly dated work, the spectacular Madonna and Child in Glory and Saints for the Modena Cathedral (1521), there had already been contact with Michelangelo and Roman culture: from here on Dosso developed a personal style, cultured and amused, thanks also to a particular harmony with Alfonso I. If Garofalo monopolized ecclesiastical commissions, Dosso mastered the field of ducal undertakings, in which he tackled allegorical and mythological themes, often taken from Ariosto. Finally, the city’s painting scene would not be complete without the works of Domenico Panetti, Boccaccio Boccaccino, Lazzaro Grimaldi, Niccolò Pisano, the Master of the Twelve Apostles: thanks to the contribution of these masters, present together with others (Fra’ Bartolomeo, Romanino, Amico Aspertini, Albrecht Dürer) in the exhibition itinerary, which will have a natural extension in the rooms of the National Art Gallery on the main floor of Palazzo dei Diamanti, the exhibition will accompany the visitor through an incredibly rich season, where the ancient and the modern, the sacred and the profane, history and fairy tale merge in a figurative world that can be defined, in a word, Ferrarese.