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Artist or Maker: Dosso Dossi (Tramuschino (Mirandola) c.1486-1541-2 Ferrara)

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Provenance: Anonymous sale; Christie's, London, 7 March 1952, lot 72, as Dosso Dossi.
Peter Corbett, London (according to a note in Bernard Berenson's archive in 1965 and 1968).
William Martin, and by descent.

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Exhibited: Birmingham, City of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Italian Art from the 13th century to the 17th century , 1955, no. 41, as Dosso Dossi.

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Notes: THE PROPERTY OF A GENTLEMAN


Although attributed by Gibbons, followed by Ballarin (presumably on the basis of a photograph), to Battista Dossi, this picture seems clearly to be a mature work of the 1520s by Dosso Dossi himself, as is suggested by the character of the forms and the drapery, and the detail of the landscape, particularly the buildings in the upper right section.

The figure type is comparable to that of Virtue in Dosso's Jupiter, Mercury and Virtue of circa 1523-1524, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, and to the standing female figure in his Allegory of Pan of the late 1520s, in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. The richly coloured and volumninous red and green draperies of the present picture also speak more of Dosso's style rather than the somewhat less sophisticated and perhaps more static treatment of the draperies in his brother's oeuvre .

An identification of the subject as Ariadne was accepted in the Berenson lists, while in the 1955 exhibition catalogue it was suggested that the canvas is the right hand section of a Jupiter and Io : indeed it would appear to have been cut on the left. Gibbons drew a parallel with the late Syrinx in the celebrated frieze by Peruzzi in the Farnesina at Rome.

We are grateful to Keith Christiansen and Professor Peter Humpfrey for confirming the attribution to Dosso Dossi, on inspection of the original and on photographs respectively.