Battista Dossi

In January 1520 an agent of Alfonso d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, wrote from Rome that the younger Dossi brother was working in Raphael's studio, while the elder had stayed at home. Raphael died that April, and by August Battista Dossi was back in Ferrara, paid alongside his brother for pictures for the ducal apartments. Those two poles, the cool polish of Raphael's school and the inventive, glowing painting of his brother Dosso, shaped the rest of his career.

He spent most of it inside Dosso's workshop, often as the less visible hand. In 1521 the canons of Modena cathedral recorded a payment made in the presence of "master Dosso's son", when the young man standing there was in fact his brother. The two worked side by side at the Villa Imperiale near Pesaro and in the castle of Bishop Bernardo Cles at Trento, and Ludovico Ariosto, the court poet, named them together in the 1532 edition of Orlando Furioso.

When Dosso died in 1542, Battista inherited his clients. He designed tapestries for the new Ferrara weaving works and painted allegories for Duke Ercole II, among them a Night, now in Dresden, built on Ovid's description of the house of Sleep. His last payments date from the autumn of 1548, and by Christmas Eve a document already calls him deceased.