Dosso Dossi

Dosso Dossi was the court painter of Ferrara in its brilliant early-16th-century heyday, when the Este dukes gathered poets and painters around them. He worked in the same world as the poet Ludovico Ariosto, whose fantastical epic Orlando Furioso shares the dreamy, enchanted mood of Dosso's pictures.

His paintings are often puzzles. A beautiful sorceress sits in a landscape surrounded by armour and strange beasts, usually called Circe or Melissa, and scholars still argue over exactly what story is being told. What is clear is the sumptuous colour, learned from Venice and from Titian, glowing skies and deep landscape set behind the figures.

He decorated the Este castles and villas, often alongside his less gifted brother Battista, on projects that have mostly been lost or dispersed, though frescoes by the pair survive in a great hall of the Buonconsiglio castle at Trento.