Lot 97: Battista Dossi (c. 1475-1548 Ferrara)

The Adoration of the Magi oil on panel 211/2 x 27 in. (54.6 x 68.6 cm.) PROVENANCE (Presumably) John Rushout, 2nd Lord Northwick (1770-1859), Northwick Park, Gloucestershire and Thirlestane House, Cheltenham; (possibly) Phillips, 19 August 1859, lot 155, as Garofalo. Rushout, 3rd Lord Northwick, Northwick Park, 1864 catalogue, no. 334, and by inheritance from his widow to her grandson Captain E. G. Spencer-Churchill, Northwick Park; (+) Christie's, London, 28 May 1965, lot 26. I.O. Chance, Colby Lodge, Pembrokeshire, by 1968. LITERATURE A Catalogue of the Pictures, Works of Art, etc. at Northwick Park, 1864 (reprinted in 1908), no. 334, as Peruzzi. Sir C. Phillips, 'An "Adoration of the Magi" by Battista Dossi', The Burlington Magazine, XVII1, no. 148, July 1915, pp. 133-4, pl.1. T. Borenius, Catalogue of the Collection of Pictures at Northwick Park, London, 1921, pp. 13-4, no. 24. A. Venturi, Storia dell' Arte Italiana, IX, III, 1928, p. 997. A. Mezzetti, Il Dosso e Battista Ferraresi, Milan, 1965, pp. 43 and 105, no. 130, pl. 60a. B. Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance, Central Italian and North Italian Schools, 1968, 1, p. 115. F. Gibbons, Dosso and Battista Dossi, Court Painters at Ferrara, Princeton, 1968, pp. 125 and 227, no. 1000. A. Ballarin, Dosso Dossi, la Pittura a Ferrara negli anni del Ducato de Alfonso I, Cittadella, 1995, I, p. 365, no. 491, and fig. 229. NOTES First certainly recorded in 1864 as by Peruzzi - whose authorship of the cartoon of the subject, formerly in the National Gallery but now in the British Museum, was widely known at the time - the picture has been unanimously accepted as by Battista Dossi since Phillips' 1915 publication. Phillips regarded it as an early work, possibly the earliest known, and suggested the intervention of Battista's brother Dosso in the architecture: 'a distinction' which to Borenius did 'not seem quite convincing', and has found no subsequent support. Mezzetti regarded the panel as a mature work, while Gibbons favoured a date soon after 1510, that is at the outset of the artist's career. Ballarin's dating is circa 1535 (text) and circa 1539-40 (caption to plate), and there are indeed evident similarities with, for example, a small picture in the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo (no. 725, Gibbons, no. 494, fig. 230), for which a similar chronology is proposed. There was evidently a considerable demand in Ferrara for small, finely finished devotional panels of the kind. While Battista's overriding debt is inevitably to Dosso, this panel should be seen as an example of his working in competition with such rivals as Garofalo and Girolamo da Carpi who were both particularly successful in compositions of this type and scale.