The exhibition “Dosso Dossi, Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara” comes as a delightful surprise.[1] It is delightful in showing for the first time a marvelous and somewhat eccentric painter. It is a surprise because he has never been on the roster of artists famous enough to be exhibited. To be sure, we do not limit exhibitions to the Picassos, but also do them for the Delaunays, not only for the mass audience of van Gogh but also for the somewhat fewer connoisseurs of Bonnard, who then surprises and pleases a large audience. Yet we rarely extend our appreciation of a Renaissance artist like Titian to the next level of Dosso, whom the Metropolitan’s director describes as among the “slightly lesser geniuses.” (It’s an odd phrase, but we know what he means.) A note on his name: the artist’s given name was Giovanni Luteri, but he was known by the nickname Dosso, derived from his birthplace. The doubled Dosso Dossi appears only in the eighteenth century among historians seeking an artificial propriety; it now seems impossible to get rid of.

Two factors favored this exhibition, overcoming the recession of the Italian Renaissance from its nineteenth-century position as favorite into a vague horizon in the twentieth century. One is that Renaissance painting still retains its status as the base for all later western painting, one which museums of broad scope need to include. New ones like the Getty find this hard to do, and their special efforts bring them